740 | Fly Fishing the Northern Rockies with Phil Rowley, Daniel Schildknecht, & Lance Egan

Dave (2s): The Northern Rockies are a massive mountain range spanning the US and Canada, known for their dramatic peaks, pristine rivers, and world-class fly fishing. Near the northern reaches of this range, Northern Rockies Adventures offers an unforgettable gateway to remote fly fishing experiences. Today we’re joined by Phil Rowley and Lance Egan to share their time on these waters over the last year. And this is going to inspire you for your next big adventure. This is the Wet Fly Swing podcast where I show you the best places to travel to for fly fishing, how to find the best resources and tools to prepare for that big trip, And what you can do to give back to the fish species we all love. Hey, I’m Dave host of the We Fly Swing podcast. I’ve been fly fishing since I was a little kid. I grew up around a little fly shop and have created one of the largest fly fishing podcasts in this country. Dave (45s): Today we’ve got Daniel back on, owner of NR Adventures and the great Phil Rowley and Lance Egan. We’re gonna find out why our Littoral Zone host had such an amazing time up chasing Northern Pike, lake trout, grayling, and many more species. We’re gonna talk about today we get an insider view of this trip and the upcoming hosted trip with Phil and Tim Flagler. You don’t wanna miss this tight lines, Tim Flagler himself. They’re gonna be heading back up here. Then we’re gonna get a chat on the second half of this show with Lance Egan, who was also up there this year to different time. We’re gonna hear his experience and how this all went this year in Northern Canada. Plus you’re gonna get one monster story rod break and, and what it was like flying in these giant float planes around the country. Dave (1m 30s): This is Daniel’s specialty is flying and covering the Northern Rockies in these float planes. All right, let’s kick this one off. Here we are, Phil and Daniel of Northern Rockies Adventures. How are you guys doing? I’m Phil (1m 43s): Doing well. How come you didn’t say Daniel’s last name, Dave? Dave (1m 45s): Well, I’m waiting. This is why, because I’m smart. I’m, I’m a host and I’m, I like not messing things up. So Daniel, I’m gonna let you announce he’s Phil (1m 51s): Got a cool name. He’s got a cool Dave (1m 53s): Name. Let’s hear it. Let’s hear how we, how we say your last name. Oh Daniel (1m 56s): Boy, that’s pressure. Yeah, Daniel Schildknecht. It’s a very Swiss name. Fairly complex. Yeah. Dave (2m 4s): Good, good, good. All right, so we got that. So we got some good stuff here because we’ve got another podcast host of course La Toro Zone podcast. I think people are loving it, the all stillwaters all the time. And then Daniel, we’ve had you on as well on the podcast. We’ll put some links out to those episodes, which have been great. Today we’re gonna talk about really what’s been going on the last summer. You guys had some trips together. I really, I’m excited about this ’cause I wanna hear what Phil’s been up to, what you guys, and then what’s coming. So maybe let’s take us there. I’ll know either one of you, Daniel, maybe you could start us off, like what, how was the season first last year when you look back on how things went there? You Daniel (2m 39s): Know, it was a great season. You know, we don’t have Phil here just to grill me from its separate angle. It was really exciting. We got Phil and Tim up this summer. It was long time coming and we had Lance up there as well too. It was a great season. It was back to back fishing weeks, but you know, we don’t do huge fishing weeks. It was kind of seven to nine guests a week, but sure kept me, dad and my brother busy find those flow planes. A lot of great catches and a lot of fun kind of stories here too. Well, I’m sure some of them will surface others. We’re gonna let them lie in the deep water. Nice, Dave (3m 14s): Nice. And Phil, was this your first time up to this northern Rockies area? Phil (3m 20s): Yeah, it was, you know, I lived in British Columbia for 30 years and I never got up into the northeast corner of the province, so it was a real pleasure to get up there. And you know, without getting too far ahead in our talk, what a spectacular place. Just, just the, the scenery alone is worth the price of admission. Dave (3m 37s): Right, right. And lots of water, right? Lots of lakes, lots of, Phil (3m 40s): There’s a little bit, yeah, yeah, Dave (3m 42s): A little bit. What, what was the trip? What was your trip when you went up there? Did you have a focus? Were you thinking about hitting a specific water type, a fish species, all that? What’d that look like? Phil (3m 51s): Tim Flagler and I had spoken to Daniel and he’d given us sort of a 60,000 foot view aviation pun fully intended and to what, you know, what to expect. But it, it just blew my mind. It was way more than I expected, you know, from the beauty, the, you know, the, the wild fish. These are fish that have seen little to nothing in the way of flies, lures or anything. They’re plentiful. They’re large, you know, diverse. We, we caught rainbow trout, bull trout, lake trout Daniel (4m 27s): Pike and Grayling I think. Yeah, yeah. Phil (4m 29s): Pike and huge pike. Not, you know, BC you don’t think of, of northern pike. But on the east side of the, of the Rockies where Daniel has access, unique flow, plane access to it was pretty staggering size of pike. So much so that the Stillwater up there actually got Tim Flagler, who has been busting my chops on other parts of my body for years on how boring and dull Stillwater fishing is. Really. Well, he’s come around, Dave (5m 0s): He’s loving it Phil (5m 1s): And it’s not so bad. Yeah. Yeah. Daniel (5m 4s): I think being towed around by a big pike in a, in a lake in a boat was, was quite a, a spectacle for him. So it was, it was pretty fun. Phil (5m 13s): Yeah, well, especially when we got them at the risk of telling stories ahead of time. We were, we were fishing the Pike Lake and had done well in the shallows and Daniel had mentioned that it is also home to lake trout. So Daniel had a sounder in the boat. So we went out into deep water and we were marking fish anywhere from 40 to 60 feet down, of course, naturally assuming them to be lake trout. So we started dredging them with, with just drifting really slowly, which allowed our fast sinking type seven lines to get down there and start stripping our pike streamers. ’cause Lake Trotter just as aggressive as pike up through the water column to get ’em. And, and Tim was riding my, because in between fish it gets a little, you gotta wait for this line to sink. Phil (5m 55s): It could be a minute or two and then strip it up and if you don’t get anything you just do that again for a couple of times. And then he got hammered by something and it was, it wasn’t lake trout, it turns out it was big Northern pike in the 20 to 25 pound range. Oh wow. Feeding down there on probably Lake white fish, juvenile, you know, whatever they want to eat ’cause of that big to eat anything they want. And yeah, that was a pleasant surprise to see something that big come up out of the gloom almost scares you a little bit because you’re like, maybe the boat needs to be a little bigger. Wow. Daniel (6m 26s): Yeah. Phil (6m 27s): Two things are large, so, so yeah, that was one of my memories. Yeah, that was Daniel (6m 31s): Day one. Wow. Dave (6m 33s): 25 pounds. So how many inches is a 25 pounder? Phil (6m 36s): 40 plus. Dave (6m 37s): Oh, so this is a big Yeah. These, this is a big fish. Phil (6m 39s): It’s big. It’s like, yeah. Almost four feet a pike. Daniel (6m 41s): Yeah. Don’t, don’t put your hand down there. It’s kind of a little bit ominous. How Dave (6m 45s): Common is that Daniel, to find some of these 40 inches out there? Daniel (6m 48s): Well, I think that day it wasn’t, it, we had no shortage of them. You know, I, I always say it’s timing right and we’ll, we’ll touch on kind of timing to get, you know, that, that dream catch. But you get the timing right. There’s not one or two of them in there. There’s dozens and yeah. And you get the timing and you kind of know what to go for. You can spend a day catching, you know, 30, 40 inch fish very commonly. Yeah. Phil (7m 11s): And if you understand the fish, how they, you know where they are, you can get ’em shallow and deep. So that’s the beauty of a lot of these lakes there. There’s always something willing to play with you. Daniel (7m 22s): Yeah, I think after that we shifted over into the shallows too. And then I think Tim got some really cool drone shots where we were able to site fish them now. So now we, we actually were just kind of like at a, in a restaurant kind of pointing out the fish that we wanted and bam. Wow. And we were able to entice them. It’s, it’s pretty neat. Yeah. Phil (7m 39s): You’d watch that 40 inch fish come up out of, because this bay was a little, we’d gone in there first I think, because it was a little breezy when we first got there. So we were just trying to get outta the, get outta the wind a little bit. And the shallows were like, these lakes are crystal clear, like glass of water kind of thing. And there was a circular bay with a little, it was kind of protected the entrance to come in and it just fell into this like a teacup hole. It was dark and black and just casting to the edges of that. And once the sun got on the water a little bit and started to warm those shallows up, these giant alligator looking things start sliding out of the depths. And then all of a sudden, Daniel, we got the first one and we saw it coming. Phil (8m 19s): Right. And you know, it’s, it’s not a trout that’s gonna turn away. It’s only gonna get better and better and better. And these things just came out and once it latched onto the fly, it just came like a freight train and ate it probably about 10 feet. Daniel and I were like a couple of kids at Christmas watching this all come down and, and get eaten and then