Taneum Creek, WA

As where many of my trips this summer, I wanted to find new places to fish and new places to explore. On gazetteer this river had been marked as a place you could fish and I drove by it several times on my way to the Yakima or somewhere out east. It came to the point where I wanted to finally check it out. A little bit tricky to get to but well worth the trip. This has already been marked as a place to return next summer. Besides fishing, I also learned this area provides great mountain biking, hiking, and dirt biking as well. Never being here before my friend and I got to the river and just started heading up. Checked out the campground and kept it on our list as a place to come back to. It was dark mind you when we pulled in, sometime near 10pm, typical to most of the times we had showed up to camp on Fridays before. There were signs for other places and we kept treking. We ended up at Elk Meadow, there is no designated place to camp, a large field (later we discovered it was the weekend of a meteor shower), seclusion, and we were relatively close to one of the forks of the river.
The next day we discovered how small the river was, at least for that time of the year. There wasn't much opportunity to fish but the couple pockets we found had one or two little guys in each. We made are way back down river to where the two forks meet. Here a bridge crossed the road and the river doubled in size but still remained less than 20 or 30 feet across. There were however many deeper pools and much more opportunity to fish although still very limited. Fishing each one, climbing through a few log jams to get to the next, and walking down to another campground we had a fun an relatively successful day on the river. This fish were not picky and so anything that was small and floated worked well.

Summary:
Location: Taneum River, near Thorpe, WA off I-90 west of Ellensburg.
Time: All day
Rod: 5 wt floating line
Tackle: Elk hair caddis, purple and traditional parachute adams, misquitos, and multiple other little duns and caddis'
Fish: 10+
Species: Rainbow and Cutt Throat
Biggest Fish:10"
Smallest Fish: 4"
Rating: 7.5/10

 The Meadow

 Caught the biggest fish under there!

 Buddies Best Catch!