We Finally Find Wildcat Creek and a Few Crawdads

Wednesday September 22, 2021 Troy Oregon

We woke up  here at Grizzly Flat near Troy.

Locating Wildcat Creek

Last night  I looked up Wildcat creek on the map and copied down it’s coordinates so I could enter them on my GPS to find that creek so we could catch some crawdads for bait. That is what we are planning to do today, go find that creek and catch some crawdads.

Little walk

I took a little walk around Grizzly Flat before we left for Troy to do some internet stuff.

Looking for Wildcat Creek

We drove on into Troy and did the internet stuff and then headed up along the Grande Ronde River Road headed to find Wildcat Creek.

Found it

The GPS said, stop here. This is where Wildcat Creek comes into another creek. I was here yesterday but didn’t’ recognize it as it had all changed since I was last here. There used to be a six foot culvert here but now there is a bridge and rails.

And where the two creeks meet used to be all gravel, but now it is rocky with a  nice fishing hole.

Washed out

Checking things out it appears something plugged up the culvert in a big storm and washed it all out bringing in all the big rocks and washing out the gravel bed.

Checking for crawdads

We set up chairs so Marty could supervise while I put some bait out to see if there were any crawdads to catch. Marty is standing on the bridge.

Crawdad bait

Before this was all gravel so there was no place for the crawdads to hide and they were easy to catch by hand but now with the rocks they have cracks to hide in so it was much harder to catch them by hand but I gave it a try and put out some meat pieces in the rocks to attract them.

What we caught

We waited a half hour then I looked for crawdads in the water being attracted to the bait. I was able to get four of them but some crawled down into the rock cracks.

I have traps

Marty and I were sitting there talking when he said something about this place needing traps. I said I have some in my van I carry around so I went to get them and we worked on sitting them up using canned fish for bait.

We decided to put the traps out overnight and come back to check them first thing tomorrow as it looked like there might be lots of crawdads here.

I lowered the two traps into this pool of water for the night.

Headed for camp

We decided to make camp at a spot I haven’t been up on Eden Bench so off we went down the river road headed to Eden Bench to find the road to camp.

We drove on up to Eden Bench and found the road we wanted and started down it to find a camp spot.

Camp

We worked our way down to this open field and made camp here by the trees overlooking the field and the river canyon where we were earlier today.

Camp for the night.

I went for a walk around the grassy field and this was the view down to the Grande Ronde River.

Nice day.