Such a beautiful time on the Rogue River. Whitewater Warehouse still offers fall camp trips where you can leisurely float the river, view the incredible changing colors of the forests, and even try your luck at fishing for the famous Rogue River half-pounder fish (small steelhead) and salmon. We recently read an incredible passage by Canadian author Roderick Haig-Brown who describes the beauty of the ebb and flow of the Rogue River's fall season...
They come to the spawning gravels in all their brilliant colors--reds, browns, greens, gray and black and golden. Like the autumn leaves above them, they have their time of fierce glory. Then the frosts and the rains and the winds come. The leaves become torn and sodden and dulled, and in their time they fall, covering the ground, drifting with the stream currents, piling against the rocks and shallows. But within the trees, life is still strong and self-renewing.
As the winds stir and drift the dying leaves, so the waters stir and drift the dying salmon against the gray-brown gravels of the the streambeds. But under those gravels life is strong and secret and protected in the buried eggs, the real life of the race. Fungus grows on the emptied bodies; they collect in the the eddies and strand on the gravel bars, and the bacteria of change work in them to make a new fertility. In spring, life will burst from the gravel as it bursts again from the trees in the massive yield of the new cycle.
Ahhh, fall on the Rogue River. And another life cycle begins....
