by Langdon Cook
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THE NEXT DAY WE LAUNCHED our pontoon boats before dawn. It was still dark when I made my first tentative casts of the trip, not expecting much. Near the bottom of the run, where the river turned right, a savage strike nearly pulled the rod out of my hand. All at once my reel was spinning too fast, the line knitting itself into a fright wig around the reel. A rookie mistake. I had forgotten to check the drag, and now I had a mess. As the fish ran downstream, I tried to untangle the line, but it was too late; in my confusion I allowed it to make straight for a logjam up against the bank, where it wrapped itself around a submerged limb and vanished.
“Did you see it?” Bradley asked me as we shoved off the bar in our pontoons.
“No, but it was a monster.”
“Hmm.” The trip had barely begun and already Bradley was diddling me over a lost fish, just the way his older brother diddled him.
Around the next corner, as we approached the Cottonwood Hole, I was reminded again of big lumbering bugaboos. Bradley had his oars out of the water as he drifted ahead of me in the current, scanning the bank with purpose. The outline of the day was just starting to come into focus as a sliver of sun peeked above the Babine Range to the east. A line of tall cottonwood trees stretched down the left bank, their yellow leaves brittle and chattering softly in the autumn breeze. Beyond the woods I could see the farmer’s oat field, and beyond that was a little farmhouse with a curl of smoke coming out of the chimney. Sticker bushes surrounded stout tree trunks, obscuring the ground with a maze of brush, and the brilliant blood-red luster of rose hips painted the banks with color. Just then a raven flew across the river, barking its guttural call. You have to wonder about the ravens: Do they see things we do not? One time Bradley was floating along the Kispiox, through a slow section that occasions the sort of peaceful reflection that is the main draw for many anglers. He snapped out of his reverie after a while, when it became clear that people onshore, not ravens, were yelling at him. He looked up in time to see the bear ahead, swimming toward him.
I beached my pontoon at the top of the Cottonwood Hole and started working my way through the run. Halfway down, my fly got stuck on a rock. I was about to wade out into the riffle to extract it when line started racing off the reel, and less than a second after my brain had begun to grasp this change in fortune, a missile-shaped fish leaped into the air thirty yards away on the far side of the river. “Fish on!” Bradley called from downriver, seeing my rod bent over. “Only counts if you land it.” The fish jumped again, right in front of another angler working the other side, and even from this distance I could see the shoulders of a big male, maybe eighteen pounds. The angler reeled in, as dictated by etiquette, and trudged off. Usually females are more acrobatic than males, so seeing this buck fly through the air like a football was surprising, and, amazingly, I was still attached to it. The fish tore off more line, racing up- and downriver seemingly at will, and I held on. I gained some line back, and after a tug-of-war that involved a few more hard runs, I brought the fish into the shallows, tailed it, and gently removed the barbless hook. The gill plate reflected a rosy blush, and a double maroon stripe ran down its body, betraying the fish’s lineage. A steelhead, after all, is just a big, well-traveled rainbow trout.
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STEELHEAD NOW CARRY THE consonant-crunching scientific name Oncorhynchus mykiss, thanks to a taxonomic shake-up in 1988 that caused more than a little consternation among sport fishermen, who preferred the mellifluous sound of Salmo and the historical linkage to two other noble game fish in that genus, the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) and brown trout (Salmo trutta). But it turns out that the steelhead is an anadromous form of rainbow trout and occupies a branch on the same tree as Pacific salmon, a distinction that can be seen in a big male’s slightly hooked jaw during the spawn.
The rainbow evolved in the glacially carved rivers of the northern Pacific Rim. When the glaciers moved south, the rainbow waited out geologic time in the refugia of California and the upper Columbia. When the glaciers retreated, it recolonized as far north as southeast Alaska. A species with great elasticity, as biologists would say, the rainbow developed a variety of life strategies to survive in a chaotic environment severely influenced by fire and ice. There are rainbows from the coast and rainbows from the interior; there’s a rainbow in the Sierras that looks nearly as gilded as a fall cottonwood and is known as a golden trout, and there’s a pink-flushed rainbow called a redband trout, which evolved to survive the harsh, oscillating climate of the high desert. They’re all the same species.
With access to the Pacific, rainbows learned how to leave behind their nutrient-starved rivers for the tremendous feedbag of the ocean. They grew larger in the salt than their fluvial cousins, on a diet of baitfish, squid, and amphipods, then returned to their natal rivers to spawn. Fresh from the sea, a rainbow glints bright silver, like a polished blade. Turning in the light, it can shimmer with an alabaster belly and a deep metallic black or evergreen or even indigo on top—a sheet of glistening metal right out of the forge’s ice bath. A large male has visible shoulders and a high forehead. The telltale red lateral line of its youth doesn’t reappear until the fish has spent some time back in the river after its saltwater sojourn. We call these sea-run rainbows “steelhead,” for reasons that are both clear and shrouded in myth. Same species as a rainbow trout, different life history. Biologists, forever fielding questions about the perceived differences between rainbows and steelhead, often call them, simply, O. mykiss.
