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SENEY
POINTS
OF
INTEREST
Trout fishing on the Fox River. Cool spring-fed water and DNR stocking creates good trout fishing on the legendary Fox, plus there are no steelhead or Chinook salmon to compete with the trout ...
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Fox River Pathway. This 27-mile hiking trail isn't all that interesting. The strange fields of charred tree stumps from long-ago fires can be diverting for a while, but the U.P. has many more striking trails for hikers and backpackers ...
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Trout fishing on the Fox River
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Both the East Branch of the Fox River above M-28 and the entire Main Stream pass through undeveloped state land and offer good fishing, says Tom Huggler. He maps and describes the Fox from a fisherman’s perspective in Fish Michigan: 50 More Rivers. Fishing is better in some years than others. What makes fishing so good in the Fox? There are no steelhead and chinook salmon to compete with trout, he says; "the system is constantly charged with an ample supply of groundwater, which provides for stable, year-round flows that rarely warm above 68°; the overall difficulty of access helps curb fishing pressure; and the DNR releases yearling brook trout to the Main Stream to augment native reproduction." State forest campgrounds on the East Branch and Main Stream provide good river access. See Camping.
Huggler writes that the East Branch "has larger and bigger trout than the Main Stream" – largely because more of it is unreachable. Watch for probable DNR regulations to keep fishing quality up.
After describing the river’s various sections and passing along numerous tips, Huggler summarizes, "The Fox River is a beautiful, pristine trout stream largely unchanged from the days of Hemingway’s visit. But it is not an easy stream to either fly fish or canoe. Those with some skills at both pursuits, however, will be amply rewarded."
Trout anglers who have read Hemingway often feel drawn to follow the footsteps of Nick Adams in "Big Two-Hearted River," best known of all Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories. It’s now clearly established that the river Hemingway described was the Fox River at Seney. He appropriated the name of the nearby Two Hearted for its sublime name. Here’s lifelong trout fisherman Jerry Dennis describing his own pilgrimage some years ago to the river Hemingway made famous. This passage is from Dennis’s engaging book of fishing essays from his own life in northern Michigan: A Place on the Water: An Angler's Reflections on Home .
"’Big Two-Hearted River’ brought to life a cherished fantasy of discovering lovely rivers filled with large, surface-feeding trout," Dennis writes. " . . . The Fox even today has a reputation for brook trout of a size rarely encountered elsewhere in the United States. Fish fifteen to twenty inches long are taken with fair regularity, primarily by locals with a knack for drifting night-crawlers through the deep pools downstream from Highway M-28. Some of those blunt-bodied trout, their spots highlighted with hobby paint, have been mounted and hung on the walls of area service stations and tackle shops. . . . Such trout can still be found in the Fox, though not in the numbers of even a few years ago. The predations of those local trophy hunters have had an impact.
"I had expected the river [the Fox at the M-28 bridge a quarter mile west of town] to be clear and lively, bubbling over bright cobblestone. Upstream would be a stretch of meadow water where large trout rose to grasshoppers and, beyond it, the river would disappear into a dark swamp that promised even larger trout.
"Instead the Fox was small, choked with fallen trees, and flowed sluggishly through dense growths of tag alders. The water was discolored, a blend of silt and swamp drainings, and passed with little vitality over a bottom of soft sand.
"The Fox’s dark color comes from tannic acid from the roots of trees in the waters it drains. The dark water is clear, not muddy, and clean. There’s a clear line where brown water joins blue at the Fox’s confluence with the Manistique just west of the north end of Big Manistique Lake. Not only Hemingway but Henry Ford fished this spot, where anglers can catch the cold-water trout and warm-water fish from Big Manistique Lake."
On Jerry’s pilgrimage to the Fox, on a humid June day, he was routed by insects – and ended up camping on Lake Superior, where the wind usually blows away the bugs. It was a good thing he brought a copy of Hemingway’s In Our Time along.
"Big Two-Hearted River" can be read in two different books today. Hemingway on Fishing ...continued below...
(edited by Nick Lyons) anthologizes stories, selections from novels, and a piece written by a very young Hemingway on fishing for trout at the Sault rapids. Nick Adams Stories collects all Hemingway’s stories with Nick Adams as protagonist, published and unpublished in his lifetime. Several are set in northern Michigan.
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