Trail Talk

Editor’s Note: At both ends of the river weekend festivals are staged as part of the Au Sable River Canoe Marathon Race. Grayling calls it’s event Au Sable River Festival and it includes the Black Bear Bicycle Tour, a 100-mile bicycle ride to Oscoda on Sunday that finishes near the end of the Au Sable River Canoe Marathon. For more information check out Grayling Visitors Bureau, the Oscoda Visitors Bureau or the Black Bear Bicycle Tour web site.

If you are heading to Grayling for the July 28 start of the Au Sable River Canoe Marathon don’t forget that at MichiganTrailMaps.com we just completed our coverage of Hartwick Pines State Park with the addition of the park’s mountain bike trails.

By Jim DuFresne

I was concentrating on a trout that was rising in the middle of the Au Sable River, trying to float a drag-free dry fly over it, when suddenly there was a canoe within arm’s reach of me.

“Whoa!” I said as they totally caught me off guard but before I could add “you guys are quiet paddlers” they were around the next bend and out of sight.

Jim DuFresne

Must be marathon time.

The two paddlers were obviously veteran racers training for the annual Au Sable River Canoe Marathon. They were flying down the river in a slim and low-riding C-2 canoe, paddling with determination and almost mechanical precision. No stroke was a wasted motion.

Effortless effort.

It’s how you train for what some call the most grueling sporting event in North America. This summer the 65^th Au Sable River Canoe Marathon will be staged July 28-29 in Grayling, the starting point, and Oscoda, the finish line.

In between 20 to 30 teams will compete in a 120-mile race that lasts from 14 to 19 hours and consists of some 55,000 stokes. It’s why organizers call the all-night run down the Au Sable the longest non-stop professional canoe race in the United States.

They also call it “The World’s Toughest Spectator Race!” During the event more than 40,000 spectators are expected to converge on the two towns and the river in between.

An estimated 12,000 people will witness the start in Grayling when at 9 p.m. paddlers dash “LeMans” style down Main Street carrying their canoes into the Au Sable at the Old Au Sable Fly Shop docks. Others spectators will gather along the final 14 miles of the river to its mouth on Lake Huron in Oscoda on Sunday morning to watch the canoeists wrap up their ordeal.

But the real marathon fans, the spectator that has no equal in the world of sports, are the ones who hopscotch in cars and vans throughout the night to cheer on the racers as they paddle beneath bridges, pass public access points and portage their canoe around six hydroelectric dams.

C-2 race canoes at the start of the Au Sable River Canoe Marathon in Grayling.

The first race was staged in 1947 when a pair of Grayling canoers finished the route in 21:03. Ralph Sawyer, who founded Sawyer Canoes in Oscoda, won the first of eight titles in 1956 when he and his partner broke the 17-hour barrier.

But the most amazing paddler was Serge Corbin of Quebec. Corbin won the race 18 times, including 15 out of 17 years from 1987 to 2003. In 1994 he and his partner broke 14 hours when they arrived in Oscoda in 13:58.08 and the mark is still the Marathon record.

For that brutal and record-shattering run down the Au Sable the pair of Canadians won $5,000. They’re professional canoe racers but they are clearly not in it for the money.

Most of the field isn’t thinking about winning, just finishing. Not all will. But in 1999 a 74-year-old Al Widing, Sr. teamed up with a “youthful” 54-year-old Robert Bradford to complete the run in 15:21:22, finishing 15^th overall.

And in the year that Corbin set his Marathon record, a pair of 15-year-olds from Grayling, Matt Ashton and Mo Hardwood, Jr., arrived in Oscoda in 15:30.46 to become the youngest team to have ever have completed the Marathon.

I suspect that for youths in and around Crawford County, ever just entering the Au Sable Canoe Marathon, much less finishing it, is as high a pedestal that you can step onto.

A half hour after the first C-2 race canoe flew past me in the Au Sable, a second one appeared, manned by two boys who appeared to be in high school. Shirts were off, youthful muscles bugling in their upper arms and shoulders, beads of sweat running down their backs.

