Winter Rose

Since the sad news I reported on in the last post, I’ve been happily wrapped up in a wide variety of holiday activities. I even got in a couple hours of fly-fishing in Shenandoah National Park.

I spent a week in Washington D.C. and northern Virginia for a reason I’m not quite prepared to elaborate on because my son is at the heart of it, and I want him to disclose the reason for all the family gatherings and felicity on his Bridging the Gap blog before I go running my mouth about it here on Rivertop Rambles. [Ed. note: he beat me to the punch, so yeah, check out his new post about family traditions old and possibly new at Bridging the Gap. I think you’ll like it, and I’ll have more on this subject later on].

at the Rothwell home

Let’s just say that the week of fun included not only hiking and fishing, eating and drinking, giving and taking, dancing and listening, pledging and throwing all caution to the wind, but also enjoying a long visit from my Caribbean daughter before we put her back on a plane one morning long before the hour of dawn.

keep on dancin’!

It’s been a helluva ride, a very good one despite my mother’s passing, but I wouldn’t last long if I had to go through it again.

one of many fine species found along the trail

We still had the memorial for my mother scheduled for an evening in New York on December 29, but the life-affirming action in Virginia and D.C. was like seeing the first new lights of winter edging through the darkness at the end of 2016. Perhaps like seeing the beauty in a freshly-cut winter rose.

winter rose

And speaking of roses and winter blooms, I had another opportunity to fly-fish on the headwaters of the Rose River in Shenandoah National Park. Any chance to fly-fish comfortably during the winter season is a bonus in this typically off season for casting, so I scrambled for the opportunity.

Rose River

We were staying in Warrenton, Virginia,  where the air temperature was in the mid-40s the day after Christmas, so the drive to the Rose was pleasant and easy. A bald eagle greeted my son and me on our approach to the Blue Ridge along the Rappahannock River Valley. We drove to a dead-end near the hamlet of Syria and prepared for a short hike and fishing jaunt into the wilds of Shenandoah.

Just inside the boundary of the park, the Rose is a boulder-chocked stream with a steep gradient, a lovely mountain water where you can fish for wild brook trout on a catch-and-release basis with artificial flies or lures. The winter stream was low and clear, the footing a bit treacherous along the rocky banks, and the fish seemed few and far between.

Based on my experience on the nearby Moormans and Rapidan rivers about a month ago, this venture on the Rose seemed to reinforce suspicions that a lot of trout had moved upstream during the hot and dry summer season in search of cooler water, and that the fish had yet to return to the lower section of the mountains.

wild side

I could be wrong about it, but that’s my take on the current wild trout picture in the Blue Ridge of Virginia. Right or wrong, the fishing was what I needed. Just a couple of winter hours in the wild, with a couple of beautiful brook trout on the line, with a nymph or Glo-Bug at the lip, in late December, like a red rose in a soul bouquet.