Land that time forgot?

I need a snack. Seen the FGFF guys around?

This weekend the family and I traveled north for a weekend of camping with three other families at Dinosaur Valley State Park near Glen Rose. This is the hometown of my casting instructor, Mr. Allen "Ol' Al" Crise, who passed away earlier this year. I was looking forward to fishing the same river, the Paluxy, that he did since it ran through the park.

The first morning I did some recon of some of the spots on the river and found most of them were clear and very shallow but running. Eventually we did find a pool called Blue Hole that seemed deep. There were also several dino tracks along the shoreline. This what the river looked like from the top of the canyon.


The river is well known for the various dinosaur tracks imprinted in the limestone riverbed that can be seen better when the water is really low though we did see quite a few. They were discovered in the early 1900s. They weren't as big as I thought. Supposedly some human like prints were found nearby as well which are thought to be fakes or those of smaller dinosaurs and they just happen to look like human prints. I wish there were some prehistoric size bass in the river. While looking into the head of the pool, we saw a couple of really nice bass over 16".

We then went back for our gear and found some spots to fish and started to fish the pool. The boys also did a little bit of exploring. We weren't there for very long when all of a sudden like 40 people started coming down the trail to the river edge making all sorts of a ruckus. And as they say, "that was that". The boys left the rod and did some more exploring. Eventually, we gave up as people kept pouring in a returned to camp. My son said there was a spot to wade in the shallows down river from the pool so I decided to return in the afternoon.

In the afternoon when I returned there were still quite a few people but not as many so I decided to give it a try once again. This time, a troop of about 50 boy scouts came down. However, I think they scared a small school of bass to my side of the river and I was able to catch one. People were swimming in the pool so I headed upstream to explore a bit. The water was cool, clear and not as deep. Unfortunately, after a mile or so I did not find another deep pool so I came back and headed back to camp.

The next morning the whole gang hiked down to another section of the river that I had not been to so we could look for more tracks. There were a few here and I walked down to a sandy bend that had a decent hole away from everyone. However, we had to return to camp to pack to leave. So even though I didn't get to fish it, the weekend was lots of fun hanging out with all the families at camp. We were already planning our next multi-family camping trip. I was hoping for something along the coast but most likely it will be one of the camps along the East Texas piney woods, hopefully with a lake or river near camp. Can't wait.