Grey fox...

Waist deep in fishpot ford

From the outside the stone is a riddle;
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river,
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where fishes come to knock on it
And listen.
...Charles Simic




When I take the trip to fish the ford I usually park in the nature preserve lot at the mouth of ceasars creek and walk down the bike trail. After about half a mile you pass the boundary of the Ceasar Creek Nature Preserve and the wide river bottom between the bike trail and river becomes a huge cornfield. I keep walking downstream even though a tractor path follows the preserve boundary down to the river and curves downstream to the ford. But the open gate has an old keep out sign that somehow seems more serious than most and I keep walking. Another half mile walk and a shallow grass covered drainage cuts across the cornfield straight to fishpot.




Here at fishpot ford the river is at it's best. You are now deep into the really good water quality and above the busiest of the canoe rentals. Luckily the best fishing on the Little Miami is early morning and at dark. About the time the canoes and kayaks show up the fishing is pretty much done for the day anyways.
Fishpot ford gets it's name from John Sublett. John Sublett was one of the earliest settlers and lived with the Rev. James Smith familly at the mouth of Ceasars Creek around 1798. John Sublett built chairs and furniture in a log workshop but was most famous as a hunter and fisherman. John was famous as a hunter and fisherman in a time when everyone was a hunter and a fisherman. At the head of the riffle complex at the ford he built a stone fishtrap to catch the plentiful fish of the river. This stone trap stood for many years and gave the place it's name.
The ford itself was well known long before John Sublett though as the main indian trail from Old Chilicothe to the Ohio river crossed the Little Miami here. General George Rogers Clark led his army across the river here also in 1780 in his campaign against the indian villages in Ohio. General Josuah Harmar also crossed here in 1790.
Simon Kenton was a captain in that army and Daniel Boone was a scout.
Here the Little Miami splits in two then rejoins and splits again as the river makes two sharp turns. All this twisting and turning makes for several fish holding riffles, pockets, runs and eddies. I usually bring along a knapsack with a lunch for if the fish are biting it's possible to spend half the day right here and never wade upstream to the truck. I also usually bring along a pretty varied lure selection because of the varied water. I always try to have the following lures along:



The plastic grub is the ultimate river lure, you might catch bass, sauger, whitebass, rock bass, sheephead, and the occasional catfish on one.



An inline spinner probably accounts for more smallmouth than any other lure and is ideal for fishing riffles.



A top water plug can be very exciting right at daylight or dusk.



A floating diving rapala is another all round lure like the grub and often produces big smallmouth.



Small crankbaits can at times really produce numbers of fish,



A jig of some sort is an excellant choice in the deeper runs and can be tipped with live bait.

Fishpot ford is roughly fifty miles upstream from the Ohio river and the water quality and diversity probably starts peaking thru here. One hundred and sixteen species of fish have been found in the little miami and a single rock in the river may be covered by a million algal cells of at least a hundred different species. An astounding eleven hundred plus species of algae and invertabrates make the Little Miami home. Twenty three of these were new to science when found in the river.
Just upstream from the ford is a nice hole that is full of down trees and logjams. If I were trying to catch a big flathead from the river this is one of the first places I'd head. I'll often slip a container of chicken liver in my pack and after fishing the ford below with lures switch and catch channel cats here.
The hole ends in a rockbar that's good for another smallmouth or two to a grub fished on an jighead. I call this "hooterville run" as just downstream on the far bank is a run down old fish camp with a handpainted sigh stuck up in the trees that states "welcome to hooterville usa" I've never had the guts to climb the bank and see if I actually was welcome in hooterville though the sign always brings to mind visions of the girls of hee haw laying around in cutoff jeans.
Just upstream you enter the boundary of the nature preserve. From here to the mouth of ceasar creek the river makes two more sharp turns and is good fishing all the way. Even if you plan on wading the entire way wear jeans instead of shorts as the river bottom vegetation is very thick and filled with stinging nettles and in some places the river is simply not wadeable. The preserve here also overrun with whitetail deer and it's common to see a half dozen on every fishing trip.
John Sublett hunted deer, turkey, and bear all along here and once killed a black bear on the ridges overlooking the river that weighed over four hundred pounds. He also trapped furbearing animals such as beaver and otter and trapped wolves on the ridge just south of here. The beaver and otters have came back strong and the river bottom here has lots of beaver sign and cuttings.
At the mouth of ceasars creek a nice rock bar lines the far bank while weedbeds extend out into the mouth of the creek. In most flows a school of gar hang around the mouth and big carp can be seen slipping in and out of the creek. An inline spinner allmost allways produces a couple smallmouth while nightcrawlers produce sheephead,carp, and catfish.






