A Lifetime of Adventures

Story and Photos by Ray Brooks

On a hot August day, Little Wood River was nicely cold, so I waded up its shallow waters to fly fish rather than brush-beating along the banks. Suddenly I heard the unmistakable warning of a rattlesnake. When I spied the coiled rattler a good thirty feet from me on the gravel bank, I was deeply offended.

Gently, I set down my fly rod in ankle-deep water and picked up a baseball-sized rock. Of course, I missed my pitch, and it took another two near-misses for the rattler to flee up the riverbank. After that, wading rather than walking was an easy choice, even though during multiple fishing trips up Little Wood, I saw only one other rattler.

For me, Little Wood River north of Carey has been a life-long attraction. The river originates in the Pioneer Mountains and flows about 130 miles to the Gooding area, where it meets with Big Wood River to form Malad River. My mother, who enjoyed remote areas with good fishing, first brought me there when I was about eleven.

In the mid-1960s my parents took me to search for 19th Century mining artifacts up Little Wood’s tributary, Copper Creek, near where it meets with another tributary called Muldoon Creek. These two activities—fly-fishing and on-site exploration of historic mines—have fascinated me most of my life.

I’ve gone to a lot of remote Idaho places in pursuit of them, but the combination of fishing and mining history of Little Wood River and its tributaries have rewarded me perhaps more consistently than anywhere else.