Mountain Trout Camps

Generally I can find something positive about all seasons, with our warming climate summers are making it much more challenging. The Coast Mountains, once a bastion of moderate temperatures are becoming unbearably hot, heat waves surpassing 30° Celsius suck the life out of me. Trying to get outside to do shit, even just a good night’s sleep all become an impossibility. After a few days I just want to wrap myself up in a snow blanket and sleep for a week. With days off coming up and the heat rolling in the only escape that came to mind was a drive over a nearby mountain pass and camping beside a glacier fed creek in the shade.

Camped beside flowing glacier fed creeks.

Trips to trout country remind me that I haven’t stocked up my fly boxes sufficiently in a couple years. Low snow has kept many of my hunting spots accessible, chasing snowshoe hares or trying to call in a lion will always pull me away from the vise. In this case, after the tipi was up and a fresh coffee brewed it was the perfect opportunity to tie some weighted nymphs for water that was moving faster than I’d expected. For the second time this season, tossing the tying kit in the truck before I left paid off. Over the course of a couple days I spent a lot of time bobbin in hand spinning up patterns with lunch.

Growing up on lakes, moving water is still a mystery to me, definitely not my forte. This also makes fishing creeks and streams so damn intriguing. Wading out in front of my campsite it quickly became apparent that there wasn’t the slack water I’d thought I’d seen through the truck window on a hundred drive by’s. Outside of it being obvious that the east side of the creek had a channel running as far as the eye could see I was slowly wading and swinging weighted nymphs watching for large rocks that would cut the current, disturbances in the flowing surface, anything a trout would hide behind.

They may be small, but they're fierce. Mountain trout in the net.

First evening out, the rainbows didn’t make me work too hard. Half a dozen drifts and I was tight to a fish, turned out to be the largest of the trip, eight or nine inches of bright colours and energy. There hadn’t been any expectations of big fish, this is a cold creek with a short growing season, sometimes the fly fishing is about the challenge of learning a new area, not about catching big ones. Day two made me work for it, lots of casting, wading, changing flies, changing spots proving that these small mountain trout provided what I was searching for, an experience.

After a few days on the water I reluctantly pulled the tipi down, packed gear in the truck and headed south, across the pass and back to the heat of the valley. Memories of small rainbow trout, broken rod tips, coffee and campfires. Fishing sounded like the purpose of the camp, but really it was about all of it: being outside in nature, reading about grizzly bears and wishing I had brought along one or two of John Gierach’s volumes. I couldn’t think of a more appropriate place to read him.

See you on the water or the mountains

- Matthew Mallory