Mountaineer Chronicles

Today, WVU baseball has their home opener. They moved gametime to 1:30 to try to beat the impending snowstorm. In honor of the their home opener, I thought I'd share this amazing catch. All I can say about this is "whoa!" Won't be long until I'm patrolling the outfield for my softball team. Hopefully I can make a couple catches about half as spectacular as this one.

On Saturday, I had to run some early morning errands, then had a few hours in the middle of the day and regardless of the weather, I wanted to get outside. At about 11:30 I got to my urban bow hunting location, with the intention of doing some shed hunting. I walked the property until about 1pm, but with no luck finding sheds. At that time I decided to head down to the locks to get a line wet for a little while. I had a glimmer of hope because it was cold, snowing, and windy--good walleye fishing time according to some, because walleye hate people apparently. But in reality I knew that walleye and sauger are dusk/dawn feeders and that I would just be practicing my casting. I fished for about a half hour, lost a white jig, and decided to tie on a chartreuse sassy shad style jig. The water wasn't super clear, so I thought a little brighter color may pay off. Well it did. On about my 5th cast with that new jig, I felt something heavy and set the hook. It felt pretty heav

Tomorrow is the first day of March and according to weather folklore, if it comes in like a "lamb" it will go out like a "lion" and vice versa. The forecast for tomorrow is currently: mostly cloudy with flurries and snow showers, high temperature of 36, north-northwest winds at 10mph. Nothing too crazy about that forecast. In checking out the national weather map (below), the weather is pretty quiet across the entire country as we head into March. Wonder if that means we are in for some crazy weather as March winds down? Pretty quiet weather going into March While we've seen a few glimpses that spring isn't too far away, it is certainly still winter. As I write this, I'm looking out the window as the snow falls at a pretty good rate. Today's snow probably isn't going to accumulate much because the temps are just a little too warm in town, although the mountains should get a light coating. The days are getting longer though, the avera

I feel like people either love or hate this guy. There is no middle ground for the most part. Personally, I like the guy. The only problem I have is when he shows up late and then won't leave. As long as he's punctual I have no problem. I mention him because he's doing what he does this week.

Well it's mid-January. When I leave for work in the morning, its dark. When I get home from work its dark. This is the time of year when cabin fever can set in. Big time. Here in WV, the winters certainly aren't cold enough to preclude all outdoor recreation, but the conditions certainly aren't optimal. Given my limited time to "do" outdoorsy stuff because of other commitments, limited finances, and limited vacation time, I've been opting to save a lot of my excursions for when weather conditions are more optimal. Sometimes regardless of the weather, a hike through the snow can be fun! That gives me lots of indoor time this time of year. Traditional flyfishing wisdom says I should be tying flies to stock up for the upcoming spring hatches. I do tie some of my own flies, but I'm not good enough or efficient enough to tie all of what I need. Maybe I need to just get back at the tying bench and rekindle my desire to pump out some flies. A few asso

Well its been quite a while since my last post, but that is mainly because I've been using as much spare time as possible to put a few deer in the freezer. Frustration and bad luck has been the theme of my hunting season for most of the year. I am participating in the Morgantown urban archery season, which started in early September. The purpose of this season is mainly population control, so each hunter is required to take a doe before harvesting a buck. I wholeheartedly agree that this is a necessary and useful regulation for this hunt, but even though I persevered and put in plenty of stand time, I was unable to harvest a doe. I missed out on a few early opportunities to take a doe in October, but otherwise I just was not seeing many, if any, deer within range. The major kick in the pants came the second week of November when I had to watch as this guy fed within 10 yards of me for about 10 minutes. I was in the tree just above watching as the trailcam snapped this picture, an

For those not familiar, in September of 2009, an invasive, toxic algae bloom occurred that killed 99% of all fish in my local smallmouth and musky creek: Dunkard Creek. The saltwater algae was only able to thrive because of the excessively high conductivity and chlorides being discharged from the Blacksville #2 mine (and possibly other sources). Since then, Consol, the mine operator, was fined heavily by the WVDEP and USEPA, and was also required as part of the settlement to build a multi-million dollar treatment system to ensure future water quality protection.   Its been about 3 years now since the fish kill, and knowing that the toxic conditions were not long-lived, even though they were quite bad, I was expecting that many fish were starting to repopulate naturally from the unaffected tributaries. Evan Fedorko and I had heard reports of the bass and musky fishery returning to Dunkard from other sources, and Evan asked me if I wanted to accompany him on a evening trip. Sinc