just everything went crazy after that. Yeah. Daniel (8m 39s): It’s, it’s pretty wild catching pike. I, I got a couple stories on Pike later on too from this week. I almost kind of stumbled over my tongue. I was fishing with Todd Moen and Oh yeah, we, we have, we have a pretty good Pike story and I think it’s gonna make it into one of his edits. Edits this spring. Oh yeah. Todd Phil (8m 56s): Videos are first class. Yeah. Dave (8m 57s): Yeah. That’s awesome. So there’s gonna be some mo Todd Moen videos out there sometimes. Yeah, Daniel (9m 1s): It looks like it, it, there’s definitely a pretty cool little pike story at, at risk of ruining it. We’ll just say it’s a, it’s a double pike on one fly. Oh wow. Dave (9m 9s): Oh yeah. Daniel (9m 10s): Those are fun. And it was, it was pure chaos. ’cause you know, we, we were sort of just setting up for the shot and you know, pike, pike, if anything they’re, they’re definitely greedy and the bigger they get the more aggressive and it was pretty cool. Dave (9m 25s): Gosh. So did you guys have this all planned out before Phil made it up here and, and Tim, did you have a plan of like, we’re gonna hit these bodies of water, these species or Daniel (9m 34s): It was a bit of a loose plan? You know, I wanted to show Tim and Phil a bit of what, what we do. But you know, just like any of our trips, we are flying. Right. Alright, so we’re, we’re picking a little bit what the weather is, what the season is. If it’s, if it’s super windy, you know, that’s probably not your pike fishing day right off the gate. ’cause pike fishing, we’re, we’re fishing on lakes, you know, maybe it’s better off on those days where it’s a bit windy to, to go in the river where you’re a bit sheltered. You might be kind of into trees. But, you know, we, we had a rough goal of the, the species to catch. And actually the, it was a really fun balance between Tim and Phil and, you know, kind of getting Tim to fall for the dark side of, of, you know, fishing on water that it isn’t moving as he per se. Daniel (10m 14s): But, you know, there, there is an argument to be set that actually a lake is always moving as well too. So, Phil (10m 20s): And then Tim found out that Phil can fish rivers too. Yeah. Dave (10m 22s): Oh right. So you guys did some rivers so it wasn’t all still water. Phil (10m 25s): Yeah, we did rivers for, we did some walkin wades. That’s another thing. Not everything outta Daniels lodge is, is a, a fly to destination. There’s some wonderful walk in wade water for grayling and trout and bull trout that we experienced as well. That was a lot of fun. Grayling or just a, you know, a tailormade fish for the fly rod? Both. Daniel (10m 46s): You know, I, I think they’re so underappreciated for fly fishing. You know, they’re, they have been with fly fishing almost as long as like the salmon or even a trout, but they’re sort of forgotten just because they’re a bit of a rare species. They’re, they’re sensitive to the environment and you know, unfortunately a lot of the waters nowadays, the people fly fish are not as pristine as they used to be to sustain this, this species. And the grayling is a sucker for a dry fly. If, if you love dry fly fishing, you need to get on some grayling, you know, and it’ll make you feel like a champion. Phil (11m 16s): Yeah. If you nm for you feel like you’re cheating but Right. And then I nm for my euro NM for using mops. So I really went dark and deep. Dave (11m 24s): Yeah. So was that more effective than dries or what? Phil (11m 27s): Well, yeah. Dave (11m 28s): Or add is the same Phil (11m 29s): For the bigger ones. Yeah. A little ginger mop worked really one worked wonderful. Yeah. Gotcha. Daniel (11m 35s): It’s weird. It’s kind of one of those things, you know, it’s just typical fish and you need to know kind of what switches on, what switches off. Sometimes you’ll just crush it and they just, they want like a parachute atoms black or canna size. That’s what they want. Nothing else. Then all of a sudden you switch to, you know, all of a sudden they’re going for a pheasant tail next time it’s a mop. It’s, you need to find that rhythm. But once you get kind of figure out what the grayling like there you can spend a whole day standing in the safe spot. Just getting ’em. Yeah. ’cause there’s probably about a hundred. Phil (12m 3s): Well I think that day Daniel, the aired river wasn’t it? And it was a little yeah. Colored for runoff. So I think the nymph just worked better ’cause it got down to them and they could see it Daniel (12m 12s): Better I think. I think so the Ard in particular is fairly silty. It’s one of the few rivers that we have that is, is pretty silty ’cause it’s a confluence, you know, a lot of it runs, I think actually north up to the Yukon if I’m not mistaken, into the Yukon River. So the ARD is a fairly silty river, but the majority of the spots we do fish in the back country. Like they’re, you know, head waters starring little spring creeks into, into streams and then little rivers and all of a sudden and you know, they’re pretty crystal clear. So I think that’s also why the dryly works pretty darn good on them. Okay. Dave (12m 43s): And you have a rainbow in here too, Daniel (12m 44s): Right? We do. And yeah, that, that was kind of where, that was where Tim really figured he’s gonna get the upper end here on Phil. Oh, Dave (12m 51s): That’s right. ’cause Tim is a big, Phil (12m 53s): Now I may have the longest recorded drag free drift in. Yeah. Daniel (12m 57s): What was that? I I, you know that Mikey was there for that one. Yeah, Phil (13m 1s): We were, we were fishing this river and it was this fish rising. It was just as the river slows down and starts to enter the lake, probably a half mile or so, maybe a mile or so from the actual confluence. But there was this fish rising and I tried to wade down to it, but when I got up to near my chest, I sort of stopped. But the water, the current was so even that I could just make a cast and then just feed line. Like I fit it almost to the backing and it just came up and ate it. Oh wow. And the, this river had lots of big rainbows in it. And we, after that we went upstream even further and there was fish, you know, just sipping. We had hatch of mayflies coming off and they were sipping the emerges. So any sort of low lying parachute, like Daniel mentioned a parachute album. Phil (13m 44s): These fish are not, that’s the other nice thing is, you know, they haven’t been, they haven’t seen too much. So they’re, they’re pretty forgiving. Yeah. You don’t need a comprehensive, crazy selection of flies, which is nice. Dave (13m 56s): You’re not using size 20, 20 fours up there? Phil (13m 59s): No, no. We are not doing that at all ever. Daniel (14m 1s): You know, end up brings me to the little fishing story, you know, other special guests that, you know, you guys ro know and I think he’ll be joining us here maybe a bit, Lance. He did go for, you know, tight euro nymphing and tiny, tiny little flies. And as much as you don’t need to do that up there ’cause the fishing, you know, it was pretty easy. Sorry, you know, but it’s, he did that and he crushed it. Phil (14m 28s): Oh yeah. I imagine Daniel (14m 29s): He was, he was just going around lance with like euro nim thing off the bank just, just pulling out, you know, bull trout rainbows. He was even getting the white fish on there, which sometimes, sometimes the white fish go nuts on a fly. Other times they don’t even wanna see anything. But he just had like the depth figured out and he was like, okay, this is gonna be a white fish depth white fish. Oh wow. Talking to him, distracting him. And he is still Dave (14m 52s): Is a whitefish, similar whitefish and grayling similar activities? No, Phil (14m 58s): I think there’s some on, so they’re all in, you know, the same family as trout and, and char and everything else. Well, Dave (15m 4s): Do they act similarly to the, the bugs? Are they different? Phil (15m 7s): Yeah, well yeah, they, they all, they’re all bug eaters. You know, your white fish tend to be good. The mountain white fish that are in the rivers tend to be, you know, good indicators of water quality. You know, that’s, they’re a, you know, so that’s a, another endorsement for that area is just how clean and pristine the waters are. Daniel (15m 23s): There’s schools of white fish that go through and I think they’re the main feed fish for, for everything up there. Oh yeah. And, and I think those big rainbows eat white fish. Yeah. Like the big rainbows are feasting on whites. Phil (15m 34s): Yeah. Daniel took us, flew us into another lake and him and his father that day we were on half, half day rations. It seemed for lakes. We get dropped into this lake. This just, I’m not trying to oversell this, but I, I keep forgetting that lake’s name, but I flew over it and Daniel (15m 50s): We keep it that way. Phil (15m 51s): Yeah. My stillwater, you know, love it was just Marl and Kara and crystal clear and it was just, you know, if you’re gonna make a lake, this was how you’d make it. So I’m already salivating before we get the, the plane up to the, the beach and can get out. And so I get a half a morning on that and we had some good success there. Some nice big rainbows again and again, just spectacular scenery. I think I missed a number of fish ’cause I was busy gawing at mountains and, and glaciers and things like that. And then moved to this other lake Daniel wanted to go. ’cause at that point I don’t think we got a bull trout or a lake trout yet. Daniel (16m 27s): I think we hadn’t because we, we were trying for bull trout into depth and all we got was huge pike. Dave (16m 33s): It was, Phil (16m 33s): It was no, probably. Yeah, we screwed it up. Yeah. So yeah, we fished the, this creek mouth and another lake and you know, as soon as the fly got out into the current and off over the drop a little bit, that’s where these big bull trout and lake trout were sitting. And, and it was funny ’cause it was schools of white fish