Walpack Valley Jigging Along National Park Road 615

Sorry about the fish out of focus. Either I moved my hand or had the f-stop too open. It would happen that way, as the story below might suggest.

Roy Bridge

Every fall, my wife and I make a pilgrimage to Walpack Inn for a huge streak dinner. From what I understand, a long tradition is coming to an end, as the restaurant is on the market. My hopes and prayers are that whoever buys the establishment keeps the salad bar and serves the same steak! The restaurant is fabulous just as it is.

I always make sure we get up there early, so I can do a little fishing in the Big Flatbrook for fall stockers. I guess it’s possible to catch a wild brown, but I hardly think of them, there are so few in this waterway.

Upstream in the Blewett Tract the likelihood of finding any is greater, since the lower reaches of the stream warm during summer. From what I understand from someone I consider an honest source, the Little Flatbrook is full of native brook trout, but I’ve never fished the stream. I’ve read elsewhere that some native brookies work their way down into the Blewett Tract, but since I went online trying to find similar information and did not, my suspicion is that for all practical purposes, it’s just not happening.

I once caught a 15-inch wild brown in the North Branch Raritan at Bedminster, but I’ve heard of only one young man actually fishing that river for wild ones.

I’ve been going to the Flatbrook’s Roy Bridge since 2011, when my wife, my son, and I used to visit the stream during May, catching stocker browns by fly casting Muddlers and Wooly Buggers. Not many, but the fishing was always compelling, as it remained from 2016 in the fall when my wife and I started to come up from Bedminster to the Walpack Inn.

I didn’t catch any trout, though. I tried stripping those Muddler’s and Buggers around the bridge itself, in addition to a nice run downstream of it, but although I encountered a single trout in moving water so shallow it didn’t cover it’s back, none ever seemed to be around.

There might have been one time, years ago, when someone stripping a streamer hooked up.

End of the Road

Last year, I found that hole just downstream of Roy Bridge had filled in. And this year? I didn’t even find Roy Bridge. I could have, but I felt pressed to get to the restaurant. I didn’t want to get home too late, as plans to fish with Mark Licht the next day (Sunday) meant I would have awakened early. (Plans fell through.)

It’s the end of an age of innocence associated with my fishing the stream. As little as the number of trout I’ve caught up there, as minimal as that number is, I fell deeply in love with the Walpack Valley region. I have a history going back five decades associated with Kittatinny Ridge—the Appalachian Trail and Dunnfield Creek. Mount Tammany and Rattlesnake Ridge. But during my youth and early middle years, I never got to fish the Big Flatbrook, although I did—once—as a 12 year old.

I have no idea how I learned about the trout up there. The internet, of course, was long away in the future, and The New Jersey Fisherman, now The Fisherman magazine, didn’t exist yet. Not in 1972. Not until 1973.

I found out about the Flatbrook, though, and I got my dad to drive me up there late in October. I fly cast.

And I used to feel I’d always fly cast on the Flatbrook. Only that, never spinning, but last year, corruption took its toll when I cast a black marabou jig on my four-and-a-half-foot St. Croix ultralight. I took the guilt trip before my wife and I sat down to dinner at Walpack Inn after I caught my single trout, and now I’m wiser to what’s happened.

I lost the original innocence that infused my every moment up there especially in 2010 and 2011. Many times in the fall, too, and I might have visited the stream once during the fall between those dates and 2016. I lost that innocence by cutting a deal as if it might enliven things. I’d meet fall stockers on their own terms. Those terms amount to fish taking interest in a jig that looks the same as a Wooly Bugger—only anyone cast and retrieve it a lot more efficiently with a spinning rod.

Before my wife and I went to Roy Bridge last fall, we rode the National Park Service Road 615 to it’s end at the blockage before we would get to the bridge connecting that road to Old Mine Road. That bridge is out. The end of the road now is at a barricade.

I watched as some trout followed my jig in gin-clear water, but none of them would strike. This fall, after all the rain on Thursday, I found the river low, the water not gin-clear but deeply stained by tannins.

I cast the jig and eventually got hit, the hook getting no grab. I cast three or four more times to the same place and connected. The trout photographed, above. I had cast the same type of jig into the Paulinksill River weeks before, when I scored there, but I think of the Paulinksill as more of a smallmouth bass stream.

It used to be you could only fly cast the Blewett Tract and downstream to Roy Bridge. (Below Roy Bridge you could spin fish.) Now you can fish any kind of artificial in the Blewett Tract, probably with hook restrictions. There must a story of corruption behind that change, too.

I did catch a trout.

I have to finish with the following, though. (As if hope springs eternal, even when you’ve feared you’ve gone through the gate to Dante’s Inferno.) As Trish and I drove through Layton Saturday evening on the way home, I suppressed my faintly wondering if I’ll ever fish the Little Flatbrook when we drove over the bridge spanning it. Even if I never do, I did at least try Peapack Brook in early June with my favorite two-weight fly rod. (I didn’t follow through because I discovered I had forgotten my fishing license.)

If I do fish the little Flatbrook, it will be with that favorite fly rod. Besides, there are places on the Blewett Tract I might be interested in, too. Same rod.

But they’ll never repair that bridge, will they? The one carrying Old Mine Road over the Big Flatbrook. Nor will Buttermilk Falls ever be accessible by car again, will it? I think that other bridge over the Flatbrook, on the way to the falls, is permanently out, too.

A deep slow stretch of the lower Big Flatbrook.