Pendills. Angodosh. Naomikon, Roxbury, Halfaday, and Grants. To anyone from this part of the world, this isn't gibberish. It's geography. These are, in no particular order, the names of several small creeks that begin in the Lake Superior highlands, run gently and beautifully through hardwoods and conifers, under what is now Lakeshore Drive (the Curley Lewis), and into the sand beaches of Whitefish Bay.
They are also history. These little creeks, swollen these few weeks with snow melt, carried food and survival to early people and they have for years been significant places for local families to spend time, fishing, picnicking, smelting, and sometimes just getting away. Mention the names of these creeks, and a story is not far off.
The creeks have changed in the past few decades. Once good sources for brook trout, they now are mostly empty of game fish. Most “experts” suggest that silt has taken most of the habitat away. Silt came with logging, which has been a fairly constant neighbor to these creeks. It also comes from heavy damming and releasing by beavers. The silt will cover up any gravel and without gravel, native trout can't regenerate.
The Hiawatha Forest is trying an experimental gravel bed on the Roxbury to see if that will promote more growth. A soil conservation friend of mine suggested that it may not work unless beaver further up the creek are thinned and managed. But on other creeks, beaver have been trapped hard and still few trout appear.
In another part of the UP, and in some places downstate, people who fish smaller streams have worked to keep steelhead from entering the creeks in the spring because they dominate the streams and leave no room for smaller trout. In some creeks at the west end of the lake, weirs keep bigger trout and salmon out of the creeks. Before steelhead and salmon vied for the same streams, lake trout left them alone and regenerated on lake shoals. The bigger foreign invaders that we have become used to may have helped end another type of fishing that was a way of life for generations.
This time of year the steelhead, and some browns, nose their way into these little creeks, and on any given morning a half dozen fishermen wet salmon eggs and stand where the creeks meet the big water to catch these big fish in water they only venture into for a few weeks each year. It's good fishing. Friendly fishing, with the possibility of a big reward.
Nothing stays the same, and some things change enough to come back to what they once were. So too these streams may clean themselves out and provide for a new generation of native brook trout. In the meantime they are beautiful little creeks, each with a feel and personality of its own.
Pat Egan is the former publisher of the Sault Evening News. He is a recipient of the William Allen White award for editorial writing. He and his wife Debra live at Salt Point.