Meriwether Lewis described one for science in his journal at Fort Clatsop in Oregon, where the Corps of Discovery overwintered in 1806, near the mouth of the Columbia. He called it a “salmon trout,” which is a pretty fair description, and he went on to note that steelhead remained good table fare long after salmon became unfit as food. This is because steelhead spawn later than salmon, usually in early spring, which made them an available food fish for Native Americans and the first white settlers in the cold dark of winter, a time of year when food could be scarce. And, unlike salmon, a small percentage of steelhead, mostly females, will survive the spawning ordeal and return to the sea. Biologists call these fish “kelts.”
The taste of steelhead differs from that of a typical white-fleshed rainbow trout. A lighter shade of pink than salmon, the fillets taste like a trout that’s been dining at the all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet, with a surprisingly delicate flavor that combines the nuttiness of a mountain trout with a touch of the sea. But steelhead were never as abundant as Pacific salmon, and the industrialization of their river habitat has not served them well. Wild steelhead are mostly gone from California now, and their status isn’t much better in Oregon or Washington. Instead, recreational anglers depend on the manufactured steelhead pumped out of the many hatcheries throughout the region. One of the few places where an angler can keep a wild fish—all of one per year—is the remote West End of the Olympic Peninsula, a hugely controversial loophole that has conservation-minded fishermen up in arms whenever a big steelhead winds up as a wall mount, as a thirty-pounder on the Hoh River did in 2009. Such fish are essential to the dwindling genetic pool. To get that big, they’re survivors, and multiple spawners at that. A fish mounted in the Smithers Airport lobby in British Columbia is estimated to have been more than forty pounds and thirteen years old when it was caught in a net, having already spawned four times. The Skeena and its tributaries probably have more of these behemoths than any other river system in the world. Anglers dream of meeting such a fish—and then releasing it back to the river to spawn again. This is the steelhead’s mystique today. And if eating wild salmon is, paradoxically, good for salmon conservation, then sport fishing for wild steelhead is similarly good for those fish too, because it funnels money from license sales and river-access fees into steelhead conservation. Many anglers won’t even eat a hatchery steelhead, preferring instead to release this human-engineered fish back into the river so another angler has a shot at it. I’ll eat hatchery steelhead every now and a
gain, but farmed steelhead are strictly off the menu for me. Like farmed salmon, they’re a poor substitute for the real thing, and their very presence in the marketplace is bad for the wild fish. Unfortunately, when people see steelhead on the menu, they get confused and assume the fish are doing fine.
Not long ago I had dinner at a respected Seattle restaurant that tried to have it both ways. The nightly special was “ocean trout.” I asked the waiter to explain the distinction. He disappeared and the chef came out, admitting they were steelhead—not wild, mind you—and spoke effusively about the wonderful character of these fish. They were farmed steelhead, probably raised in pens in a side channel of the Columbia River—or, worse, in a typically overcrowded land-based Idaho operation. When I pointed out that they had almost certainly never seen the “ocean,” as the menu suggested, he walked away. I haven’t been back there since.
BRADLEY DROVE HIS TRUCK down a rough incline and parked beside a primitive launch where the Sweetin River empties into the Kispiox. A small grotto with just a few camping sites amid the alders, the campground was unoccupied, except for a lone tent and a note left behind on a damp picnic table. The Kispiox attracts anglers from all over the world, especially Europeans coming from places where even the most remote river valleys have long since been domesticated. The massed peaks, open spaces, and deep woods of British Columbia call out to a certain type of person who yearns for the dark and unpredictable. The author of the note was a man named Claus, and it was addressed to his friend Hans. Written in blue ink on a page torn from a spiral notebook, the missive had been smartly tucked into a Ziploc bag and weighed down with a smooth, palm-sized stone from the river. Bradley’s eyes widened as he read it aloud. “ ‘We are out looking for the wounded bear. We will meet you here shortly.’ ” Bradley replaced it carefully under the rock. “Not if that old boar finds Claus first,” he said with amusement. There was indeed a wounded grizzly on the prowl. Locals who had seen it described the bear as probably suffering from a calamitous fight or maybe a fall, shuffling along and contorted with what appeared to be a spinal injury, possibly even a broken back. “Not a happy bear,” Bradley added. Certainly not the sort of bear you want to surprise in the willow brakes. But we understood the motivation. Opportunities to see large animals in their natural habitat don’t come along often for most of us. Just then a flotilla of fishermen drifted by on pontoons. They talked loudly among themselves, as if using their voices as ad hoc bear bells. We decided to drive downstream and put in elsewhere.
At the next boat launch we hauled our pontoons off the truck and dragged them to the riverbank. Morning fog rose off the water in columns. This float would take us downstream through fifteen miles of nearly perfect habitat: braided channels, logjams, pools, riffles, runs, and tailouts. Fifteen miles of eyeballing the banks for the hunched silhouette of a wounded and pissed-off grizzly bear. And by float’s end, as would be typical in most any steelhead stream, we got blanked in about 14.9 of those miles. But midway through, in a hundred-yard run with a high bluff on the opposite bank, we felt the charge of adrenaline that keeps anglers like us coming back. I tied on a fly called a Purple Peril; Bradley used a feathery Black and Blue—a time-honored color combination on the Kispiox. On my first cast, nothing. Second cast…whoa—a grab, no hookup. Third cast, bang. The fish exploded out of the water with my fly in the corner of its mouth and went aerial for half a dozen fits of cannonballing and somersaults across the surface. It was a large female. “A hen!” Bradley shouted. In some ways he preferred the hens to the larger males, because of their crazed gymnastics. I could see her pink complexion and watched helplessly as she executed a desperate flip and threw the hook. Game over.
