Glory Days
by William Crisp
We just celebrated the opening day of snake season and bass season; my twenty second such adventure of overseeing the magical second Saturday in June in a row. Before that there were such weekends that I partook more so than just observed and as I ventured through the forest and to the streams, I couldn’t help but marvel at the bounty of the 2017, sun-splashed weekend.
We hear lots of stories of how great things used to be in the outdoors and we’ve heard even more predicting the dire failure we’d suffer in the future. I’ll give you some specific examples of how the pessimism has been greatly exaggerated.
The Sinnemahoning Creek is now full of small mouth, channel cats, and hold over trout and other species. In 1997, the Sinnemahoning was classified as dead, polluted and really had very few fishermen on it. In 1997, there were zero anglers on the Sinnemahoning. In 2017, there were nearly a hundred or perhaps easily more anglers and boaters enjoying that beautiful creek.