They didn’t have the precision that that first pair displayed. Their strokes seem to be more of a struggle, not as nearly as fluid as their counterparts down the river.

But you could see the determination on their face to take on the Au Sable and survive a 120 miles of non-stop paddling.

That’s good. They’re going to need such resolve at 3 a.m. Sunday, July 29 when they have been up all night paddling and still have still have nine more hours of strokes in front of them.

Editor’s Note: Don’t forget on Tuesday, April 24, Jim DuFresne will be giving his presentation Michigan’s Top Ten Backpacking Treks at 7 p.m. at Backcountry North, 2820 N. US-31 South in Traverse City. Advance registration for the show is required and can be made by calling Backcountry North (231-941-1100). The $5 admission includes the new Jordan River Pathway map from MichiganTrailMaps.com. If you’re headed to Grand Traverse area for the weekend and need accommodations check with the Traverse City Convention and Visitors Bureau (800-872-8377).

By Jim DuFresne

A friend and I were hiking the Manistee River Trail, that classic trek 30 minutes south of Traverse City near Mesick, when we paused to watch a drift boat floating the Manistee River below us.

 There were three in the boat; a guide manning the oars and a client at each end casting large streamers towards the bank. They nodded, we asked them how they were doing and in the middle of the discussion about fly fishing and giant brown trout, the angler in the front stopped casting and sat down to take a call on his cell phone.

Jim DuFresne

No, I’m sure it was a smart phone. Because this was a person, a CEO probably, who took a day off to arrange a guide and go fishing but couldn’t take a day off. In the middle of the Manistee National Forest, in a place so remote you could only reach it in a boat or on foot, he found it necessary to still conduct business. From a bluff above I called him out on it.

“Is that a cell phone?” I said. “You’re taking a phone call out here!”

 He looked at me, kind of sheepishly, and said “Stuff happens.”

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Many consider the Michigan hiking season to be June through August and maybe in sheer numbers of people hiking then, it is. But to me the peak of the season is right now, this week.

How could you ask for better trail conditions? The weather is clear but cool. I don’t need hot weather and a brutal sun while I’m in the woods. There’s no bugs yet, at least not any that want to suck your blood or buzz annoyingly behind your head.

There’s also very few people out on the trail. The wildflowers were just beginning to bloom in the corner of the state we were in and if I was more knowledgeable I would have known if the morel mushrooms were starting to pop up.

A hiker on the Manistee River Trail.

If you’re backpacking, the nights are cool enough to justify building a fire but not so cold where you spend an evening shivering in your sleeping bag. If you’re not tenting it, then there are some great deals in Traverse City, resorts that charge close to $200 a night in July were trying to entice you last week with that same room for less than $60.

That’s a deluxe room with a Jacuzzi tub, something that might actually be useful after your first 13-mile hike of the year.

But the best part of April hiking is that the leaves had yet to unfurl. They’re coming but until then you can see for miles from a high point whereas often in the summer there would be no view at all.

That was particularly true where we were on the second day; the portion of the North Country Trail that is combined with the Manistee River Trail to form a 23-mile loop. The NCT is rugged and often we found ourselves skirting the edge of a forested ridge to a view of valleys, more ridges and acres of the Manistee National Forest to the east.

In my mind this is the best time to be out on the trail. But if you make the effort to escape into the woods, then escape.

No Facebook, or Twitter checks, or emails or ring tones that come from the movie “Top Gun.” If you pack along a phone, then turn it on only for an emergency or to arrange for transportation at the trailhead.

When you enter the forest alone, free of any communication with the rest of the world, it becomes a spiritual cleansing from the high-tech overload most of us live with.

Enter the woods and listen to nothing but the wild around you. There is no call worth disrupting the tranquility you find on a trail, there is nothing on the Internet worth reading while you hiking along a high ridge.

 Not even this blog.

I’m driving a new car. No, let me re-phrase that; I’m driving a newer car.