and they were packed tight and hugging the bank. Like you, you just knew that they had had a really tough life and as soon as they got out into that edge water, they were toast. So. Right. Yeah. They were kind of swimming through our legs and around us and, and, and you know, using us for a form of protection I think. But again, just, it’s just every lake’s like that and every river is just untouched. Daniel (17m 15s): It’s just untouched ecosystems and it makes, we’re pretty spoiled to have that, you know, we did mention that thing about the grayling though quick, and I will circle back. I did say that they eat different than the, the white fish. It’s the way their mouths are like, oh yeah. The, the mountain white fish and the lake white fish are more like a sucker almost. Yeah. The mouth’s a little bit down the mountain. White fish is a little bit more kind of like trout like, but still the grayling does have a bit of a bigger mouth. And so it’s almost like if you’re catching the lake, if you’re catching any of the white fish, usually you’re catching them lower down right along the bottom. But that said, you catch ’em sometimes on a dry fly and it it boggles your mind. Phil (17m 54s): Yeah. They’re not the great most graceful of dry fly eaters. They kinda, because of their mouth underneath a little bit, they kind of come down on it. Whereas the grayling’s massive trout’s gonna come up and give you that delicate, you know, nose poke and, and take the fly down. So, Daniel (18m 7s): But grayling also are pretty bad. Sometimes they’re known for having a bad aim. Sometimes you’ll have a grayling and you’ll, you’ll swear you set that hook. But if you actually were filming it and kinda look at it, you’ll actually notice they just, sometimes they’ll like try to slap it and they’ll, they’ll come up for a second, third take and Yeah. Yeah. Phil (18m 24s): Well that’s, sometimes they do that with cas. They’ll come up and drown them and then circle back around and get ’em. Because trying to chase a cat, particularly on lakes, trying to chase a Cass that’s moving all over the place, just drown it and it’s not going anywhere. Just circle back around and eat it. Dave (18m 38s): How are the, the lakes up here different from, you know, you fish lakes, all North America right down? How are they different? Is it similar? Lot of similarities or? Phil (18m 46s): Yeah, similar but different, you know, lakes, every lake is unique and depending on its topography, you know, I think sometimes, you know, if you look at the macho lake that’s right out, you know, right outside the, the doors of the lodge, literally it’s deep, it’s crystal clear. Probably not the most productive lake because it’s so deep and clear. Little littoral zone, little shoal area. But these smaller lakes nestled in, in the mountains are shallower more shoal area, more opportunity to grow weeds, more habitat for food, better opportunity to grow fish. So they’re all different. So they’re, a lot of ’em are, are productive. But the, the clarity of the water is what struck me. Phil (19m 26s): Just, I don’t think, there’s no murky lakes up there, Daniel. Daniel (19m 29s): No, there, there really isn’t. You know, it’s spring runoff maybe being an exception, but really, yeah, it’s, it’s crystal clear water I think is the defining trade up there. And then, you know, the topography, what are they, soil, bottom, rock bottom, what’s growing in them. It’s, you need to keep in mind it’s like 5 million hectares of, of, of landmass recovering. So there is gonna be a lot of different geography mixed in. So yeah, it changes a lot. And that’s kind of the beauty of the trip, right? You can kind of diverse cherry pick, cherry pick the diversity. It’s, it’s not, you know, what’s within the range of a pickup truck. Dave (20m 6s): Right, right. Were you up there now? Was this a week long trip? And talk about the timing, like what, what the time of year and all that. I can’t remember Daniel, from our last conversation, is there a, is there a time like if somebody’s listening now they’re thinking, wow, this is something I want to get involved in. What? Talk about that a little bit. Daniel (20m 20s): Yeah, I mean Phil, I think that was, I would say it was kind of our season wrap up. Phil (20m 24s): Yeah. It’s near the end of the season. ’cause I had said I’d like to fish a couple of those lakes when, you know, the hatch cycle. Like particularly ides are more in swing. ’cause I was So Dave (20m 32s): There are Chrons in, in these lakes. Oh yeah, Phil (20m 35s): Yeah. Daniel (20m 36s): There’s, you know, all the kind of typical, you know, we got the, the freshwater shrimp in there. We got canids. The freshwater shrimp are actually very predominant in a lot of areas. Like, you know, the, the flesh when we do do sometimes a shore lunch and the, the flesh of these fish are like pink, like salmon pink. Phil (20m 54s): And that’s a good indicator of a productive lake because scuds freshwater shrimp need lakes and high in pH for the development of their exoskeleton. So they are a, a good barometer. And that one lake that Daniel gave me a half day on and I’m still Yeah, Daniel (21m 10s): That, that sounds Phil (21m 11s): So neat. Sore. I did do a throat sample on there. ’cause while we were there we were also exploring and doing a little bit of, of research on the lakes of as to the different, what, you know, different, you know, trying to build, help Daniel build a hatch jar for example. And you know, seeing scuds in there and not just teeny ones. These were, these were big, the bigger, larger gammas so, you know, size twelves and, and and things like that. So that, that’s a very positive sign for those fish. Daniel (21m 36s): There’s a lot of calcium. It’s very calcium rich and I think that really helps the scuds, I find scuds in just about everything we have up there. Another big food up there is snails talking to the biologists. So it’s all kind of lines up with that. But yeah, time of the year, you know, that’s the go-to question. Everyone asks, you know, when’s the best time? You know? Yeah. Dave (21m 56s): Best time. Yeah, I got one time, gimme one week. That’s all. When is it? Phil (22m 0s): Or between ice off and ice on. Yeah, Daniel (22m 3s): Exactly. That’s, that’s the way it is. And you know what up in the Rockies that’s short. And I think sometimes that actually is to our advantage, it leads to a really productive period. Like people you know say, oh they want to go lake fishing. Well June and August is sort of the kind of that time for that into September. But if you’re dry fly fishing, you’re missing out if you’re not there mid-July to mid-August. So that’s kind of how I kind of sum it up. But you know, the species change, if you’re chasing pike end of July, big pike, you’re gonna want to come when the water’s a bit cooler on either end of that, go kind of in June, go more in August or into September if you want nice rainbows that’s, you know, your prime time in the middle of July to mid-August. Dave (22m 46s): What about the Lake Trt? When’s the, because those are a little tougher, right? They’re they’re down deeper. That’s Daniel (22m 50s): True. I like to call them a June fish, but you know, Phil, Phil will prove me wrong every single time and he’ll catch ’em any time of the year. So, Phil (22m 57s): You know, traditionally they, you know, they, they come into the shallows in the fall to spawn. So they’ll be attracted to rocky points and reefs ’cause that’s what they like to spawn. And in the spring they’ll be shallow until that water warms and then, ’cause they’re very, like most char they like cool oxygenated water. So as soon as it starts to warm up down, they’ll go deep. And for the most part, I think people look at a lake trout when it’s in deep water is uncatchable on the fly, but with a little bit of finesse and a little, you, you can do it Dave (23m 25s): The type seven you need to just get your deep stuff on. Phil (23m 28s): Yeah. Type seven you need, you know, you know, we’re fishing that day. I talked about trying to get those pike you’re a sounder helps because they’re in the main basin of the lake. So they’re meandering around chasing forage fish. So they’re not really holding against structure like a a, you know, trout and lakes in the shallower lakes, points of land drop offs, weed beds, those kind of things. Areas of transition. But you’re dealing with a fish and it’s kind of pelagic in its open water nature. So you gotta move around to find them. And then you’ve also gotta have a day that the wind isn’t too bad because it’s impractical, unwise, unsafe, any of those to anchor in that deep water. So now you’re using, you’re fishing from a moving, a drifting boat. So the slower the boat drifts, the better chance you’ve got to let that line get down. Phil (24m 13s): You know, the technique I use is in, in conventional angle they call it sharp shooting, where they’ll mark a fish on the sounder. They’ve got their bait caster or their spinning reel, A heavy jig poof. It just goes, even though a type seven line sinks at seven inches per second, it’s not lead jig fast. So it takes time to get down. So it’s typically a cast downwind as far as you comfortably can have the rest of the line off the reel. And you just stack men the balance on top of what you cast and let it all sort of cascade and fall through the water. And once it goes vertical or near vertical, then you start stripping up through them. Right. And they’re just so aggressive. Oh, Dave (24m 47s): So you wait till it’s literally just vertical down below Phil (24m 49s): You. Yeah. But if the wind’s too much, then Dave (24m 51s): It never gets vertical. You Phil (24m 52s): Move. Yeah, you’ll get over top of things and you’ll get ahead of your fly line and then it’ll start to come under tension and swing up and it won’t work. So you gotta pick your spots. But those lakes, like Daniels machos, huge lake. We did try fishing that one evening, but it was more of a wildlife