The short stretch of creek from the mouth up to the parking lot at the preserve is excellent fishing for smallmouth bass. The creek is simply beautiful and a great place to bring a flyrod as the creek is only thigh deep and but wide enough for a good backcast. Here the Smith familly tapped sugar maples in late winter and the father drove a wagonload of maple sugar and bacon from pigs fattened on acorns from the surrounding woods a couple times a year to Cincinnati. He slept in the wagon at the market where fountain square now stands before returning.




Upstream from the parking lot the creek flows down two and a half miles from the ceasar creek dam. This section of stream flows thru a deep gorge and has ok fishing for small bass in a beautiful setting. At one point large cliffs cut into the hillside and beaver sign is common along the creek. Here I also heard a loud ruckus while fishing and looked up just in time to see a large coyote leap off the bank trying to catch a goose standing on a small midstream island.









The quarter mile of stream right below the dam holds a large amount of fish. I've caught largemouth, smallmouth, kentucky spotted bass, sauger, pumpkinseeds, catfish, carp, sheephead and white bass here. And just this last spring lost a big muskie right below the dam. A few years ago while carp fishing I caught a five foot long paddlefish on light spinning tackle,then a month later landed one four feet long.
My guess is these filter feeders accidently suck up the bait as the strain the water thru huge gill slits.





The dam here holds back 2800 acres of water up to one hundred ten feet deep. I don't pretend to know much at all about the lake even though I fish it alot.The lake holds large numbers of crappie and sauger and is making a name for itself as a muskie lake.

ole buglemouth

Trail camera pics and videos

An Ohio Pyramid

This is the Great Mound in Miamisburg Ohio. The largest conical mound east of the missisippi and one of the largest in the world.





Yeah those are people at the top, It's huge!





The view from the top. Some theories suggest the mound may also have been used as a signal tower. Although you really cant see when the pictures are this size a tiny bump on the horizon in one photo is the skyscrapers of Dayton in the distance. You can see miles and miles of the river valley.





.The Mound was probably over seventy feet tall when new and sits on top of a large ridge overlooking the river. The circumference is 877 feet. After climbing the 116 steps to the top the view is amazing. I can't imagine the power or esteem someone must have been held in for his people to have went to this incredible amount of work to bury him.
The mound was built by the Adena people sometime between 1000 bc and 400 ad.(1400 years, they must have been quite a people to rule for so long)The Adena people, or the mound builders as they are sometimes called, were the first to make pottery in what in Ohio. Big pots as large as eighteen inches high and twelve to fourteen inches in diameter have been found.The Adena used tools made of stone and bone but used copper for jewelry. The Adena also made art seemingly just for srts sake. They created stone tablets with absrtct designs varved all over them and made pipes in all kinds of animal and human forms.
The Adena were the first people to grow food in addition to being hunter/gatherers and grew plants like pumpkins and squash. Their principal weapon was the spear.
The only real archeological excavation of the mound was in 1869 when a vertical shaft was sunk from the top to the base, with two horizontal tunnels extending from it. One skeleton covered with barkwas found eight feet down; a second "vault" 36 feet from the top surrounded with logs was discovered but nothing was found inside. Layers of ashes and stone were found which probably mean the mound was built in stages over time.





This is a photo of Monk's Mound near Collinsville, Illinois I found online. Monk's Mound covers 16 acres; it rests on a base 1,037 feet long and 790 feet wide, with a total volume of approximately 21,690,000 cubic feet, a base and total volume greater than that of the pyramid of Khufu, Egypt's largest. Its just about the same size at the base as the pyramid at Giza. All built by carried baskets of earth! Untill the Pentagon and big skyscrapers were built it was the largest manmade structure in America.