I picked up a Saturn Vue that is three-years old and has 43,000 miles on it. It’s high tech. For the first time I can use my IPod in my vehicle. It has remote start for those mornings when the windows are all frosted up and during those cold winter drives I can flick a switch and the seats warm up.

Jim DuFresne

I like the Saturn but it can never fully replace the car I just gave up; Father Jack’s Buick, a.k.a. the Priestmobile.

My wife’s uncle was a Catholic Priest and after he died I purchased his car from the estate, a 1998 Buick Regal with 110,000 miles on it. I only paid $1000 and figured I could squeeze a couple of years out of it. But this car was blessed because eight years and 140,000 miles later I was still driving it.

It took awhile to warm up to Father Jack’s Buick. You sat low in the seats so getting in and out was always a monumental effort. The trunk was poorly designed. I could barely squeeze my belly boat in and could only carry my mountain bike if I left the front wheel hanging out. And there was something wrong with the tape player. No matter what cassette I put in, it was always like I was listening to Alvin and the Chipmunks sing.

Plus it was Buick. Drive a car like that and you might as well slap an AARP sticker on the bumper. People who saw me on I-75 in December probably thought I was just another snowbird heading to Florida for the winter.

But that car had the character and perseverance of its pervious owner and eventually I came to realize that Father Jack was somewhere in the Buick. Maybe sitting next to me in the front seat.

Father Jack's trusty Buick Regal

This was a man who didn’t dilly-dally. He was famous for his 40-minute masses that attracted church-goers from surrounding parishes. He had little patience for excessive ceremonies and when it came to his sermons he told you what you needed to know without a lot brow-beating or biblical references.

This is how you should live your life, now go home and do it.

Naturally the clock in his car was fast. I would reset it at the beginning of every month and it would be off by 15 minutes at the end of it so I’d reset it again. This went on for eight years. It was hard to be late in Father Jack’s Buick.

After a couple years the trunk no longer locked. No doubt he was letting me know I was becoming too attached to worldly possessions. What was important wasn’t my flyrods in the trunk, rather the journey and certainly the destination at the end. That can be hard lesson to learn sometimes.

 Most of all, that car, like Father Jack, was dependable. No false fronts or pretentiousness. You knew what you were getting. It wasn’t a model I’d ever choose at a dealership but it was always there when I needed it. That Buick never stranded me in the woods.

And I spent a lot of time in the woods in that car. For two years I drove around the northern half of the Lower Peninsula trying to find and fish obscure rivers and creeks while working on my book, 12 Classic Trout Streams of Michigan.

Beginning in 2009 I was crisscrossing the state researching trails for www.MichiganTrailMaps.com. Sometimes it sputtered, sometimes near the end it hesitated but it always started up.

Once last year I was deep in the Pigeon River Country State Forest, a good hour from the nearest tow trunk in Gaylord. After spending all morning on the Green Timbers Pathway I jumped in the Buick, turned the ignition and nothing happened.

I was probably looking at a $300 towing bill, if I could even find somebody to come out there, when I decided what I needed to do was pray. But not to God.

“Please Father Jack don’t let the Buick strand me here. Please!”

He was in that car with me, he heard me. I got out and opened and closed the hood a few times, rock the car a little from behind and tried the ignition again. This time the engine roared to life.

I’m going to miss that car, maybe more than I miss Father Jack’s sermons.

After a flight halfway down the world and another halfway across Argentina, an all-night bus ride and jaunts on subways and taxis, after dreaming and planning about this day for over six months, there I was—finally—standing on the banks of the Rio Malleo in the foothills of the Andes.

The river was roughly the width of the Au Sable’s Holy Water stretch near Grayling and just as clear. But it was slightly deeper, possessed a much stronger current and its bottom was composed of round, slippery rocks and small boulders. I immediately regretted not bringing a wading staff. I stepped into it gingerly and cautiously moved toward the center of the river with my guide, Marco, urging me on from behind with what little English he knew.