tour watching caribou walk around. Oh wow. Caribou, which is another benefit. Oh yeah, Daniel (25m 12s): Yeah. It was, it wasn’t quite the day for it. I think we spent an hour and a half at it. But it’s, it’s not an easy one. But speaking of lake trout and fishing, you know, dad, dad’s been guiding he, lake trout seems to be his specialty in what he loves to do. He always goes for June where he does sort of the opposite fill and he just goes for the lake trout. They’re usually feeding in a, in higher water columns earlier into season. So 10, 15 feet of water and all of a sudden, you know, you got some big lake trout that spent the whole summer at like 40 feet. But come June right, water temperature, they follow that, that kind of, that transition zone zone up, you can almost mark them by the water temperature and then, then you can catch ’em in shallow water. Daniel (25m 54s): It’s a lot easier. Now that said, I learned the hard way this summer, that water temperature doesn’t just have to do with the outside temperature, it also has to do with current as out fishing with a guy. And we were going for rainbows and you know, caught a couple nice rainbows, dry fly And then we switched over to Nim. There’s some bull trout mixed in there as well too. And some white fish as well. Anyway, decent tug on the line for him and you know, the tug turns into like a heavy bend in the rod and it’s either gonna be the biggest rainbow I’ve seen pulled from this spot, or it’s gonna be, I thought a bull trout. But there’s no way it’s gonna be a lake trout. It’s, it’s in a bay. Daniel (26m 34s): It’s kind of separated to get into that bay. There’s, there’s a kind of shallow section of about four feet of water. There’s an eagle nest looking over it. Like Phil (26m 42s): I know that Daniel (26m 42s): Lake. You know this lake? Yeah. Well yeah, guess what? This sure enough coming closer, you know, reeling this fish in, putting tremendous pressure on the rod. I’m not going to, you know, name any rod manufacturers here we see the glimpse of this thing and it is a little behemoth like it’s, it’s about 20 odd pounds of lake trout on a six weight fly rod. And the show was on and I was running down with the net and then just reaching in. I have of course the one day I have like a nice little fly net as opposed to like a big honk and boat net trying to get this thing in. Clients kind of handling the fish and all of a sudden the fish goes for a run snap goes to six weight. Daniel (27m 25s): Oh wow. Rod tip slides down. Does what? Did it go deep? He just ran, but it was enough pressure, big heavy fish that like that rod was arced like it was, it was like a sea. And it snapped right in the middle. And I kid you not, the tip of the rod slid down and like, oh yeah, he was down to maybe like three feet of line or four feet of line there. There’s barely anything left. And it was like the perfect hook removal and plop. I’m getting in with the net, kind of got the tail fish jumps out, everything gone. Didn’t even get the photo. Oh really? So you lost the fish too? Everything. Lost a rod. Lost the fish. Oh man. But we were totally under year for that one there. There’s no way we’re gonna catch a big lake trout in here. Daniel (28m 6s): It’s in a little isolated bay and it taught us a lesson. Wow. Phil (28m 10s): There’s always a rogue that moves around and God, that’s the fun of fishing, right? You end up in, you know, like, well like back to that first story we marked those fish in that lake. We assume them to be lake trout because they’re deep. They’re doing, that’s where you expect lake trout at that time of the season. And they’re big pike hunting out there. Daniel (28m 27s): Yeah, it’s fun. You know, each day is kind of a bit different. You’re playing with the conditions, you’re look at the water temperatures and you, you know, you don’t always, it’s never absolute science. You’re always kind of reading what, what’s coming your way. Are you flying out each day? Is that, is that the game plan? That’s exactly it. Right. And you know, you’re kind of going off of what you did last week and, and what, you know, you historically kind of know if you know dad’s depth and knowledge in there. But you know, with Phil there we did go and we explored some areas that dad said, oh no, I’ve never fished here in in September. And you know what? I think we should be fishing there. Oh cool. In September. There you go. Yeah. Phil (29m 4s): They gotta eat every day. Right. You just gotta, they move, right? Yeah. So you just gotta be, they may not be where they were early season, but they’re Daniel (29m 11s): There. Yeah. Phil (29m 12s): Yeah. And, and the other thing too is you don’t have to fly out every day. There was lots of walk and wave. There’s lots of other things to do. So if you’ve got somebody in your group that maybe doesn’t wanna fish, you know, doesn’t fish as hard as the rest of the group. There’s tons of things for them to do. Right. You’ve got mountain biking, Daniel, you’ve got your a TV tours. You can go up to the hot springs there and, and you know, Daniel (29m 34s): The hot springs are a super popular thing. I think, you know, anyone that passes by there we’re on the Alaska Highway. So, you know, people coming through are always that hot springs is like the bucket list thing when you’re in the area. You know, our fishing is, you know what brings people in on these big tours. You’re planning on this, but everybody knows about those hot springs. The fishing is our little kept secret and we’re gonna keep that amongst your listeners here. Dave (29m 59s): Right. So is this the Alaska Highway? So if you were driving from, from south up, from, you know, the states up to Anchorage, Alaska, would you go right by your place? That’s Daniel (30m 8s): Exactly it. You’re you’re hitting the tip of the fishing iceberg. Oh wow. Driving right by our door. And you’ll see those float planes out there and if you’re ever wandering what they do, that’s it. That’s what we’re doing here. That’s Dave (30m 18s): It. They’re sitting out there. Yeah. That’s really amazing. And the float planes, Phil, Phil, we, I haven’t been on these float planes to talk about that. Was that pretty amazing? Well, or have you been on a plane? Have you ever been on a float plane? Have Phil (30m 28s): I been on a I used to fly. Oh, I have a commercial. I had a commercial pilot’s license. So Daniel holy cow. And his father and I, I think Tim at times was like, what are those three gabbling on about? Because you know, when I last flew, you know, the instrumentation and GPS wasn’t around all this stuff. So I’m living in the past trying to catch up and pointing at things. So I’m having a great time. So I love, I love flying in small planes. So Daniel’s got a, a turbo water that is a, a thing would carry a mountain. I think it’s big, right? Yeah. Dave (30m 59s): This is not your, this is not your typical Alaska bush plane sort of thing. Phil (31m 2s): No. This isn’t a 180 5 on float. It’s not that. That’s a bad plane. That’s what you’ve got isn’t it Daniel? You’ve got a 180 5 is it? Daniel (31m 9s): No, no. We have, we had one many years ago. What’s Phil (31m 12s): The one you have on the strip? Daniel (31m 13s): Little 1 72. Yeah, that’s, that’s a little, little toy airplane. It’s a lot of fun. Phil (31m 18s): And then you’ve got the, you’ve got the caravan, right? That’s the sports car. Daniel (31m 21s): The caravan’s a sports car. It’s a little rocket ship on floats. Like, it’s about as fast as you probably can go on a float plane without having it Wow. Phil (31m 28s): Without having serious problems. Yeah. So both very capable aircraft carry a lot of stuff. Great seat to fly. Like every, I I almost think I filled my iPhone and my camera up. ’cause you every turn of every valley is another a, you know, jaw dropping view and you, you just pull the camera out and after a while it’s like, I’ve got so many of these jaw dropping views. Does it ever, you know, it’s just Dave (31m 53s): Right. And you got good view in this plane. You can just kinda, you’re just looking down over everything. Yeah. Daniel (31m 57s): We put bubble windows in the otter and, and the, the caravan has pretty nice, has a pretty decent view too. But it’s, you’re not shoulder to shoulder with your buddy, which is nice as well. Well Phil (32m 7s): These planes, what’s the caravan hold Daniel? The Daniel (32m 9s): Caravan is certified for nine, but we fly it around with, with maximum seven. It’s, it just, it’s on aip floats and Yeah. Phil (32m 18s): And then the turbo water is, Daniel (32m 20s): Could go up to 14, but we fly with 9 0 14 Dave (32m 23s): People. Yeah. We did a episode with Ariel Tweedle who is a flying Wild Alaska, the discovery show. They, you know Yeah. That, so she was on and she talked about her dad. They showed some, some stuff there. But they would fly in the, they had so much weight they had to throw their bags out the, the window. Yeah. Daniel (32m 39s): Jim, Jim Tweed’s election. Yeah. Dave (32m 41s): Jim Daniel (32m 41s): Tto Right. Expressed his soul there Dave (32m 43s): Who passed away. Right. He passed away some random sad accident’s. Sad. I know. Sad. But we talked about that in the episode. It was, it was amazing because wow. I mean you don’t have to do that though. You’re not throwing bags out your window. No, Daniel (32m 52s): We’re not throwing bags unless, yeah, we we’re, we’re not. No. Okay. No, no. That, that we’re, we’re flying in, you know, like I would say like probably the, the Cadillac fleet of, of bush planes, you know, in the past you would shove everything in and you know, have a fishing guest slot in amongst the rods. You’re not doing that in an otter or caravan. There’s Phil (33m 12s): No, and the flight up alone, you’re coming up out of the greater Vancouver area. Most guests come that way in a King Air Daniel (33m 18s): 300. Yeah. Dave (33m 19s): Oh that’s right. They’re coming up in your plane too from Vancouver. Yeah. Daniel (33m 