Steelhead

My relationship with steelhead fishing is complicated. I’m not alone. Even biologists find steelhead perplexing. Debate continues about whether they are salmon or, trout that happen to behave a lot like salmon. The consensus is that steelhead are the anadromous form of coastal rainbow trout that migrate as smolts the ocean to forage for several years, and later return to the river where they were born to spawn.

Steelhead are iteroparous, (meaning they can complete their reproductive cycles multiple times) unlike Pacific salmon that die after spawning.

I’m neither a die-hard nor a hardcore steelhead angler in the sense that I am only passingly committed and loyal, while also lacking the intense engagement and depth of knowledge. I don’t own a Spey rod, I can’t tell you what sink tip is heavier, and I am hopeless when it comes to knowing which flies I have in my box. My short-circuited education has been generously accelerated in many ways. I have benefited from some great casting mentors, relied on hard-earned insights from knowledgeable guides and have enjoyed the advantage of visiting some incredible places in search of them.

My first trip, and first fish, was a lovely summer-run on the Heber River on Vancouver Island. The river there is crystal clear and punctuated with deep pools and dark lonely runs.

The Heber is in renowned fly fisher Roderick Haig-Brown’s backyard. Haig-Brown did more to put flyfishing conservation on the map than anyone out here. He has also been able to eloquently put into words many of the impressions and lessons anglers share. He was credited with saying that he was a writer who happened to flyfish and that is quite different than the other way around. His legacy is inextricably linked with the Campbell River, but he visited the Heber on many occasions and wrote about it as well.

The Heber runs through steep tangled valleys until merges with the Gold River and there are a handful of pools that you can drop into from the highway that runs through Strathcona from Campbell River to Gold River. The trip had started with sun-drenched afternoons fishing for pink salmon on the Campbell. It was a banner year for pinks and the fishing was gratifying. Often, I would have a fish on the line and already be plotting my next cast. You fish like you eat potato chips, my companion had observed. You haven’t even finished and you’re reaching for another one. This kind of laziness was not helpful in preparing me for steelhead, that would prove to be finnicky and easily spooked.

We’d covered Saunders, Refrigerator and Highway pools in vain. From the base of a house-sized boulder, I cast upstream to where the river made a small raucous plunge over a sharp ledge and finally did hook and land one. While it was more luck than art, the fish was pale silver and sweet. And perfect.

The pool I would later come to love most on the Heber was more challenging to reach. It was below the falls that marked the upriver limit for the fish. It was hidden. Secret. We named it Shangri La. But it was the kind of place my friend would keep under his belt for a few more trips until I was worthy or at least able to be trusted to keep it quiet. There’s an abandoned logging road that back then was driveable if you weren’t squeamish about the scratching sound of branches dragging along the side of your truck.

It's not the bears that scare me, he had said, it’s the cougars. And then proceeded to tell me of a time he was fishing with another guy, and he could feel the hair on the back of his neck prickle. Looking over his shoulder he saw a big cat on the rock behind him. As calmly as he could, he suggested his friend wind in the line. They started to make their way back to the truck. The cougar intently followed and was clearly stalking them. It charged a few times, backing them against the rocks. He emptied his bear spray into the cat’s face. It hardly flinched. He picked up a branch like a baseball bat and swung at it. In this way they edged their way back to the truck. It was reported to the Fish and Wildlife officer and the cougar was eventually shot. It was old and skinny, and its teeth had worn down so that it was starving.

The same guy told me about a teacher who climbed the roof and shot a cougar hovering at the edge of the schoolyard. It was never clear to me if he was using the kids as bait or whether recess had been cancelled. Maybe this is one story best taken at face value.

Locating the road, didn’t guarantee finding the pool. You would think that the sound of the falls would make it hard to miss, but the rush of the river over boulders in this stretch was constant and misleading. At what you thought was the right spot there were two ways down. One above the falls and the other below. Above it was a precarious rockslide and below an obstacle course of trees. Both were steep and you might find yourself having to back track when you reached the sharp cliffs. In the trees the ground was soft and spongy. Each step a potential booby trap. Getting to the pool would leave you sweating and breathless.

It was a place that didn’t tolerate fools. For all the effort in getting here, you might have a couple of casts and that would be it. A purple leech with a pink bead head was the go-to fly.

The last couple of years I’ve visited, the river was closed to fishing. The return deemed to have been reduced beyond precarious.

