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Saturday I drove east from the rainy Seattle side of the Cascades to seek sunnier weather and take some friends on their first flyfishing trip. We went to a small stream where I've caught small trout from a meadow with plenty of backcast room, but unfortunately the water up there at 4,400 feet was still high and too cold from runoff. I like to think I could have found a few fish on nymphs on a solo trip with lots of time to kill. However, being focused on teaching, I only fished myself long enough to tell that the fishing wasn't going to be much good yet (i.e., I caught nothing in a few promising spots).

We moved on to a high lake, Taneum Lake, mostly just for the easy, scenic hike. We saw a few cutthroat trout cruising around, but it was not a good lake to flyfish from shore. I had brought my packraft, but nobody else much felt like paddling around on the lake when the wind picked up and snow started to fall. I might have fared better with a spinning rod. The fish did try to hand me one opportunity on a silver platter, but I blew it by failing to have the right setup when opportunity struck. I was rigged up with a heavily-weighted fly and sink-tip line from a deep shoreline when I walked up toward a shallower area and spotted a cruising fish. It paused behind an isolated boulder as if it were trying to give me the perfect opportunity to sneak into a good casting position, so I did. There was no time to change flies, so my heavy dragonfly nymph dropped into the water about 20 feet in front of the fish with a loud "plunk" that sent it darting off into the depths. Whoops.

On my way back to Fairbanks from fishing, the area around Cantwell produced the same kinds of dramatic views it always does under Alaska's midnight sun.

Late May is an odd time to hunt for rainbow trout along Alaska's road system. The adult salmon aren't in yet, most of the smolts aren't really running yet either, and the rainbows are in limbo between their mysterious headwater spawning locations and the places they enjoy salmon smolt and egg buffets later in the summer.

Last year, when the rivers were atypically low due to a light snowpack, I fished three miles of a favorite creek and moved only three rainbows, all of monstrous size. This year, greater snowmelt had the creek swollen beyond long-distance wadeability, so a friend and I explored some absurdly off-the-beaten-path access points, the kind where it takes an hour to reach a piece of water in which nobody else has set foot for years.

On this new water, I caught one 19" female and briefly saw a nice male rocketing downstream post-spawn. Mostly, though, the scenic new reaches were a bust from a catching standpoint. At the end of the day, I bashed through half a mile of alders and devil's club (R.I.P. my waders, 2019-2020) to reach a known hotspot and caught six fish, mostly 18-21", before a storm rolled in and chased me back to the car.

I spent (Spent: The wing position of many aquatic insects when they fall on the water after mating. The wings of both sides lay flat on the water. The word may be used to describe insects with their wings in that position, as well as the position itself.) most of the month of May in Alaska, and most of that sitting in an AirBnB in North Pole abiding by the required 2-week indoor quarantine for travelers from out-of-state due to Covid-19. After the quarantine came a frantic sequence of fieldwork to train the technician we hired to complete our second summer of data collection on a study of food resources for juvenile Chinook Salmon in the Chena River. However, our weather-dependent sampling schedule allowed for a break from May 29th-31st, and I drove south to chase rainbow trout.

I've been wearing Korkers wading boots for years because I like the interchangeable sole system; I mostly use the soles with aluminum bars on the bottom for traction, but sometimes I switch them out to avoid damaging a boat. On a recent trip, the fabric inside the heel of my Buckskin boots tore (probably due to forcing my foot into a wet boot with too much friction too many times), and the tear made it almost impossible to put the boot on. It's the first time that's happened, and I doubt it'll happen again if I'm a bit more diligent about loosening the laces first. Even though my boots were a few months outside the official 1-year warranty date, I filled out a warranty claim, and they replied immediately offering to send replacements. Those came in the mail a few days later, and all I had to do was destroy the old ones so another claim couldn't be filed on the same boots later. That was one of the most painless warranty experiences I've had in a while. Kudos to Korkers.