by Jim Strogen The Colorado River below Lake Powell is a blue-ribbon rainbow trout fishery loved by anglers across the country. While this reach is among the prettiest places that I have fished, and one that I try to return to as often as possible, there are issues on the river that are important to
My heart raced as we proceeded down the almost 15-mile Swanson River Road. We kept expecting to be turned around any minute. Knowing there were so many lake options with confirmed populations of char, I had a lot of faith one would offer me the opportunity to bring an Arctic char to hand. The problem was, the bumpy pothole strewn dirt road was, as far as I knew, the only artery to the lake systems. If this fire got out of control, as the 2019 fire did, I could be shut out.
“When we think about people, and the ‘habitat’ people utilize, we don’t just look at the superhighways where they can easily be seen traveling,” he said. “People don’t live on the freeways, people don’t ‘spawn’ on the freeways or on their commute.”
Dolly Varden are a close relative to bull trout and it wasn’t until 1978 that the two species were confirmed to be distinct. In the continental United States, Dolly Varden naturally only occur in coastal the drainages of northwestern Washington from the Canadian border south through Puget Sound and south on the Olympic Peninsula to the Quinault River.
In Alaska, lake trout inhabit the deeper lowland lakes along the central Arctic coastal plain, as well as waters in the Brooks Range and Alaska Range. They are not found in the Yukon-Kuskokwim lowlands or the coastal drainages of Southeast Alaska.
“This might really, really suck,” I said to Ancans with a halfhearted laugh. We then laughed together because we knew we were already unquestionably committed
“Excitedly, too excitedly, I ripped the mouse from the trout’s mouth before it decided that the mouse was more trouble than it was worth and could not be convinced to poke its head out again.”
