To read the first part of Tom Claycomb’s “Flying into the backcountry,” visit XtremeIdaho.com.
The next day we hiked upstream a good ways. Lot of nice holes. I’d ordered a lot of flies from flydealflies.com, which is my go-to fly shop. We weren’t catching any big bulls so I switched from a Wooly Bugger to a Caddis and we got into the cutthroats, a few nice ones.
There were some nice holes and mostly calm waters on this stretch of the river although there was a steep gorge a half mile downstream from camp. We were having a great time fishing. I mean how could we not? It’s the biggest wilderness area in the Lower 48 and we’d flown into the furthest spot in it. It was awesome.
It was 1 1/2 weeks before season, but we were seeing quite a few grouse. At one hole, a few came down to the river right upstream of me and then fed down the bank. I flipped a big black Woolly Bugger on a flat rock right in front of one and it pecked on the fly for a bit. I figured it might turn into an aerial dive bombing disaster if I accidentally ended up hooking it, so I pulled my fly away.
Fredy and Brian decided to fish downstream, but I thought I’d seen one or two good ones feeding so I held tight. I finally netted a couple of nice cutthroats out of the hole. Even on my Rise Fishing Co. 7-weight rod, it bent the tip pretty good and took a few minutes to net.
I lose track of what happened on which day, but one day I had waded in semi-deep against a sheer rock wall. I was fishing with a Caddis fly and a small one hit, it was about 4 to 6 inches long. I had him reeled in but the rock wall behind me jutted out over my head, so I couldn’t hold my rod tip back behind me to be able to net him. He was dangling right in front of me splashing on the surface.
I awkwardly tried two to four times to grab him but couldn’t quite reach him. After a few seconds, a big cutthroat jumped into the middle of the fray. He was right in front of me attacking the fingerling like a frenzied shark. I’ve never seen a trout feeding that aggressively.
He hit it hard once and then twirled around and slammed it so hard that he ripped it off my fly. Wow, that was wild. I’ve never had a trout do that literally right at my fingertips. That was something to see.
We threw our tents right off the river so we’d have easy access to drinking water. After filling our water bottles, Fredy noticed that a bear had done what a bear does in the woods right where we pumped our water, not 20 yards from our tents.
One day while Fredy and Brian were fishing down the river, they’d run right up on top of a bear. And then while in camp one day, Brian told me that I might want to grab my camera right fast. Across the river was a bear standing on his hind legs eating berries out of a bush.
It dropped down on all fours and strolled down the bank until it got even with us and then it started across the river. I was getting some good pictures but Fredy decided he was close enough and waved his arms and spooked him off. I’d liked to see how well he did crossing the river, which we struggled with while crossing. He didn’t seem too worried.
Well, departure day finally arrived and we each had two loads to pack up the 1,000-foot incline. By the time we got out, my lungs were burned from sucking down all the smoke. There was a big fire to the south and north of us. Much worse and the pilot couldn’t have seen the runway enough to be able to drop down and pick us up. But once again, the Forest Service wasn’t even making an attempt to fight them.
I’m not a frequent flier on bush planes, so the take-off seemed a little iffy to me. We taxied to the top of the hill and turned around and punched it. After building up a little speed, we hit a hump and bounced a good foot high. Not much further we hit another hump and bounced a good 2 feet high and then another one.
I thought on the third one when we came down we’d bounce over upside down, but we we were airborne. We shot out into the canyon and took a hard right, our right wing barely clearing the canyon wall by 50 feet.
Wow, what a trip.
Tom Claycomb lives in Idaho and has outdoors columns in newspapers in Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Louisiana. He also writes for various outdoors magazines and teaches outdoors seminars at stores like Cabela’s, Sportsman’s Warehouse and Bass Pro Shop.