22s): Yeah. We, we do planes. Planes from start to finish and it’s part of the experience, but it’s also your ticket to like untouched fishing. Right. And you can, without the plane, you know, it’s, it takes a bit of the magic away, but it’s, it’s beautiful up there. And the flight alone is, is pretty spectacular. Phil (33m 40s): Yeah. The flights up from Vancouver area is about two hours, wasn’t it Daniel? Daniel (33m 43s): Yeah. It’s about two hours over the Rockies. You can ask Tim. Phil (33m 47s): Yeah. And then, Dave (33m 48s): So Tim, it sounds like he had a, it sounds like Tim had a good time. It sounds like there was some stories. Phil (33m 53s): Oh, Jim had a great time. Jim just can’t do long flights for biological reasons. Oh, gotcha. No, we’ll leave it at that. Right. And then you landed Fort Nelson. Right. And then we had a, about a two and a half, three hour drive. Yep. You know, we had stops and got out and more jaw dropping scenery. Daniel (34m 10s): You know what, it’s always a longer drive because of the views you’re driving from like the flatland into the Rockies. This is the tip of the Rockies. It’s kind of like the end of it. So, oh. You know, it’s just kind of going from a plateau one last time into the mountains and you, you have crazy vistas. You’re gonna see stone sheep, you know, moose, caribou, you know, black bears, like all sorts of stuff on the drive you Dave (34m 34s): Saw bison. Phil (34m 34s): Oh god. They’re right beside the road. Oh my gosh. Dave (34m 38s): So this is, you’re at the tip Yeah. Tip Daniel (34m 39s): Of the Rockies. Yeah. Dave (34m 40s): Wow. So on the north that you’re just going off, if you go north of where you’re at, you’re going to go into like the open what plane? What is that? Yeah, Daniel (34m 46s): It’s, it’s like the Yukon Yukon Plateau there and you know, the mountain ranges start up again. Northwest territories and a little bit kinda Alaska, but it’s fairly flatland compared to the Rockies. Right. Yeah. You gotta think a little bit of, kind of like Denver, you know, Colorado kind of style. Rockies, Phil (35m 2s): Calgary, like going outta the up the foothills and then just very much Daniel (35m 5s): That, that scenery and, and you know, now take all the people that live there, subtract it out, think of what the fishing was like 200, 300 years ago. That’s what we do. That’s Dave (35m 16s): It. Because there’s not a town. What is the closest town to you guys up there that has any people? Daniel (35m 20s): Fort Nelson. And Dave (35m 21s): What’s the population there? Like Daniel (35m 22s): 3000 maximum. Dave (35m 24s): Yeah. So tiny. Still pretty small. Yeah. Phil (35m 27s): Have you, Daniel, one last thing on the aircraft. Have you convinced your father yet to invest in a helicopter? You and I are. Daniel (35m 33s): Oh, I I’m working on it. I think it’s, it’s, it it’s earmarked at some point. Can Dave (35m 37s): He fly, could you guys fly into helicopters too or you got that skill? I Daniel (35m 41s): Don’t have the hell yet. And I’m working on, Phil (35m 43s): And I played around a little bit when I was younger and they’re pretty fun. Yeah. You know, I grew up when Apocalypse Now came out, so that did more for helicopters like Top Gun did for fighter pilots. Right. Daniel (35m 53s): I think, you know, that’s probably the next step for us. You know, when we’re flying around and we had to keep fill from the, from the aircraft controls at all times. It’s, you see so much water that you just want to hit. And if you could put down a float plane with it, like you can, there’s a lot of it you can, but then the helicopter will make it so much easier. You know, you don’t Right. You know, you don’t even have to walk. You just kind of hover, hover down the river. Phil (36m 17s): No. And if you get into weather one day you could just put it in a hover, spin around and go back to what you came and, and get out of trouble. ’cause as Daniel can attest, flying in the mountains is challenging ’cause of the changes in elevation and, and winds, the impact of them going up and down valleys it’s, you know, you’re, you’re actually flying up in the mountaintops. ’cause if you flew in the valleys, you could get yourself into a serious amount of trouble. Daniel (36m 40s): Yeah. You’re, you’re generally flying over the mountains and you’re setting up to land. You’re not, you’re not zigzagging through it. Right. Dave (36m 46s): This is cool. Well you guys are painting a good picture of I think wanting to get up there, right? Phil (36m 51s): Everything’s just advertised. Dave (36m 53s): Yeah. And you have this coming, right? Like there’s gonna be a trip coming up that you’re gonna be doing. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah. And maybe, and as we look ahead, this episode’s gonna be out there for many years. Is this something where, and I’m, I’m hoping maybe I will be up there on one of these trips as well. So, but talk about that. What does this look like for you, Phil, and, and Daniel looking ahead? Phil (37m 10s): Well, yeah, Daniel, Tim and I have sat down and talked about we’re gonna do a, a hosted trip that runs from August 10th to 17th 2025. And, and the hopes is that it just builds and grows from there. Daniel (37m 23s): We kind of picked the date range, which is a little bit of a mix of still water and moving water. You know, give it a, a couple years, maybe we’ll shift it by a week south or up or down. But I think that that’s, that’s a pretty good week to get a great sampling of everything. And you know, it’s kind of team fill and team Tim there on, on, you know, moving versus still. But I think, I think we have a convert or two, which is kind of fun. Oh yeah, Phil (37m 48s): Yeah. So this includes, you know, obviously your accommodation and you know, the, the first time you step in foot in that lodge, it’s pretty spectacular. There is a relief map, right. Daniel on the wall of the, of the main dining room that’s was one of the local, their local carved it all out of wood. It’s just incredible to look at. Daniel (38m 8s): It’s like two stories. It’s, it’s huge. And it really, I really like to start to trip like that. You come into the lodge, you made your trip out of Vancouver, drove up the highway, you’re starting to see the scale of this country. Yeah. But now when you’re looking at like a map that you usually, you knows a little thing on a cell phone and you look at it and it takes up two stories and, and we’re using a laser pointer to point out, you know, all those places. Oh wow. We plan on fishing for the week. It really makes the scale of, of the situation. Oh man, how Dave (38m 33s): Tiny you are. Daniel (38m 34s): Yeah. And it also kind of, you know, I always find even at the end of the week, we sometimes like to recap to look at the map again. You know, we’ve been here, here and here it’s maybe four places and you know, sometimes six places or a couple more, but you really just saw the tip of the iceberg and each each week and each season’s a little bit different too. Right. And then we talked about, you know, the species kind of changing, you know, June lake trout season, July rainbow fishing. Right. August kind of pretty good for, for a bit of everything. It’s that season and 70 different spots to fly into. There’s a lot to, to fish. Dave (39m 9s): Yeah. There’s a lot. How many total? I mean, do you have any idea how many lakes, stillwaters, or rivers are out in this area? Is it just, Daniel (39m 15s): You know, I, I couldn’t fathom. Yeah, I think we’re, we’re looking at probably, probably hundreds of lakes, rivers, like 50, 60, all sorts of them. Depends on how you classify the size of them. Are Dave (39m 26s): The rivers size wise? Are they, yeah. Are they mostly smaller type rivers or a mix of sizes? Phil (39m 31s): Mostly smaller, but there’s a couple times I could point down to Daniel. Wow, that looks good. An eagle. I’ve never been in there. Daniel (39m 36s): Some of the stuff, it’s, it’s about being able to even just get into it, you know? Right. Like that’s why the fishing’s good too. You’re the only way we got into these, these things are if a float plane, if you don’t have a float plane, you’re not getting in. But there’s also limits to where you can go with a float plane too. Hence, hence our little, Dave (39m 51s): Hence the hell. Daniel (39m 52s): Yeah. Phil (39m 53s): You could drop off a group with a inflatable raft at point A and pick ’em up at point B at the end of the day and they could have a, a spectacular float. But yeah, we’re going up there in August four Flyouts. Right Daniel, because there’s, there’s also, as I mentioned earlier, there’s some great walk and wades. And it also factors in, you know, we are in the mountains so there can be some weather challenges, you know, that just, you can’t fly. It’s all visual flight rules VFR. So, Daniel (40m 20s): And you know, you got those hot springs and there, there’s a lot to do and with the walk and wade, but the four flyouts you’re getting, you know, that’s, that’s nine to five, that’s a fishing workday and you’re, you’re gonna be hauling fish, you know? Yeah. If you’re just sitting there not catching fish, I get why, you know, you, you would have some energy to spare, but nine to five, four days of the week, you’re gonna, you’re gonna feel that it’s gonna be a burn on the fishing arm. Yes. Phil (40m 43s): It’s guided, hosted fishing. Tim, and I’ll be there with you or That’s right. With whoever Daniel as well helping out, we’re gonna probably do some Zoom educational sessions prior to talk about everything from logistics to flies, to gear, everything. So when you land, you’re prepared, you have a pretty good idea of what to expect. Accommodation, of course. Food. Dave (41m 3s): Are you gonna be doing more like a half, so kind of half still water type, half stream type or we’ll Phil (41m 9s): Go wherever mother nature allows us to go. So Yeah, we’ll, we’ll try and give it a, a pretty even break that way or, you know, we have