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North to Heyburn

Posted on by Kimberly Landon / Leave a comment

The first time I went pike fishing, five years ago, my dad and I packed the old SUV to the gills with various spinner baits, all-weather clothing, and more food than either of us would know what to do with.

We headed north to Heyburn State Park, to fish with Dad’s buddy Ron. Up until then, those two had taken an annual, man-only trip, but this year I was allowed to crash the party. As we drove through the canyon between New Meadows and Riggins, Dad quizzed me on the names of several songs by ZZ Top, AC/DC, Def Leppard, and Ted Nugent. A moose waded nonchalantly into the waters of the Salmon River, and I tried to be the first to spot a deer.

Five years later, on a placid morning at Lake Coeur d’Alene, my husband Brock and I walk down the marina docks, following Ron to his boathouse. Barn swallows dart in and out of the rafters as we tie on our tackle for the day, and Ron teaches me the first fishing knot that I can remember to tie on my own. Once we pack our food and emergency rain clothes into dry storage, we head out past the pilings towards our first stop for the day, the Mill Pond. I smile at the sight of Brock experiencing for the first time the sheer speed of the boat as we power under the Chatcolet Bridge.

We headed north to Heyburn State Park, to fish with Dad’s buddy Ron. Up until then, those two had taken an annual, man-only trip, but this year I was allowed to crash the party. As we drove through the canyon between New Meadows and Riggins, Dad quizzed me on the names of several songs by ZZ Top, AC/DC, Def Leppard, and Ted Nugent. A moose waded nonchalantly into the waters of the Salmon River, and I tried to be the first to spot a deer.

Five years later, on a placid morning at Lake Coeur d’Alene, my husband Brock and I walk down the marina docks, following Ron to his boathouse. Barn swallows dart in and out of the rafters as we tie on our tackle for the day, and Ron teaches me the first fishing knot that I can remember to tie on my own. Once we pack our food and emergency rain clothes into dry storage, we head out past the pilings towards our first stop for the day, the Mill Pond. I smile at the sight of Brock experiencing for the first time the sheer speed of the boat as we power under the Chatcolet Bridge.

Ron has a top-of-the-line Ranger Bass Boat, equipped with fish and depth finders, a trolling motor that can be driven from the front of the boat by foot, and enough horsepower to blow your cheeks back. That first day on the boat five years earlier, I had been caught completely off guard when he hit the gas. My dad’s eyes had shone with laughter at how fast my hands grabbed for anything that would keep me in my seat. He and Ron promised I wouldn’t be catapulted out as we flew towards the Mill Pond. I’d never been pike fishing before, and was more excited than a school kid on the first day of summer. Continue reading →

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Tied and True

Posted on by Les Tanner / Leave a comment

Just so you’ll know who’s writing this, I caught my first trout on a fly in the summer of 1945. I still have the fly (gray pillow feathers tied to a long-shanked #8 bait hook with pink sewing thread). So I’m not a fly-fishing newbie.

I’m not a purist, either. On a windy and up-to-that-point fishless trip a few years back, I completely surprised my buddy by abandoning flies in favor of a grasshopper on a #10 Eagle Claw. Caught a nice brown right away, too.

Most of my fishing is done on smaller streams, but I’ve fished the South Fork of the Snake River a few times with a limited amount of success. However, the size of the river and the scarcity of access to wading fishermen such as I restricts most of the fishing there to float-boaters.

After reading Snake River Flies (WestWind Press, 2014) by Boots Allen, I’m eager to do a lot more fishing there. I want to take another shot or two—or many—at the river, this time using flies that were created, tested, and popularized by expert fly-fishers and fly-tyers from the area. One of these is the author, a third generation Snake River fly-fisherman. Others are folks like Bob Carmichael, Marcella Oswald, and Bob Bean, none of whom I’d heard of before I read the book. My loss. Continue reading →

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Those Were the Days

Posted on by Ted Trueblood / Leave a comment

Those were the days, my friend; we thought they’d never end.” I liked that song.

I‘ve been there.

In 1954 the Weiser River was running clear when the spring chinooks turned into it from the Snake, a rare thing. Much of the drainage of the Weiser had been devastated by abusive logging and grazing, and when the hard rains came or the snow melted quickly in the spring the red mud flowed into the river and I never saw the Weiser high and clear. Streams in the wilderness may be up and flowing through the willows and yet be so clear you can count the pebbles on the bottom. But they know not the cow and bulldozer.

We got the word from Fred Einsphar on May 30. He had a ranch along the river from about halfway between the town and Galloway Dam, and he was a sportsman. Herb Carlson, Clare Conley, and I were there early the next morning. There were no other anglers.

Herb and Clare had spinning tackle. I had my nine-foot, five-and-a-quarter-ounce Winston and a three-and fifth-eighths-inch Hardy Perfect reel filled with backing, monofilament, and a shooting head—my steelhead tackle. I intended to use nothing else. I believed that salmon would hit a fly as well in Idaho as in the tidewater pools of the Eel and this was the chance to test my theory. Continue reading →

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Sorting Spawners

Posted on by Kris Millgate / Leave a comment

On weekends, I hit the hills with my family to play and at the same time I scout for places to shoot video. On weekdays, I return to those places with my camera equipment to work.

