Backpacking in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness

I’ve been super busy lately and have a new project coming up which will require more traveling and busyness. So what’s a guy to do? Take off on a backpacking (BP) trip for a few days of course! My youngest daughter normally goes with me but was tied up so I went by myself.

I had a lot of articles to get in so I whipped out and then put together all my BP gear that had been put away for the winter. Gee that takes a while due to all of the little gizmos that BP requires. I want to write a BACKPACKING 101 article soon so right now I won’t go into all of the gear you’ll want to have.

It’s a drive up to the trailhead and then of course a bit of a hike in to the spot I wanted to camp at. I wanted to leave early enough to get in and set up camp and still have a few hours to fish before dark so I could hit the evening hatch. I arrive at the trailhead and there were only 4 to 5 trucks. Hopefully they’d scattered in different directions than I was going.

I got to my spot and hadn’t seen a soul. Good. I slapped up camp, gathered a little wood and then rigged up my flyrod and trotted down the trail to the first hole. I used to BP into this spot the week after the 4th. Any earlier and you’d hit too much snow. But the last 14 to 15 years, I’ve pushed it back to the middle of August and on into September because the runoff has slowed down and the fish are more congregated in the holes. Plus, the big bull trout have come upstream by then.

Oh no! I arrived at the first good hole and there was a massive log jam in it. Logs had pretty much jammed up the whole hole. It was unfishable. About 5 years ago on a trip with Kolby there had been a huge snowslide that pushed a ton of dead trees into the river a few miles upstream. I guess they had finally made it down to this hole. Or maybe there’d been a new slide, although I hadn’t seen it while hiking in.

We’ve got to stop and ponder something a minute. Remember the Jarbridge Shovel Brigade in Nevada? If you remember, the overreaching feds refused to let them repair a road because a few piles of dirt may fall in the river and hurt the bull trout. When they refuse to fight forest fires, which results in miles of burned and dead standing timber that will all get pushed down into the rivers and result in huge mudslides for years to follow, does that not hurt more bull trout than re-building a road?

Some of these log jams are so packed that there is no way that a 30-inch bull trout can pass through them to go upstream and spawn. And one year there was a big mudslide that muddied up the river for miles downstream. The river looked like pig slop. Focus on the real problems boys.

So the hole where the big 30-inch bulls like to gather in is gone for this year and maybe a few more to come. It’s a mess.

I doodled around until dark and then hiked back to camp and built a fire and relaxed. The next morning I woke up, dipped a pot of crystal clear water out of the river and heated it up. Ahh, there’s nothing like breakfast in the high country. I ate a couple of packs of flavored oatmeal, slammed down a few cups of coffee and hit the trail.

But before we get into the day’s happenings I have to mention. I’d caught two mice over the night. I always carry two mouse traps and put them under my hanging pack. I hate for them to get into my food.

OK, enough of being a drama queen. I headed downstream hitting the holes. Whoa, something was wrong. I was not catching very many fish and nothing very big. I started off using some big black bead head wooly boogers. The last few years I’ve been using some flies called Fish Skulls that I order from flydealflies.com.

Later in the day I switched to dry flies. I caught enough to keep it interesting but not like norm. I found a few huckleberries that I stored in a water bottle to put in my oatmeal the next day. I fished until dark and then drug back into camp and built a fire and heated up a Mountain House Beef Stroganoff dinner. That’s my favorite from MH.

The next morning I put huckleberries in my oatmeal, wolfed that down and then took off fishing again. Today I netted a few nice native cutthroats, one was pushing 15-inches and a 15-inch whitefish.

Later that afternoon I found a good patch of huckleberries and spent over an hour picking them. I got enough to take some home for Katy & Kolby. Well, the trip soon cam to an end and I hit the hot dusty trail back to the trailhead. Uggh, I must be out of shape. The hike out about killed me.

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.

Post Author: By Tom Claycomb

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