Cryptic Fish Report

On the third day in a row that I went to Salmon Cascades to not see salmon, the ranger at the Sol Duc entrance station (Olympic National Park) said that the salmon haven't come yet, the river is too low. I had been thinking there seemed to be plenty of water there at the cascade. But visualizing the several times Highway 101 crosses the Sol Duc River between the Sol Duc Road and the coast at La Push (whither I go at the drop of an impulse), I can see that each time I've glanced up- or downstream as I roll over a bridge, there was not much water. Hmmm, not much water, I would think, every time. The ranger thought that after the ever-arriving and not yet arrived heavy rainstorm this weekend, perhaps the fish will come flowing up the river.

The second afternoon a helpful gentlemen pointed out two barely discernable salmon in the pool below the cascades. I saw them, I saw them. They swam around behind a rock, the gentleman left, and I couldn't spot them again. They were exactly the same color as the greenish-greyish rocks and river-bottom under a light-rainy sky.

On the third expedition I studied the same rock the two fish had disappeared behind the day before, and saw a salmon swim by the rock and head rather casually upstream; I didn't try to rush back upstream to be by the cascade in case he jumped, which I should have done, because another fish-watcher told me he had seen one leap, just one, and neither he nor I saw another fish.

When M. was camping up on the south fork of the Hoh River last week, there were two days of rain and afterwards the river was full of fish...