In May 2024 I made a special trip up from Sooke to the Heber. Leaving early in the morning, I caught the sunrise from the summit over the Malahat, skirted Nanaimo along the east coast of the Island and then cut inland at Campbell River. I was finding my way back to Shangri La on a mission to honor one of my friend Harper’s last wishes and leave some of his ashes in the pool. At his memorial, there were lots of pictures of Bill that I had taken on fishing trips. One of Mary Ann’s favourites was taken at that pool. It was memorable because it was a nice fish on an infamous “last cast”. The kind of cast where you are set to leave and have nothing left to lose. Harper was well known for his last cast heroics.

Scrolling around on google maps and drawing on my vague memories of the place, I found a spot to leave the rental car on the highway and set off on the logging road that we used to drive down. My logic was that if I ran into trouble, it was more likely that someone would spot the rental beside the road than buried in the forest where barely anyone visited. It proved a wise choice when I got to the first fork in the road and found the way forward was overgrown and littered with fallen trees and piles of bear scat.

After a few false starts, I found a path down to the river above the cataract. I changed into my river shoes to wade across. On the other side of the river, a game trail led me down to the water bringing me to a bare rock overlooking the main pool. I searched in vain for a sign of any fish. After a pull of scotch from a small flask I had once gifted Bill, I poured a small jar of ash into the pool. I thought they would disperse in a cloud and drift in the current, instead they sank quickly and into a solid bright patch in the water below me. He was back again.

After whetting my appetite on the Island, the hunt for steelhead would take me to the Babine River, a major tributary of the Skeena system, in Northern BC for a couple of week-long trips over the next decade and a half where the fish were big, tough but occasionally willing adversaries. It wasn’t uncommon to measure the days in bumps, bites, hooked and sometimes landed fish. Hooked four and landed two would be a very respectable day. At the mouth of these river systems, anglers talk of the bright chrome fish, hot from the ocean and so fresh they still carry sea lice. You hook them and then just hold on helplessly as they head back to ocean. Here the dark double-striped bucks and bright pretty hens are good-sized fish and are made tougher by the long migration up the Skeena River and then into the Babine all the way up to the weir below Babine Lake.

It's a big river and the most efficient way to fish it is with two-handed Spey rods armed with various weight sink tips and tube flies. Work your cast out to distance, big mend and let it swing. Take a step downstream and repeat. Go through the run, change your fly or adjust your tip and do it all again. Sometimes the fish comes as a light pluck or tap, other times you just come tight to something solid. Occasionally it’s a smash and grab. No matter it’s always a surprise and a feeling that is hard to describe to someone who hasn’t chased it.

For two years 2022 and 2024 I went there for what is euphemistically called freeze up week. It’s an unofficial group, of friends, family and otherwise low maintenance guests at the end of season in early November who can cope with slightly reduced support as the crew breaks down the camp and prepares to move out. The temperatures can range from plus five Celsius and then plummet to minus twenty, bringing either snow or rain. It’s a roll of the dice.

On the plus side, all the fish are in the system and the camp is not far from the top of the run. The only other lodge on the river has closed for the season. Conditions on the logging road from Smithers discourages locals from making a day trip. The guides know the water well and they have a good idea where the fish are holding and what has been working. The bears are fat from salmon and making their way to their winter dens.

The first year the temperature plummeted to double digits below zero. Rod guides were filling with ice, and my reel froze like a block of ice after being dunked in the river. One of the guys on the river had summited Everest twice and told me he had never felt as cold as when he was standing waist deep in the river. The water supply lines to camp froze solid and we had to call it. The river was slushy by that point, and we couldn’t jet boat our way up to the launch. We called in a helicopter that touched down on the gravel bar to take our gear out in a big net and then returned to shuttle us the ten minutes to the car park for the drive back to Smithers.

Knowing the river well is a distinct advantage here. Jet boating up and down in the middle, upper and lower beats could be a dangerous task with submerged boulders, rocky steps and ledges that have no business being where they are.

In 2024 I was invited back, and I confess I was initially reluctant. Among my group of steelhead friends, I still feel like an imposter. Reports from the test fishery pointed to a solid return. The best in years. And after a couple of seasons of tough going this was a welcome turn of events. It was fear I suppose that finally convinced me, fear that this might be my last time on the river, and that this might be the last good year for anyone.

And it was a good year. Lots of fish were hooked and landed. Laughter flowed easily and we all sat like knights around one big square table in the lodge. Every day there was better than my best day of steelhead fishing anyplace else. In the end it wasn’t the cold that forced us out, but rather snow followed by a melt that turned the river chocolate brown and made many of the runs unfishable.

With my hand around the tail of one of these fish, reviving it in the current, a feeling of reverence comes over me. They are remarkable and beautiful and fierce. I worry that we are seeing the decline of something irreplaceable, and angry that we are the cause.