Upper Dam

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A New Dam Day Dawns At Upper Dam | The Virtual Angler

Gone is the picturesque 200-foot-long, mortised-and-tenoned damhouse.
Gone are the wood-and-stone cribs, or aprons, that jutted downstream from the dam, from which many anglers took many trout over the decades.
It was from one of those stout fingers that Carrie Stevens made the first casts with her new creation, a streamer fly she named the Gray Ghost, and landed a 6 pound, 13 ounce brook trout. That was in 1924, when Upper Dam was an angling destination reached only by lake steamers from Oquossoc or South Arm. The Gray Ghost and its descendants still catch a lot of fish at Upper Dam, and Carrie Stevens is memorialized on a bronze plaque that stands beside the carry road, facing Midway Camp where she tied so many of her great flies.

 

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Fish Stories and Tall Tales. or Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Gray Ghost | The Virtual Angler

"It's a great story and mostly true.... "

She had indeed tied a new streamer pattern that morning, and had fished for a half-hour, catching a couple of small fish, before the big trout took the fly. But it took her nearly another hour to bring the fish to the net, so the pool had not truly “yielded” the fish in “less than an hour.” No biggie.

The second “wee flaw” is more of a whopper, and I naively repeated it in this space a week ago. She did not catch that trout on a Gray Ghost streamer.