Latest updates, page 42

There are some very late-season Coho (aka silver) salmon runs in interior Alaska. I've never found the time to fish them before, because it's often below freezing by the time the fish arrive, and few spots are accessible by foot. This year has been unseasonably warm, so a couple friends with a boat invited me to join them on the most well-known of these rivers. We found a few good spots where the fish were aggressive, and caught them until our arms were tired. Almost a thousand miles upriver from the Bering Sea, these fish might not have fought as hard as they would fresh from the ocean, but they still had plenty of energy left to perform some impressive runs and acrobatics.

I had a terrific caribou hunt a few weeks ago, so I wrote about it (with many pictures) in the articles section.

Here's a sneak peek:













Check it out: Troutnut's 2012 Alaska Range Caribou Hunt.

This stonefly is one that is fairly common in higher altitude lakes, especially in western North America. I have collected it in higher lakes in Glacier National Park, Montana. Dick Baumann tells me that in a recent publication this stonefly has been renamed Skwala compacta.

Amidst the hundreds of little grayling streams scattered through interior Alaska, there are a handful places to find a welcome bit of variety: dwarf dolly varden. These guys don't migrate around chasing the nutritious salmon runs, but instead stay in small streams at a correspondingly small size. I had never found one of these gems (and hadn't looked very hard) until the other day. I had great fun with my soft, short 4-weight, placing a foam beetle in some challenging places in hopes of enticing an 8-inch fish.