Evening

Was poking around in the woods this evening and jumped a doe. She ran a bit then snorted a bunch, but the wind was right and I just froze and she came sneaking back trying to find out what spooked her. After maybe ten minutes she bounded away with one last snort. A very nice walk in the woods

Will o' Wisps and Warrior Ghosts

You are lost in the desolate forest
Where the stars give a pitiful light.
But the far-away glow of the Will of the Wisp
Offers hope in the menacing night.

It is lonely and cold in the forest,
And you shiver with fear in the damp,
As you follow the way of the Will of the Wisp
And the dance of it’s flickering lamp.

But know, as you trudge through the forest,
Toward that glistening torch in the gloom,
That the eerie allure of the Will of the Wisp
Summons you down to your doom.

It will lead you astray in the forest,
Over ways never traveled before.
If ever you follow the Will of the Wisp,
You’ll never be seen anymore.
By Jack Prelutsky

Probably no where can you go and find more ghosts than along the Little Miami at Fort Ancient, much less fish at such a haunted locale. All that science can really say for certain is that from the end of the last ice age till now man has lived there, Paleo-indians, Adena, Hopewell, Fort Ancient peoples, woodland cultures and finally Scot's Irish pioneers. The hill overlooking the river here is the site to visit if you are interested in native american cultures in Ohio. Two and a half miles of earthworks in places up to twenty plus feet tall, indian mounds, indian burials, villages, farming and religious sites. You name it and Fort Ancient has it all.
Down on the floodplain, where now the canoe livery sits was the site of a pioneer settlement now completely gone. This ghost town had a blacksmith shop, hotel, post office, and was a stop on the Little Miami railroad.
On the opposite bank of the river the Cross Key Tavern, built in 1802, still stands. The Cross Keys was also a stop on the stagecoach line. Local lore has the tavern haunted by a woman that stayed there while the Cross Key was operated as an inn, probably sometime around 1810. Supposedly she found her bed so comfortable that after she died she returned to haunt that bed. Legend also says the antique shop at the top of the hill has tried selling the bed but it keeps getting returned by unhappy buyers. This antique shop itself was originally a church built in the 1850's. Ive heard the abandoned cemetery beside the shop is haunted itself. Across the road from the grave yard, in Camp Kern, is the Kern Effigy, A stone pathway built by the Hopewell that supposedly resembles a giant snake.
My brother and my great uncle Albert Sandlin fished the river along here in the seventies and saw their own ghosts of sorts, a ball of light floating downriver hanging a few feet above the water. My great uncle mentioned seeing the mysterious light on a previous trip and then it reappeared on a night both he and my brother were fishing the river. My brother described it to me as a circle of soft light about the size as the bottom of a five gallon bucket floating slowly over the river.
Science says these lights are made by the gasses formed by decaying vegetation in swampy ground. Down here at Fort Ancient the steep hillsides would shelter a gas ball from the wind that might break it apart allowing it to linger on a muggy summer night.
Legend tells a different story, calling them Will o' Wisps or Jack o' Lanterns and claims they are the ghosts of unbaptised children caught between heaven or hell. Other legends say the lights are the souls of men who have sold their souls to the devil. Certainly a better place than Fort Ancient, with it's ghosts town and indian burial grounds, could not be found for a haunting.
Here the river runs in a series of long runs and holes better suited for catfish, crappies, and sauger fishing without alot of the classic smallmuth riffles. My smallmouth fishing here consists of walking five or ten minutes between fiffles and runs then fishing each one thoroughly. But with the exceptional water quality each spot usually yields some fine fishing making the effort worthwhile.
I've found that in early morning before the canoe crowd is out in full force this is a great stretch of river to fish with a flyrod. The long and smooth heads and tails of each pool are tailor made for a deer hair bug twitched on the surface. This seems to produce some very nice sized fish every year also. I tie a simple deer hair bug as big around at most as a nickel, really about half as big as the average bug you see on sale for fishing largemouth bass. Fished on a six weight rod they cast better and produce many more smallmouths than a bigger bass bug.
