Beech Spring

Amelia & I have a favourite spring creek. If you know beech forests, you understand that they are typically found in hilly, relatively steep mountainous terrain. If you know spring creeks, you know that they typically flow out of the ground in pastoral settings – or at least a ways out from the toe of the slopes that water infiltrates. So, to find a beech forest spring creek is relatively rare, but that’s what we stumbled across a few years ago as we explored a back country west coast river. Our spring creek is very spring influenced but does pick up a few ephemeral, run-off fed fingers. The kick is that for most of its run, it flows under a beech forest canopy and is quite weedy in spots. It’s not a long run either, perhaps 1.5 km of water. And there aren’t fish everywhere but there are a few nice browns, most certainly. This year we’ve fished it once a month and will likely fish it once more before we head home to Canada. On each of our visits, AJ missed one of the largest browns of our trip – likely tipping the scales near double digits. There’s a clip of video that will be on our West Coast Spring Creeks dvd (due out later this year) that shows just how amazing the fish and spring creek is. As it is, this blog post shows how amazing both the setting and fish are. The pongas, tuis, fantails, beech canopy, mosses, and a few browns… it’s a stunning little bit of water. Below, you’ll find some of hour favourite photos of this wee gem.