the ability with the aircraft there and everybody’s desires. If a group wants to do rivers, another group wants to do lakes, we can do that. Daniel (41m 24s): We can switch stuff up. Right. And that’s, that’s the beauty of it. Like, you could spend multiple weeks of just fishing, moving water or you could just focus on honest particular species. I mean like, just recapping wise, you know, you got, of course everyone loves getting big rainbows. It’s a dream. But like bull trout, you know, that’s a cool fish. Yeah. And you know, for a lot of people the first question they say is, oh, you’re allowed to catch ’em up there. And Yeah, and BC BC is pretty much bull trout country. Yeah. You know, it’s great bull trout fishing up there, the grayling or you know, cherry on top. Usually you can’t catch grayling and rainbows on the same trip because one specific one’s arctic. So there’s a little bit of a, you know, little specialty to that as well too. Daniel (42m 8s): And then, you know, there, there’s of course lake trout we, we talked about there, the unfathomable monsters from the depths. Yep. And then the, the northern pike that are pretty much omnipresent. Like those, those carnivores will eat everything. And then, you know, there’s even like oddly for BC little nestled up there in Northern Rockies walleye Dave (42m 29s): Oh, walleye too. Yeah. Daniel (42m 31s): Me and Phil were talking about some walleye fishing, but August is a, a trickier time for it, but it’s Wow. Yeah. That there’s a lot there. Dave (42m 37s): Is walleye a native, is that a native fish to the area or, Phil (42m 40s): Well, the way that, again, as Daniels talked about, you know, the Rockies cut up through the continental divide and come up the, the border of BC and Alberta and then it starts to tail off to the northwest. So Daniel’s sitting just on that where it starts to tail off. So he has access when he goes off the east side of the Rockies there, he’s getting into more. That’s why the pike of there and the, and the walleye are there because they’re in that peace river country, which it’s the rocky separate from the Pacific side where you’ll find your rainbows and things like that. So, so there’s no worry when, you know, I think people sometimes worry that a pike’s gonna get into a, a rainbow trout lake up there. It’s not gonna happen. Daniel (43m 18s): No. The the water flows the wrong direction for that. Yeah. It Phil (43m 20s): Just doesn’t, you know, they don’t, those bodies of water don’t talk to each other ever. Daniel (43m 24s): Yeah. It’s pretty spectacular. Phil (43m 26s): And you can catch walleye on the fly. Dave (43m 28s): You can Phil (43m 29s): Oh yeah. I make, I I love doing Dave (43m 31s): It. Is it the same thing you’re just getting down deep like lake trout sort of thing? Yeah, Phil (43m 34s): It’s, it’s the same gear and everything, the same techniques as trout. You maybe make a fly change here and there, but leeches and minnows as what they like to eat. Right. Dave (43m 41s): And they’re good eating. Right. Walleye are like, people love walleye, don’t they? Daniel (43m 45s): They’re famous for their eating. They’re really good as Phil (43m 47s): A catch and release fisherman. I wouldn’t know. But they’re gorgeous. They’re best. Daniel (43m 52s): They’re, I just actually my first year catching a walleye on the fly rod too. And you know, we’ve always fished for them and spin rod, but it was a bit trickier for me on the fly rod. Just ’cause I feel like they’re almost like a little subtle kind of like kiss of a bite. Phil (44m 5s): Oh yeah, they are, they are a very soft eater. They’ve got all those teeth, but unlike a pike, they tend to inhale their food and I almost say play a game of count of two where they’ll suck in your fly and hold it and if you don’t recognize the take they’ll spoof, they’ll spit it out. So you, Daniel (44m 21s): They fold me a couple times. Yeah. Phil (44m 22s): So all my, the one thing I’ll credit is as all the ate fishing, I’ve had the good fortune of doing, you know, having, learning over the years, the hard way to recognize subtle takes, it helps with the walleye. But we fish ’em under indicators. We strip streamers for them, we fish deep water vertically with them, with sinking lines like other species. They have their seasonal habits where they are and just go get ’em and Yeah. And once you beauty walleye is they tend to school up. So once you find one you usually find a bunch of them. Right. And they’re pretty aggressive so they, they hunt like wolves. Daniel (44m 57s): They’re an interesting fish. They’re, you know, they kind of look a little prehistoric too if Phil (45m 1s): Like that. Yeah. They feel like 80 grit sandpaper. Oh really? They’re handled with a bit of care. They’re not gonna bite you, but they’ve got very sharp or perm the gill plates and their spines on their dorsal fin. If you don’t grip ’em Right. Usually come on from underneath you can get stuck. Oh wow. It’s cool. You know, so you gotta be careful that way. Yeah. Daniel (45m 18s): It’s a guides to delight. Yeah. Phil (45m 21s): Yeah. But they hold what, once you get ’em in the palm of your hand, they kind of pose, they just sort of sit there and let you take all kinds of pictures of ’em and, and then say, okay, you’re done with me. And then put ’em back. Right. Daniel (45m 31s): Yeah. It’s fun. All the fish. Dave (45m 33s): Yeah. Well I wasn’t even thinking about that. Phil (45m 35s): So we can do all of that. This, this Dave (45m 36s): Trip. So we can, so August, you can have a chance at all those. Daniel (45m 39s): Yep. You can. Yeah. Every Phil (45m 40s): You half day. So you could go, you know, there’s, I don’t know how many species we’ve laundry listed off here, but you, you know, you can, Daniel (45m 47s): It’s six. I always have to count two. I’m like, which 1:00 AM I missing? Phil (45m 52s): Yeah. So if you broke, if you broke into half days, you’d have six done and three flyouts, right? Yeah. Yeah. Right. And it’s not an unreasonable thing to say, oh, that’s gonna, you know, maybe we’ll get one. It’s like, oh, we’ll get ’em. You’ll Dave (46m 2s): Get ’em eventually. Yeah. Well, if somebody wanted to get in on this hosted trip, how would they do that? What’s the best way Phil (46m 8s): You could email myself? But Daniel I think is gonna handle all the bookings and everything. Yeah, Daniel (46m 11s): You can reach out. Reach out to me too. Another great way if, you know, if you’re listening in 2025, we’ve got a couple trade shows. We’re gonna be at both Tim, Phil, and I. So come up, talk to us in person. Otherwise, yeah, send over an email, daniel@nradventures.com. I’m sure we’ll drop that in the podcast notes there. Yeah. But yeah, and you know, if you’re not planning a, the host a trip, I still do have, I think I have a June date still available for this year. And I might have one or two spots in July. But it’s looking like it’s a busy season. If you’re planning a trip best getting contact, but, you know, early, we book out about a year in advance. Daniel (46m 55s): Highly, Phil (46m 55s): Highly recommend it. Good. I, I’ll also have information on my website about the trip as well. Okay. Fly fishing.com. If you go to my trips and schools page, I’ll be building that up shortly and have that there. So lots of ways to get information. And they can email me too flyCraft@shaw.ca as well to get information as well. More than happy to help and answer any questions. Right. Dave (47m 20s): Good. All right. Well I’ll put, like you said, links to all this in past episodes we’ll have there, the Littoral zone. Will there be a potential Littoral Zone podcast on some of this? Phil, is this something Because it’s different, it’s a little different. Right. Have you talked to Lake Trout or have you talked to Walleye or Phil (47m 35s): No, I’m going to, they’re on the list. I’m going to. Dave (47m 37s): Okay. And is Brian Chan, ’cause Brian Chan’s been on there a couple times. Has, was this in his area as a bio when he was up there? No, Phil (47m 43s): He’s down in region three, the Camloops area. We are up in the northeast corner of the province. Daniel (47m 48s): It’s seven and six, and actually I think even a section of five. So we’re pretty, we’re pretty out there. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s a Phil (47m 55s): Lot. Yeah. How far is the drive from Kalos Daniel, would you say? Daniel (47m 59s): Oh, I, I would reckon about 20 odd hours at least. Dave (48m 2s): Oh, wow. Yeah. Phil (48m 3s): Beast’s a big place. Daniel (48m 4s): We’re covering like, like we’re so close to Alaska. We’re, we’re north of Juneau. Dave (48m 9s): Oh, you’re that close to Alaska. Yeah. So how far are you from Anchorage? Daniel (48m 13s): It is probably about like 18 hours. But that’s because the road snakes around and all sorts of stuff. Straight line. It’s actually really short. It’s just kind of around to bend. Oh, Dave (48m 21s): This is amazing. Well, the cool thing is I’m doing, this is a shout out here to our, our trip. We’re doing a, taking the four wheel camper from Oregon up to Anchorage. So we’re gonna be probably passing right by your place with the family. Daniel (48m 33s): Stop on by Dave. Phil (48m 34s): Yeah, it’s right on the side of the road. You can get gas there. They got a store. Okay. I just punched it into Google Camloops to Daniels lodge’s. Seven 17 hours, 33 minutes with no, with no gas stops. Daniel (48m 46s): Yeah. Dave (48m 47s): All right guys, well this has been awesome. Appreciate all the feedback here and again, we’ll we’ll be following up on some of this stuff. We’ll have Daniel on, we’ll talk more about the trip and some details there. But thanks for all your guys’ time today. Yeah, Daniel (48m 57s): Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure’s. Phil (48m 59s): Thanks Daniel. Thanks Dave. It’s good to see you both. Dave (49m 2s): Alright, we’re gonna take a quick break Right now just as we transition into the section with Lance Egan and hope