If you park at the ODNR parking lots alongside the bridge and walk down the bike trail for ten minutes or so you will come to a stone bridge over a small creek. The curved arch of the bridge is just big enough to walk under and looks like it should be home to a troll or two. This small creek has created a nice rock bar out in the river speeding up the current and providing a fine area to fish. I usually fish this water fast at first picking up a fish or two on an inline spinner then slowing down and going back over the water with a plastic grub or marabou jig. A jig here for me has produced white bass, sauger, bass, drum, and once a decent channel cat. The secret to finding the best water is finding areas with a firm bottom of gravel or rock instead of softer muck.
Often the very hottest days of summer, those ninety degree scorchers, can produce some fine fishing for smallmouth. Just fish the fastest water you can find that is close to deep water. Fish these riffles with a fast moving bait like a spinner or small crankbait early in the day and you will get bit. The fast water provides food and oxygen, the warm temperatures amp up the fishes metabolism and the nearby water provides midday sanctuary.
For a few miles each side of the Fort Ancient bridge the hillsides are covered in just about the finest forest left in sothwestern Ohio. Early visitors to Little Miami river valley in the late 1700's and early 1800's described the valleys as having the most magnificent forests they had ever encountered. Considering the entire country was cloaked in forest these woodlands must have been quite majestic to earn such praise. Along the river just upstream form here I found a few years ago what I'm sure was bobcat scat on the end of a log about chest high off the ground. Deer are frequently seen crossing the bike trail in early mornings and in spring the gobbles of wild turkeys ring thru the woodland.
Up atop the hillside at the Fort Ancient museum there are relics also of paleo-indians dating back 12000 years. Large clovis spearpoints that would have been used to hunt the mammoths and mastadons that roamed here after the last ice age. Some mastadon skeletons have been found in Ohio of animals that were eleven feet tall and estimated to have weighed ten thousand pounds. Imagine hunting that with a spear! Other megafauna that would have lived in the Little Miami valley in those days would have included the dire wolf, giant beavers and ground sloths, saber toothed cats, and the meanest monster of them all, the short faced bear. The short faced bear stood up to twelve feet tall and weighed up to 2500 hundred pounds.
In the earliest years of the eighteen hundreds the woodlands from here upstream to past waynesville were known for their fine black bear hunting. Although by the end of the seventeen hundreds indians still had villages along the little miami, the Hopewell and the Fort Ancient peoples were long gone. The earliest white explorers to Fort Ancient tell of finding mature trees hundreds of years old growing atop the earthworks. One theory holds that the little ice age that so devastated europe from 1300 to the mid 1800s caused the Fort Ancient people to adapt from their settled ways into the woodland culture Shawnee. Another theory was their culture was wiped out by disease sweeping up from the south caused by contact with the first Spanish exlorers to North America. To me some combination of the two seems logical.
The Fort Ancient people who lived all along the length of the Little Miami and the Shawnee shared many ways of doing things and artifacts from both cultures are very similar. The Shawnee, many archeologists believe, are the most likely descendants of the Fort Ancient people. Since most of the Scot's Irish settlers of Kentucky and Ohio ended up with traces of Cherokee and Shawnee blood in their geneology I like to think so, having the blood of these Scot's Irish hillbillys running in my veins. Maybe some tiny tiny fraction of my own heritige dates back to these amazing people.
Although called Fort Ancient, this place wasn't really a fort at all, the walls are broken by 63 large gateways that would have been impossible to defend. It is thought that instead this was the religious center for villages from the surrounding countryside, their Mecca of sorts. I rather like the idea of Fort Ancient as a place of pilgrimage and worship instead of a fort. Any theory that has one of my favorite fishing spots being holy makes perfect sense to me. These ancient peoples would have grown corn and squash here and gathered wild foods such as ramps or acorns from the surrounding forests. Pearls and shells from the Little Miami were much used in jewelry and they would have traveled the river in dugout canoes trapping and catching it's plentiful fish. Wether or not their spirits now haunt the river scaring fishermen as glowing balls of light is of course another thing entirely...



















A dancer from the celebration held every year at Fort Ancient.