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Just awesome photos! It is great seeing them in the middle of the winter. I was very impressed with the brookie pictures. Was that one brookie or a couple. Are they wild fish or stocked fish? PA has very pretty hatchery brookies and in a few weeks in a stream get even prettier. That is one very large hook jawed brown! Looks to be 24" - 26". The other one is bragging size too.

By the way what is the Driftless Area???

Beautiful fish and photos, Len. They make me a bit jealous, actually.

-Shawn

Len, how is the "driftless area" defined? Where is it, and how did it get its name?

Ya, nice photos Len

Louis - Driftless meaning it was skipped by the last Ice Age epoch. The area of the upper Mississippi (and Lower St. Croix) River basin is a much older landscape than much of the upper Midwest.

The Driftless basically starts just south of Hudson, WI/Afton, MN (just north of the Chin on the Indianhead that makes up the shape of NW Wisconsin)and extends south with the Mississippi into Northern Iowa. It's also known as Coulee Country due to the seemingly endless valleys cutting up into the limestone hills. Each one of these coulees generally harbors a tiny little limestone spring creek...

There are thousands of spring creeks in the Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa driftless area. Some like the Rush and Kinnickinic are famous and heavily fished, most are seldom explored and offer a lifetime of angling solitude.

Len is right-smack-dab in the heart of the best concentration of water and has all of the fish named from what I hear...

Louis-
I would like to add to Brad’s well worded explanation. As you will recall, from high school history, man once traveled in nomadic groups and were called hunters and gatherers. Tens of thousands of years ago, during the glacial period, a small group of these nomads crossed from the Asian Continent to the North American Continent, via the Bearing Strait; which at that time was a small finger of land connecting the two continents. These people drifted throughout North America and happened upon a small glacier less area which would eventually include what is called Southwest Wisconsin today. As luck would have it this area was full of spring creeks boiling up through huge limestone deposits and teeming with native trout. Realizing the significance of this discovery to their daily sustenance they became trout fishermen and are today considered the earliest known to partake in this activity. Many took root deciding to stay hence the term Driftless Area. It is with great reservation that I reveal this little known fact lest those of you from back east will descend upon our sacred waters, take stand in our pools, and force us to fish shoulder to shoulder, causing us to become drifters once again.

There is another fly fishing web site, that will go unnamed here but they have a couple of annual get togethers called "Fish-Ins". The premise is that anywhere from 50 - 100 guys and gals descend on an area and spend three days wading through all the good lies, drinking beer, and generally making life tough for the resident fly guys. I am thinking of having my TU chapter take our annual week long outing in the Driftless area as we all love those little limestone creeks. Thanks for giving us all that great information!

I now know where I will be retiring.

Beautiful fish.

Is the one a tiger trout?

Have been running it to Tigers around here as of late.

I get lucky with my Sony w-7 point and shoot from time to time.

The fourth picture down from the top is my favorite, that brookie is awesome!