Straydog,

Again, perhaps the Upper Rogue and Middle Rogue are just completely different. I'm mostly familiar with the river above Gold Ray. I don't have 40 years experience, like you, but I have fished it more than 100 days a year for the last fifteen years--generally drifting the river three or more times a week during peak fishing times. I mostly fish for steelhead--summer and winter run--with a fly.

The Upper Rogue has a native/resident rainbow population, in addition to cutthroat, large enough that several guides offer trout fishing excursions (day trips where only trout are targeted), and it is quite impossible to fish all day without hooking one--particularly during the fly-only season. There are undoubtedly not as many rainbows per mile as other rivers, e.g., McKenzie, Deschutes, but to say that there are none, or too few to notice, would be completely inaccurate.

Many of the Rogue's tributaries are filled with trout as well. The Applegate in particular. At the very least, those fish migrate, at times, into the mainstem.

As for the state record coming from the "Holy Water." Not only unlikely, impossible. The record fish was caught in '82--long before the "Holy Water" was anything but a glorified put-and-take trout pond. Additionally, the fish was a native. Testing revealed that the twenty-eight pound fish was a hermaphrodite--thus, like many truly oversized fish, it never sexually matured.

I don't know what else to say. I probably catch a couple hundred trout a year on the Upper Rogue--a mixed-bag of cutthroat and rainbows. No monsters, but lots of good sized trout in the 12" class. Some may in fact be residualized steelhead (probably are), but others are good ol' fashioned wild trout.

Obviously I can't speak to what ODFW has told you. I do know, however, that it has become their policy to discontinue stocking trout in most of Oregon's free-flowing waters--whether anadromous fish are present or not, and regardless of their prospects of successfully over-wintering. It's a good policy too. There are literally hundreds of lakes in the state stocked to the point of overflow with hatchery fish.

You're right that it's a gem of a river. And the news about Savage Rapids is long-overdue good news. Thanks for sharing it.

[ 01-15-2002: Message edited by: Bubzilla ]