Fly Fishing & Conservation in Vermont by Traver Tim;

Author:Traver, Tim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

STRATTON POND

Sunday, July 1, 2018

One of my goals this fishing summer is to visit some of the more remote walk-in ponds along the Long Trail and Appalachian Trail in the Green Mountains for some off-the-beaten-path brook trout fishing. (The trails are co-located through the southern portion of the state and then divide midway up, with the Long Trail continuing north and the Appalachian Trail turning east to the New Hampshire border.) Stratton Pond seemed like a good candidate. It’s about a four-mile walk in from the trailhead on Kelley Stand Road, with only four hundred feet of elevation gain—nearly a flat walk. I could have done an in-and-out in one day, packing the pack rod and a few flies, a bag lunch, water and a headlamp and gotten the gist of fishing at Stratton Pond (never trust a fishing writer to tell you the 100 percent truth). But my wife was hiking the Long Trail—or, I should say, the Long Trial—and we’d made plans to resupply her at Stratton Pond. So I packed for an overnight and carried, in addition to the ten pounds of food she needed for the next segment of the Long Trail—or, I should say, the Lawn Trail (though the trail is most often described as a “green tunnel”)—balloons, birthday cupcakes, new silver earrings, a birthday card, original poetry (pretty darn good rhyming, if I say so myself) and a bar of dark chocolate.

Arguably, the biggest conservation story in Vermont over the past eighty years is the formation of the Green Mountain National Forest (GMNF) in April 1932. While the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 provided authority to the federal government to set aside forest reserves, it was the Weeks Act, signed into law in 1911 by President William Howard Taft and authorizing the government to protect lands vital to navigable stream flows, that led to the creation of the GMNF. Much of the inspiration for the Weeks Act was the 1910 fire season in the Rocky Mountain West. About 3 million acres burned, and there was significant loss of life. The GMNF is 400,000 acres of forestland and includes thousands of historic settlements and Abenaki archaeological sites. Its creation was in response to unregulated logging and the despoiling of forested ecosystems and watersheds in Vermont. The job of the GMNF today is to “restore, protect, and manage” these watersheds, forests and historic resources. Wild trout are very much in the sights of foresters who manage the national forest today, and most of the major fish passage and habitat improvement projects are partially funded by the U.S. Forest Service. It’s partly to its credit that we have the cold-water resources we have in Vermont—that we have wild trout.

The idea for a Long Trail was conceived in the mind of James P. Taylor in a tent on a blustery day on top of Stratton Mountain in 1909. Not one to waste any time, by 1910 Taylor had formed the Green Mountain Club and begun, with a handful of members, cutting the Long Trail.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.