you enjoy this one. That was great to have Daniel and Phil on here. And now let’s hear from the great Lance Egan, who, who has been on this podcast before. And let’s, let’s take it away. Here we go. How you doing, Lance? Lance (49m 21s): I’m great. Thanks for having me Dave. Yeah, Dave (49m 23s): Yeah. Thanks for putting this together. It’s, it’s been a little while since our first episode. Your name is always out there. It’s always, you know, whether you’re talking your own nipping or really anything in fly fishing, fly fish, food, you know, all that stuff. We’ll put a link to that last episode we did in the show notes today. I wanna get a little update on you and then we’re gonna talk a little about this trip you did up to Northern Rockies and a place that I haven’t been to. So I’m gonna live vicariously through you today. But, but yeah, maybe give us an update. What, what’s been going on since, you know, maybe the last couple years? What, what do you anything new with, with you and everything going? Lance (49m 54s): Oh, mostly the normal stuff for me. You know, fair bit of work, as much fishing as I can fit in and my kids are getting bigger and, and life plugs on. Right. Dave (50m 3s): Yeah. So not much to, are you still doing the, I don’t even keep up with all like the, the competition stuff. Are you still involved in any of that, in any form or fashion Lance (50m 13s): Involved? Yes. I’m still a part of the leadership committee of Fly fishing team, USA, but I stopped competing fall of 2023, so I, I no longer compete in it. I just have a little bit of directional, you know, advice I suppose and yeah, Dave (50m 30s): Yeah, helping guide things. Lance (50m 31s): Yeah. Very limited but still a little involved. Dave (50m 34s): Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah, we’ve been, we’ve been talking to Glade. It’s been cool because they’re, well the, I think the women’s and the youth are gonna be coming to, to the right near where you are, right up, up into Idaho. This, I think this next year. And then maybe the men too after that. Lance (50m 50s): Yeah, yeah. That’s gonna be just a few hours north of me in Idaho. You’re right. The Youth and women’s championship I think is later this year. And then I believe in 2026 we have the, what they call the seniors, which is like the 18 to 50-year-old range. Dave (51m 4s): Right, right, right. Yeah. Maybe, maybe before we jump into, I, I’ve just been interested in, is it like if people getting involved in that event, do you think that’s a pretty, pretty interesting thing? What, like if somebody wanted to volunteer to help, you know, doing some of that, is that a pretty, is that something you think is, is worthwhile? I Lance (51m 21s): Think it’s worthwhile. It’s really fun to watch the competitors. I think that it’s interesting to watch how different people attack the same pieces of water. So like you would have an opportunity to be a a, what they call a controller, which is just somebody that’s making sure each, you know, you’d have, you’d be assigned to one competitor and you’d be making sure they follow the rules and then you’d help them measure fish or really you’d measure the fish for them and then keep track of them on a score sheet. But all the while you’re kind of just hanging, you know, out of the water. But just on the bank right near them, watching them work the water. And I think it’s, I think it’d be an interesting, I, I guess I know it’s an interesting opportunity ’cause I’ve done it before to watch and especially if you’re on one beat, you get to watch up to five different anglers, fish the same piece of water and they’ll all use different techniques. Lance (52m 10s): They’ll fish different water types, they’ll use different flies. You know, some of them might start with dries and then work to a dry dropper and then do nymphs and then finish with streamers and others might just tackle it strictly with nymphs and others might be maybe think that streamer’s the best way to go or someone might just fish start to finish with a dry dropper. You never know. And it’s always interesting to contrast the, the effectiveness of each of those where they find the fish and, and the sizes of fish they catch and, and the flies they use and all that’s really interesting stuff. It’s pretty cool to, to be a part of. I’m sure that there will be, I know you just did an episode with Glade Gunther and I’m, I’m sure that he talked a bit about some of the other opportunities there. I’m sure he’ll have some, you know, sector judge opportunities and there’s, there’s lots of different roles to be filled there. Lance (52m 54s): But yeah, it’s definitely a worthwhile event. It’s really cool thing to do and it’s, it’s fun to, it’s fun to participate and, and see some of those competitors. Dave (53m 3s): Yeah, yeah. No, it’s awesome. I’m excited for that whole thing and it’s gonna be cool to, to be a part of it. So tell me again on now the podcast, because I’m always interested, of course we’re talking on a podcast here, but talk about your podcast that you have going and when, you know, we might see some, some episodes, some new episodes coming out there. Lance (53m 21s): Yeah, so the new and the Knower is what my friend Pablo Suri called the podcast before I was involved with it. And it’s, it’s just solely fly fishing so far. And we have two seasons completely out. Season three is in the process of coming out. We have a couple of three episodes out I think Right now in season three. But we will finish this season and then hopefully we’ll do a season four coming up as well. We’ve been a little less regular on our releases lately. We’ve just gotten a little bit on the busy side of things, but they’ll still be coming out as time allows. Dave (53m 55s): Nice. Perfect. Well let’s, let’s jump into it. We’re gonna talk Northern Rockies Adventures Lodge that we’ve talked quite a bit about here. And, and I wanna hear your experience, ’cause I know it’s a pretty amazing place, you know, the, the species and kind of the location. So first off, maybe tell us, so when, when were you up there? What was the dates and then what species were you chasing? Lance (54m 15s): So I was up there last July, kind of the, I think we were there the very first week of July as far as species go. We were chasing anything and everything that would take our flies. So we ended up catching lake trout, bull trout, rainbow trout, grayling and Northern pike. Yeah, Dave (54m 33s): Rainbow trout, grayling and pike. Wow. So, and that was the cool thing. ’cause you go in July and again, I forget about the, some of this stuff when the time, but it seems like Lake Trout is one of the ones that are hard because they’re down deep or was that the case in, in July? Lance (54m 48s): I’m sure that there were some down deep. We didn’t chase them down deep, we chased them in the shallows and, and really we didn’t really specifically target them, we just fished lakes that had them in it and you’d just catch them here and there. You know, they kind of hang out near some of the inlets and we didn’t catch any large lake trout. They have them there. We just, were not targeting them a fly tackle. But yeah, some decent bulls, really nice rainbows, some really nice grayling. And then we had a couple days of pike fishing, one day of pike fishing with so many pike you can’t keep track of them all. Wow. And wow another day where there were fewer but really, really quality pike, kind of all 40 plus inch pike pretty incredible. Lance (55m 28s): And the scenery was, was second to none on at every, every location. They have a really unique situation there. They, to my understanding, and, and Daniel could correct me if needed, but I think that they are the only fishing guide service that’s allowed in this, in this general area where their lodges. And so they, they offer, you can take off from their lodge and just, there’s a river just like across the street sort of a thing and, and lots of access points up or downstream from there along the highway. So they can just take you from the lodge and experience some fishing. But what they really specialize in are these amazing flyouts in their float planes. And you know, depending on what you want to do, what you want to chase species or lakes or streams or what have you, they, they can take you quickly into the back country where there are no roads, there’s no way to get in there except for just days and days of hiking. Lance (56m 23s): And so you get into these places that are not only, you know, amazing and beautiful but incredibly remote where there’s nobody else there. There’s just moose and you know, wildlife basically. That’s about it. And you have the opportunity to say, you know, today we want to go chase rainbows. They also, one other cool thing is they have drainage into the Pacific and into the Arctic. So they have a very, that’s what gives them the wide range of, of species. Dave (56m 49s): Gotcha. That’s really cool. Wow. So yeah, you and you named, I mean the species again getting pike, lake trout, bull trout, I mean those are, and Grayling Roy, those are, I think, you know, species you don’t hear of all the time, especially catching ’em together. So you got that. Lance (57m 2s): Yeah. Not in the same place. Dave (57m 4s): Yeah. In the same place. Right. And, and so that, so in where you guys are fishing, there’s some like draining north up to the arctic and then some draining like west out to the ocean towards bc. Is that kind of the, the situation? Lance (57m 15s): That sounds correct to me. Yes. They, they, you know, and to be clear, they don’t have all those species in one lake or one drainage. They’re in different drainages. But you with their float planes, you can just take off and they’re on a lake. The lodge is right on a lake. So you take off from, you walk out from your cabin from the lodge, you jump on a float plane, they fly up over just amazing sites over the, the, the mountains there with, you know, snow cap peaks and