Halfway there, I ran into a group of whiskered, sooty fellows fishing below Thoreau Falls. My own relationship to these denizens of cold highland brooks began when I was seventeen and on my way to climb Mount Carrigain deeper into the Pemi. Hemmed in by a waterfall and a mountain, Ethan’s brook trout somehow endure. Close to the top of the divide, Ethan’s inlet soon disappears into cliff and scree slope and its outlet heads west, cascading over nearby Thoreau Falls and into the East Branch of the Pemigewasset River, a tributary to Henry David Thoreau’s Merrimack River, and then onward to the Atlantic. Should the shallow pond heat up, dry out, or freeze solid, there isn’t much room to move. Life for the small brook trout that live there is a risky proposition. A wild place in the upper Pemigewasset watershed, Ethan Pond gets its water from intermittent streams plunging off the steep sides of massive Mount Willey above Crawford Notch and from springs seeping up through the broken stone of its floor. At this one high outpost of wilderness, you can gaze backwards and forwards and get most of the entire span of trout-fishing history in America.Įthan sits at an elevation of 2,900 feet under the dome-like summit of Mount Willey, by the cliffs and ledges of a west-running ridge. Ethan Pond, a small pond high in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, is not only where a trout-fishing addiction began for me, but it’s also where some of the earliest observations of recreational trout fishing were made in northern New England.
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