Jim DuFresne

On my first cast I was still getting organized when a trout took the No. 14 parachute Adams, a dry fly Marco selected and tied on for me. I totally missed the fish. On my third cast I was ready and after setting the hook watched with amazement as the trout leaped out of the water repeatedly and then ran with surprising power before I could reel it in to Marco who was standing guard with a net.

It was 12-inch rainbow, a beautiful fish with a bright pink splash of color along its sides. A 12-inch trout is a nice fish on Au Sable. A 12-inch trout is a great fish for me on the Au Sable. But before I could get my camera out Marco had removed the hook and slipped the trout back into the river, saying three consecutive words of English for the first time that day.

“Call your momma,” he said as the fish darted off.

A 12-inch trout was not a great fish to Marco.

Up to then, my only experience with guides was as part of a driftboat float, targeting steelhead. I had never had a guide for wading until Marco showed up at 11 a.m. my first day in Junin de los Andes, a small town in the Patagonia region. He was supposed to pick me up at 10 a.m. and that’s when I learned everything runs an hour late in Argentina.

We drove north of town, to within 20 miles of the Chile border, to a stretch of the upper Rio Malleo that Marco obviously knew well. The river was part of the country’s famed Lakes District. Preserved high in the Andes within Lanin National Park were a dozen huge lakes whose rivers descended towards Junin de los Andes.

They were rivers with cold, clear water and filled with rainbows and browns. Every one of them was designated flies-only and catch-and-release, the reason this small town is known as the fly fishing capital of Argentina.

Within the first hour there I hooked and released a dozen rainbows. I also managed to snag my fly a half dozen times in a branch which wasn’t easy, considering the lack of trees along most of the bank. At first it was embarrassing. Marco would rush over and retrieve the fly and untangle my tippet or replaced it. He also insisted on untangling my wind knots and, with a steady breeze throughout the day, some were ugly.

Jim DuFresne with a brown trout from a river in Argentina's Lakes District.

Often our conversation in the beginning was little more than me saying “sorry” for another wind knot and Marco replying “no problem, no problem.” But after a while my embarrassment eased up. Having somebody untangle your tippet was nice.

Other times he would say “mend” which I knew well but was struggling to do in the wind. Or “coast too close” which I quickly realized meant he wanted me further from the bank or else the trout I was casting to might spot me.

I spent seven hours that first day slowly working the pools and runs with him a couple yards behind me, watching intently. When my cast was a poor one, he’d quickly say “again.” When I nailed a particular hole he’d say “good cast” and eventually hearing a complement was almost as satisfying as catching a 12-inch rainbow.

When we broke for lunch, Marco set up a small folding table and chairs on the bank of the river and covered it with plates of crusty bread, thin pieces of chilled beef that had been coated and cooked like chicken-fried steak and marinated potatoes. We washed everything down with cans of ice cold beer that been sitting in the river.

For as little as we knew of each other’s language it was amazing how much we conversed.  I learned he was 30 years old and his wife was expecting her first child. He once attended a university near Buenos Aires but hated the sprawling city so much he returned to Junin de los Andes within a year, vowing never to leave the Patagonia again.

He learned this was my first trip to Argentina and possibly the only chance I’d ever have to fish his rivers.

By early evening the wind had eased up and we were working well as a team.  I had found my rhythm, casting steadily and needing only one or two false casts to re-position the fly and lengthen my line. From behind I heard a constant “good cast…good cast…good cast” as I caught and Marco released numerous trout in the 12-14 inch range and an occasional 15-16 inch fish.

When we came to a tree that fallen into the river we both instinctively knew there was probably a trout in the patch of quiet water it created. I managed to drop that fly right against the tree so it could float across the smooth surface. From behind I heard “best cast.”

 I smiled and might have turned to say something to Marco but almost immediately a dark, elongated shadow darted from underneath the fallen tree and slurped in that fly. I set the hook and it ran hard downstream.

