Time: 7:00PM – 9:00PM

Location: Where angled road cuts away from route 24 and heads to Red Cliff

Fish Landed: 11

Homestake Creek 07/14/2010 Photo Album

When I returned to the campground, I set up my two person REI tent and made my delectable dinner of chicken noodle soup and carrots and bread. After I cleaned up, I decided to fish Homestake Creek until dark. Homestake is a small tributary to the Eagle that runs directly across from the Hornsilver Campground. I drove downstream a bit toward where a side road angles off to the left from Route 24. I drove to the bottom of the hill where there is a big curve, and the stream was cutting deeper and deeper into a canyon. I didn’t want to scramble down a steep canyon late in the evening, so I did a U-turn, and parked half way back up the hill.

The gradient was quite steep where I began with numerous plunge pools. I tied on a light gray body deer hair caddis and caught three small browns in the plunge pools as I hop scotched my way from boulder to boulder moving upstream. However, the caddis stopped producing and it was getting progressively darker, so I switched out the caddis for the royal stimulator that had produced so well for me on Brush Creek. I picked up a few fish on the stimulator, but I knew there were more fish than I was attracting, so I added a beadhead hares ear under the stimulator. This proved to be a smart move and my catch rate picked up. The stream was narrow enough that I could cast to the slack water on the far side of the fast midstream current and reach my rod out and up and let the combination drift back through the juicy pockets and slack water without drag. More often than not, a brown would grab the trailing hares ear when I executed this technique.

When I got to the portion of the stream where the road Y’ed away from Route 24, the gradient was less steep and the stream widened. By this time it was getting quite dark since it was approaching 9PM, so I called it a night and returned to my sleeping bag.