hunter, with a perfect love for Plott hounds, a sporting breed developed in the Smokies. Hunicutt’s three best-known hounds were Dread, Jolly, and Old Wheeler. When he was age 46 in 1926 and the region was abuzz with efforts to create the national park, Hunnicutt published Twenty Years of Hunting and Fishing in the Great Smokies (Knoxville: S.B. Newman & Company). A 216-page, soft-covered book, that contains numerous photographs of hunters and fishermen, their camps and hounds. In 1951 Hunnicutt published a second edition that consisted of 188 pages.
Hunnicutt and Cathey would spend weeks at a time on the upper reaches of Deep Creek. An amusing tale concerning one of their trips tells of the two leaving camp one morning at the forks of the Left Prong and the mainstream of Deep Creek. Cathey was to fish the Left Prong until supper, and Hunnicutt the Right Prong. Hunnicutt found the fish less than cooperative, and returned to camp empty-handed. Cathey had not yet made it back, so after waiting for a while, Hunnicutt decided to try his hand up the Left Prong and meet Cathey on his return trip. He’d fished approximately 300 yards of the creek, creeling eleven nice trout along the way, when he rounded a bend and saw Cathey, who had 90 trout strung over his shoulder. Hunnicutt asked Cathey if he was mad about his coming to meet him. Cathey’s reply was short and rather stern, as he eyed the eleven fish at Hunnicutt’s side: “No, but had you not come to meet me, I would have had a hundred trout when I reached camp.”
During the late 1960s and early 1970s while researching my various books on fishing the Great Smokiy Mountains National Park, I encountered a surprising number of old men who shared their stories of Uncle Mark. They are too numerous to note here, but the zeal with which each one of these old-timers told me their Cathey recollections was as telling as was their tales. Doubtless he was a dashing daredevil of an old bachelor, who as a youth rode logs bareback down the shoots, and later in life chased bears over the ridges so long as the baritone bays of his Plott hounds could be heard.
Carl Standing Deer of the Qualla Reservation was perhaps the best-known sport angler among the Cherokees during the early years of the park. Standing Deer, whose greatest claim to fame rested on his deadly aim with his hand-built bow, proudly referred to himself as the grandson of Suyetta, the revered Cherokee storyteller. Standing Deer was a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist, who used horsehair lines after gut and even nylon lines were available, and scorned flies, preferring stickbait and wasp larvae. Standing Deer considered Deep Creek to have the finest fishing in the Smokies, and was occasionally available as a guide. He often posed in his chief attire along the main thoroughfare of Cherokee, and one can only wonder how many kids from my generation had their photos taken with the war-bonnet-wearing chief by an old Browning Hawkeye camera for the modest charge of 25 cents.
After the national park was formed, the fishing changed. Gradually, bait fishing became illegal in all park waters. Creel and size limits were imposed. Auto access to many streams became a thing of the past. With the building of Fontana Dam, the park grew as the Tennessee Valley Authority turned over much of the land it had acquired from residents who would have been isolated as a result of the impounding of the Little Tennessee River. The power from Fontana Dam was funneled into the nation’s atomic research center at Oak Ridge. The Smokies were the site of some secret road-building practice for the Army Corps of Engineers and of other experiments for the military.
Until 1947 the streams of the Smokies were annually restocked with large numbers of both brook and rainbow trout, in an effort to provide park visitors with “quality” fishing. Rearing stations were operated at the Chimneys, Tremont, Cades Cove, and on Kephart’s Prong. Today, the Smokies offer fine sport fishing for rainbow and brown trout. Fishing for brook trout was sharply curtailed in 1975 when a large number of brook trout streams were closed to all fishing, and it then became illegal to kill a brook trout.
This area is rich in tradition and fishing tales. When tramping down the banks of these streams, it is always interesting to wonder what happened along these trails in previous years.
chapter 3
About Those Creeks
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A TYPICAL POOL, run, or glide in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, much less a typical stream. One of the truly great things about fly-fishing here is the virtually infinite variety of angling challenges and opportunities found among the 733 miles of fishable streams in the national park. Frankly, that variety has astonished every one of the hundreds of anglers I have guided on fly-fishing trips over the last quarter of a century.
Streams in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park can be broken down into five general categories, with single streams often containing all categories as they progress from their headwaters to their ending points, or where they leave the park. The five are small rivers; medium-size, low-gradient streams; medium-size, high-gradient streams; small, high-gradient streams; and “brush” creeks.
The park has several small, river-sized streams. These include the lower reaches of the Oconaluftee River, Little River, and Abrams Creek. These differ dramatically from headwater rills. Gradient and flow volume are the key differences, although, as a rule, the farther downstream the pH of a stream is measured, the higher it is, thus the more fertile it becomes. Flow rates vary from season to season, and especially during exceptionally rainy weather or dry weather. For example, the average flow rate of Little River is 200 to 400 cubic feet of water per second. During rainy weather this can more than double, while in droughts such as were experienced in 2007 and 2008, dwindle to 70 cubic feet of water per second.
Small river-like streams in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park share several common characteristics. They are wide in many places; these flows spread out shallowly in areas up to 200 feet wide over river slicks and bedrock. These spots are dotted with pocket waters that usually hold trout throughout the year, and in most instances hold smallmouth bass and rock bass. These streams also hold the largest percentage of long, slow pools with bottoms of fine gravel and sand that appear to be custom-made for fly-fishing the last hour of the day, when duns are most common. These waters also boast a sprinkling of plunge pools, with examples of the most extreme being Abrams Falls and the Sinks on the Little River. Another characteristic of the park’s small rivers is that the trees found along each side of these flows rarely meet to form a complete canopy over the stream. Solar energy striking the streambed is conducive to the productivity of stream-borne insects and to the food chain in general.
A significant portion of the largest trout and bass found in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park populate these small river reaches. This is usually because these streams provide larger trout with more “elbow room,” and they also offer a greater quantity and variety of forage than smaller, higher-elevation streams. These large streams also provide fly-fishermen with the greatest opportunities to use a variety of techniques to catch trout and bass. Casts of 100 feet or longer are possible on some stretches and pools; although, to be honest, the short-line method of fishing is usually more effective than “gold medal style” distance casting.
The medium-size, low-gradient stream covers the lower reaches of streams such as Eagle Creek, Hazel Creek, Hurricane Creek, or Panther Creek. These streams resemble scaled-down versions of the previously mentioned small rivers. They average 14 to 30 feet wide, and more often than not the overstory of trees meets over the creeks to form a shading canopy during summer. Medium-size, low-gradient streams usually have pH levels very comparable to those of the low-elevation small rivers. The average pH in these waters is 7.2 to 7.8. These streams typically host outstanding populations of caddis flies and mayflies, but in many instances are not the best producers of stone flies.
Medium-size, low-gradient streams offer their best fly-fishing for trout in winter and spring. These streams tend to warm during the summer, and early-autumn trout will migrate upstream where higher elevations provide cooler habitat and the faster flow increases the level of dissolved