The fish never broke the surface but one point I was within a few feet of my backing. I patiently work line back, only to watch the trout take it out again at will. At times it sat so still on the bottom of the river I thought the hook was snagged on a submerged log.

Then it would run again.

Finally after 10 minutes, the fish tired and I was able to work it in close enough for Marco to scoop it up with his net. It was a 22-inch brown trout and for a minute or two we both just stood there gazed down at the fish.

It only the third time I had ever caught a trout 20 inches or larger on a fly and I suspect Marco sensed this was a personal trophy for me.

He smiled and said “day awesome, huh Jim?”

I laughed at hearing another unexpected word of English and there was only one thing I could say.

“Day awesome, Marco. Day awesome.”

Editor’s Note: This is the first of hopefully several Trail Talk entries on Jim DuFresne’s search of the world-class fly fishing in Argentina.

My right knee aches.

Yesterday I ran six miles, pushing it at the end, knowing that my right knee would throb that night and I would be sore today. I am but there is no denying it and nothing I can do to prevent it.

Jim DuFresne

I’m getting older.

Day by day, year by year, I get a little older, a little stiffer. I lose a little more flexibility along with little more hair. I have a little bit less energy at night, my pace is a little more slower when I hike. I no longer spring out of bed in the morning. I crawl out and then spend the first moments of every day rubbing my shoulders, stretching my neck, cracking my knuckles.

When asked my age I say mid-50s but the reality is I’m marching towards 60 and to emphasize that point my eye doctor recently told me I needed cataract surgery.

I’m trying to slow the aging process or at least ease into it. I work out six days a week, religiously, more so then when I was younger when skipping a few days or even a week or two was no big deal. Now it is.

Once while in the stream bath at my gym a pair of butt-naked 70ers sitting next to me said “boy, you better start lifting weights. At our age it’s the only way to slow down muscle loss.” I looked at them, I looked at what naturally happens when you’re closer to 100 than 50, and began a weight-lifting program the next day.

Two years ago I enrolled in a yoga class after my daughter urged me to take up the exercise as a way to improve my flexibility and balance. I walked in and it was 30 women and me. Most of them older and all of them far more flexible.

I unrolled my matt in the rear cornered of the studio and while they moved fluidly from one position to the other, I grunted and struggled with my warrior one and downward-facing dogs. I’m barrel chested, a former high school heavyweight wrestler, so my happy baby pose looks like anything but a gleeful infant in a crib. But I show up twice a week, like I do for my six-month cleaning at the dentist. It’s not something I particularly look forward to, it’s something I need to do.

I’m not trying to turn back the clock or even prevent the inevitable. Someday I’ll be sitting in lounge chair, maybe on the edge of a pool in a warm weather state like Florida, reminiscing with somebody about where I’ve been and what I did.

It will come soon enough. Until then I want to squeeze in a few more adventures.

A month after my daughter left for Argentina to take a job in Buenos Aires, I read a magazine article about the fabulous fly fishing in the Patagonia region of the country. Then I met somebody at a Trout Unlimited meeting who was going down there to fish and at that point it became something I needed to do because, at this point of my life,  I can.

I still have enough energy to fish for long hours and enough strength in my legs to stand in a strong current and cast towards raising trout on the other side of the river. I can still  tie on a No. 18 fly, threading a 6X tippet through the small eye of the hook. Okay, I need reading glasses but I can still do it.

I still have the stamina to fly halfway around the world and the patience to endure airport security. I still have a daughter, fluent in Spanish, living in Buenos Aires who could help me arrange transportation across this incredible long country and book me a bed in a fishing lodge for when I get there. Who knows how long she’ll be there.

Most of all, I still have the desire to do it. The fact that I’ll be traveling alone with a very limited use of the language I view as a challenge, not an ordeal. The thought of watching a 22-inch brown trout rise to my fly and then run hard with it, still excites me.

I’ve yet to begin the first leg of this journey and already I’ve learned a powerful lesson; my sense adventure is far more enduring than my physical abilities.

Long after that right knee is shot, I’ll still want to climb a mountain.