I looked at Bradley, slack-jawed, and he started to laugh. He couldn’t help himself. I was neither in the driver’s seat nor, it would seem, in possession of a license. There’s nothing really to prepare you for that accelerated moment in time when a large steelhead is on the reel—nothing but experience, of which I didn’t have enough. “Get your line back out there,” he said. When another fish grabbed my fly on the next cast and ran out into the middle of the river before the hook came free, we knew something special was happening. For some unknown reason, one that is unlikely ever to be divined by all the world’s fisheries biologists and armchair anglers combined, they were on the bite. Next it was Bradley’s turn. He hooked and fought a very large fish, quite possibly his largest fish in a lifetime of steelheading, one he figured went well in excess of twenty pounds, perhaps nearing the mythical thirty-pound mark, before it popped off near the shore. I put my camera away, unused. “Guess it doesn’t count, huh?” He took a moment to compose himself. Breathe in, breathe out. There was nothing to do but cast again. Then the two of us hooked into fish at the same moment—a double—and fought fifteen-pound bucks side by side into the beach, not a very common occurrence on any steelhead river, anywhere. After forty-five minutes of action, the sun broke through the cloud cover and the river went cold. Forty-five minutes of nirvana. There are steelheaders who would trade in their most prized tackle for such a flurry of action.
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WE PULLED INTO CAMP just before dusk. As is my habit, I looked for the pregnant shape of my tent in the meadow as we rounded the corner, satisfied that it had survived another day in bear country. After hanging our waders to dry, we unpacked a celebratory bottle of Jim Beam and started walking up a muddy jeep track to the evening gathering. Most of the campers stay in the upper meadow, where their tents and RVs cluster around an open-air shelter. Some of them have been coming here every autumn for more than thirty years. They all know one another and enjoy socializing as much as fishing. They stay for two weeks, three weeks, even six weeks or more during the fall steelhead run, usually arriving in early September. Nonangling spouses have other pursuits during the day, like painting and bird-watching. In the evenings the shelter becomes the social hub. Beginning at around five-thirty, campers start assembling with armloads of wine, beer, crackers, cheese, olives, lox, and other goodies for cocktail hour.
Bradley and I felt good. We were steelhead anglers who had caught fish. The usual suspects sat in camp chairs on the deck. There was Gottard from Alberta, who hunted mushrooms in the nearby woods, and Dennis from Montreal with his wife, Diane, the painter, who made ethereal watercolors of fish and fishermen; there was a doctor from California, and some businessmen from Spokane. The Florida crew had not made the trip this year, but there were anglers from Oregon, Montana, Arizona, Texas, and a few Canadian provinces—in all, a few dozen campers, many of them retirees, who enjoyed nothing more than camping for a month along a wild British Columbia river and chasing its most celebrated and elusive denizen.
Such camping is not without its hazards. More than one defender of the wild has noted with mixed feelings that wilderness wouldn’t exist without the regular presence of beasts that can eat us for dinner. Every now and again a grizzly wanders through camp, reminding everyone of their relative positions on the food chain. The day before, while we were out fishing, a young black bear visited and popped one of our spare inflatable boats. We found it fifty yards away, upside down and listing. This was not our first inflatable casualty. These boats are toys to the bears, basketballs to be bounced around at will until their clumsy moves put a hole in the thing and end the fun. Imagining such a scene brings a smile to the face, yet it was cold comfort in my dinky pup tent at night.
Our dealings with the bears so far were nothing compared to what Victor had seen today. Victor was a short, jolly-looking guy in his sixties, with apple cheeks and a puckered grin. He put down his chilled beer stein so he could use both hands. “It was at the Kindergarten Hole,” he began, waving his arms around.
“That’s where they teach the kids to fish!” someone razzed him.
“Yeah, yeah. So I look across the river and here comes a bear. Didn’t think too much about it—it’s just a bear. All of a sudden there’s the damnedest thing you’ve ever seen in your life. Growling and howling,
the water flying twenty feet in the air—and the sounds!” He took a sip of beer and nodded. “It was two bears.”
“Bear fight!” said Bradley. He’d seen a few. One time on the Rogue he watched a yearling sitting on a ledge above the river, gnawing on a salmon carcass. All of a sudden a large male appeared. It walked out on the ledge, swatted the yearling into the river, and took its prize back into the woods.
A plate of smoked oysters made the rounds. “Well, we watched the grizzly sow and the two cubs last night at Cottonwood,” an angler from Washington State said. “They were gettin’ their oats.” His partner noted that this sort of scene was long gone from virtually every steelhead river of the United States, where grizzlies have been hounded into oblivion. “Big sow,” he said.