Following this routine of scout, then shoot, I’m lying on wet boulders in Swan Valley’s Palisades Creek on a sunny June day. While hiking with my kids the previous Sunday, I saw fish jumping a four-foot waterfall. Now it’s Monday afternoon and I’ve returned in waders. It’s sweaty hot on the rocks. It’s painfully hard to hold still. I’m belly-growl hungry for the granola bar in my pack on the bank. I’m questioning my strategy when the first trout finally breaks the current in front of my lens.

“It is really amazing what fish can do when they’re trying to go spawn,” says Brett High, Idaho Department of Fish and Game regional fisheries biologist, as he sits by the rushing river on an overturned bucket. “We’ve seen fish hold their positions almost vertically for several seconds.” Continue reading →

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Tricks of the Trade

Posted on by Les Tanner / Leave a comment

It was my wife’s response to a completely innocent question that got me to thinking about writing this, so blame her.

“When can I go fishing again?” I asked as I unloaded my gear after returning from my latest three-day excursion to the Lochsa River.

“Why on Earth do you think you need to go again? You’ve already learned everything there is to know about fishing. Instead, you should be mowing the lawn and fixing the leaky faucet in the bathroom sink and—”

If there’s anything I have learned in the past almost-sixty years, it’s how to tune her out when she begins talking like that. The more I thought about her answer, though, the more I returned to her statement that I know everything about fishing. Of course I don’t. Who does? But I do believe that I’ve gained more than a little bit of information about the sport in the past seventy-five years. I expect to be at it for another twenty-five or thirty years, too, but this might be a good time to jot down some of what I’ve learned. So here, for the first time in print, are a few of my tricks of the trade.

A major problem is knowing where to start, of course. Another will be knowing when to stop. I won’t describe how I became involved with fishing. For one thing, the first fish I ever caught was purely an accident (which describes a large percentage of what I’ve caught since then, as well), and because accidents can’t be planned, the details aren’t important.

Nor will I spell out precisely how to choose rods and reels and lines and lures, and how to read water and tie flies and so on. Those are the subjects of umpteen zillion books and videos and TV programs intended for folks at the two extremes of the fishing spectrum: those who don’t know which end of the long stick to tie the string to, and those who would bypass a fishing safari to Chile or New Zealand in favor of a month-long workshop on tying Royal Coachman flies on #38 hooks.

So I guess I’ll have to zero in on the subtler things that make me the guy that people point at and say, “See that guy in the orange hat? Somebody told me once that he’s a pretty good fisherman.” (I started that rumor many years ago, and it really caught on.) Continue reading →

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The Retro-Anglers

Posted on by Mahlon Kriebel / Leave a comment

“Hey, Mahlon, jerk your pole downward to set the hook!” I had just missed the umpteenth strike and my audience was greatly amused. I was fishing the mouth of Stratton Creek, which empties into a dredge pond a couple miles north of Warren. It was a lovely spot, where the stream had etched a four-foot-deep channel through gravel before spilling over a sandbar into a blue pool some hundred feet in diameter. There was little brush to snarl back-casts and almost every cast yielded a strike. I could cast fine with the old telescoping steel rod but couldn’t set the hook. The rod and reel with level line were similar to one I had used sixty years ago. I challenged my hecklers, “Come here, show me.”

Since the 1970s, four of us had hunted and fished the Warren region, forty miles north of McCall, and we also had four newer members on this trip. Our group included a mining engineer, two university professors, an electrical engineer, a science teacher, a mining inspector, an executive in a hunting and fishing gear company, and a horticulturist. At an average age of seventy-five, our excursion resembled a safari, with personal sleeping tents, a cook tent, a dining tent, a pair of two-burner gas stoves (a third in reserve), a small stove for coffee, a huge ice chest with eight gallon jugs of ice, a “one-holer” outhouse without the house, a solar shower with privacy curtains, chain saws, shovels, axes, and four ATVs. The previous summer we had concluded that present-day gear favors the fisherman, so on this trip we had made it our challenge to fish with antique equipment such as my steel telescoping rod, which I had purchased at a second-hand store for eighteen dollars. Continue reading →

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Alpine Angling

Posted on by Basil Service / Leave a comment

Idaho’s Loftiest Fly Fishing Text and Photos by Basil Service This content is available for purchase. Please select from available options. Purchase Only

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Ineptitude

Posted on by Ryan Lynch / Leave a comment

I know the term for a skier who doesn’t have a clue what he is doing is a “gaper,” but what’s the term for someone who doesn’t have a clue about fly fishing?

Not knowing this probably qualifies me for whatever that is. I want to learn how to fly fish, maybe because I’ve watched A River Runs Through It a few too many times. In any case, I’ve only been fly fishing a few times and have begun to think it might be a myth that people catch fish this way.

When I decide to try one more time, the first thing I do is go to the local fly shop in Driggs to get a fishing license. I’ve lived in Teton Valley, a world-class fly fishing destination, for the three-and-a-half years, and sadly have never bothered to get a license. The guy in the shop looks the part of a fishing guide, so I ask him where I should go. Should it be Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, South Fork of the Snake, the Teton River? He suggests Henry’s Fork, says they’re biting on nymphs, and then helps me pick out a few fly patterns. I rush home and thumb through Fly Fishing for Trout in Streams. How does one use these nymphs? I know at least that nymphs are for subsurface fishing, so I thumb through that section. Looks like I’m going to need some tippet material and strike indicators. The pictures in the book show I will be attaching the indicator to my lead line and then tying a few feet of the material called tippet onto that, which will have my nymph on the end. The book says the strategy is the nymph will be a few feet underwater, and I will watch the indicator to see if I have hooked a fish. Continue reading →

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