stone sheep and mountain goats and all that kind of stuff. Cruise around. Oh wow. You can see moose from the planes and it’s absolutely incredible. I’ve posted a few things on my Instagram channel from it at Langan fly fishing where you can see some of the, the footage of flying over the mountains and some of the fish that were caught and that sort of thing. Lance (58m 0s): But it, it’s, I mean, it, I’m relatively well traveled. There’s certainly lots of people that have done more traveling than I have, but I’m pretty well traveled fly fishing wise. And I don’t think I could find a more beautiful place than that general area. It is absolutely incredible. Right, Dave (58m 14s): Because obviously it is the Northern Rockies, right? I mean you’re, you’re in just jagged peaks and water everywhere. What’s it like? I’m interested ’cause we just did an episode with Ariel Tto and she actually is, you know, was the star of flying Wild Alaska, the TV series that was on. And we talked a little bit about her dad passed away in a plane accident. He was taken off in one of those planes and hit a stump or something. Oh wow. But I’ve always been interested because I haven’t been on one of those yet. And I’m always thinking like, man, it seems sketchy. I, I know Daniels is different, right? ’cause they have these giant planes, but what was that experience like flying in, in those and are they float planes? Are they all float planes? Lance (58m 53s): They have a bush plane as well, but yeah, we use float planes basically to get us, they just get us into it, you know, take off from one lake and land on another lake and then they’re kind of stored at some of the lakes. And also they could also land you at a lake, pull the plane over to the side of the lake and then just take a two minute, three minute walk over to a, a stream that connects two lakes. And sometimes it might only be, you know, a quarter mile between the lakes and sometimes it could be 15 miles between lakes. So you have all kinds of water opportunities there to fish as far as the, the flight goes. Yeah, it’s, it’s, I have to admit I was a little nervous my first time as well jumping up in a small little plane. Lance (59m 34s): We had pretty incredible weather so there wasn’t a lot of bumpiness. You know, one flat I can remember had a little bumping of stoop, but not much. Not enough that I think, you know, anybody that’s not normally bothered by any sort of flying would have no trouble at all. Obviously it’s, it’s like all things, you’re taking some risk there, but I don’t know they, those guys have done, you know, thousands of flights and you, I mean you’re probably a lot less safe driving your car to the supermarket than you are jumping up in one of those planes. Dave (1h 0m 4s): Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And they have a ton of experience. That’s the thing we, we talked about that on the last episode we did where Daniels, they’ve been doing it for a long time up there and so it’s not a, not a thing at all. And, but yeah, I think, I think that is kind of a cool bonus really. I think that’s a cool experience. You know, if you go up there is that you get to get in some of those float planes and travel around, maybe talk about a little bit. So you get there. How many, how many days were you fishing? How many nights were you there? Lance (1h 0m 27s): Off top of my head, I think that we were there seven days and we fished six of them. I believe we could have fished seven days, I can’t remember. But it was somewhere in that neighborhood. We basically there a full week. Dave (1h 0m 39s): Yeah, full week. Okay. And when you were there, what was the, and you stayed at the lodge, what was that experience like? Was that different than any other lodge? I’m not sure if you’ve been to many lodges around what, what was that experience like? Lance (1h 0m 50s): It’s very similar to other lodges that I’ve been to. It’s a beautiful lodge. It’s right on the Alaska Highway. They have a full dining room and restaurant that’s part of the lodge. They have different styles of like, you could also rent a little cabin with a little kitchenette in it if you wanted. They have all kinds of different opportunities there. The program that we did, they basically, we had kind of a, a carp style breakfast and then lunches we were always out on the water so we would just have kind of sack lunches, sandwiches and that, you know, bunch of snacks and nuts and you know, fruits and all those kinds of things. And then we’d have a more elaborate sit-down dinner back at the lodge. Food was amazing. Lance (1h 1m 31s): They have great food, great service. Everybody was always smiling, everybody was super happy. It’s a really cool place. It’s, I have to admit I was excited to go. But you know, the lodge is amazing and like I say, the people there were all very friendly and easygoing. The fishing was spectacular and the sights and scenery were just almost overwhelmingly amazing. Dave (1h 1m 55s): It sounds like it was that you had five stars I made here because you had, so I mean it pretty much, it sounds like you did catch all the species that are out there. Is that, is that the case? Was there anything you missed when you were up there? I Lance (1h 2m 4s): Think they have opportunities to catch small mouth and walleye and I think they can get some she fish as well certain times of year, you know, they have, they have, it’s something like, Daniel will have to correct me here. Yeah. But I think it’s something like 132 million hectares of, of wilderness that they can go to and, and yeah, you start flying over it and you’re just like, hey, you know, you’re in the flow plane so you’re talking over the, the headphones, but, but you’re like, what’s this drainage over there? And you, you know, that’s the such and such river. What’s this one over here? What’s this lake? That’s that you. Oh, amazing. And some of ’em you’re like, what’s this little stream over here? I don’t know. I have no idea. It’s too small. We, we’ve never been to that one before. We fly over it all the time. Lance (1h 2m 45s): There’s just so much water to explore. I think that they, as I recall they said they have around 80 pretty regular locations that they kind of cycle through, which probably leaves like a thousand that they don’t cycle through regularly, you know? Yep. There’s just so much water to fish. It’s amazing. Dave (1h 3m 3s): Yeah, that’s good. Okay, so you got the, and what was the, on the pike when you guys are, you got some bigger ones, what was that? I’m always interested in the pike because I think you talk, you hear a lot about pike and muskie and it, it sounds like they’re similar except that pike you’re able to catch more of them. What, what’s your take on pike? Have you caught a lot of pike in the past? What was that like? Catching some of those bigger ones? Lance (1h 3m 22s): Yeah, pike fishing, you nailed it. I mean, compared to true muskie, true muskie are very selective feeder, very selective timeframe. Feeding. Northern Pike are known more for their reckless abandon. You know, they just kind of throw themselves at anything that swims by them. I’m generalizing a bit if they’re, if you have a, a fishery with not very many pike or really highly pressured pike, they can change their habits up a bit. But when you’re in a place like that, like the, the Pike Lake, we fished with tons of fish available. There were some large pike in that lake too, But there were so many small pike that it was hard to get past the small pike to catch the larger fish. And the larger Pike Lake we fished the water clarity is really good everywhere. Lance (1h 4m 7s): But this particular one, we, we nicknamed the Canadian Caribbean because it’s got this like white sand beaches and white sand flats in it with just the occasional weeded. And it doesn’t like you fly over it again. I put something up on my Instagram channel with it, but you fly over it and you just don’t, you don’t think, this is not a pike fishery like, you know, pike fishery if, if there weren’t forests and mountains around it, you’d think you were in, literally in the Caribbean. It’s just not, it’s the water clarity’s kind of the turquoise looking and pretty incredible. But that lake, you would do some blind casting but you could also just kind of drift around or row around in these little boats. Lance (1h 4m 50s): They also had little motors on ’em. But you could go around and, and, and wait till you spotted a fish or you could just cast to some of the weed beds and just cover some structure. We caught some fish both ways, both site fishing and blind casting. But I think we caught two or three fish in there that were sub 40, 40 inches. The rest of ’em were like 40 to 45, 45 and a half inch pike. They were all giants. Wow. Dave (1h 5m 13s): Wow. Yeah. And so then, and that’s a four, anything over 40, right? With a pike is a big fish. Yeah. Lance (1h 5m 18s): Anything over 40 is a big fish. They consider like 50 is the pinnacle of Oh okay. If you catch a 50 inch pike that’s like, that’s like a 30 inch brown trout if you will. You know, it’s just an absolute beast. A giant it. A 40 inch pike though is a massive fish. I mean just incredible fish strength wise. Fight wise. They just got bulky in there. I don’t know enough about the lake’s makeup to tell you what they eat, but I would speculate that they had either grayling or some white fish or something like that, that they were feeding on. ’cause they were definitely not starving. Dave (1h 5m 51s): Right, right. They’re a good side. And what out of, so you have pike and we talked about the other species. What out of those do you think on the trip stood out? Which species stood out more? Was there a moment or fish that you kind of, you know, have some bigger memories of? Lance (1h 6m 4s): Yeah, my biggest memories were the pike, the large pike and the rainbows. So they have, they have several rainbow fisheries that we went to. One of them they just call Rainbow. I don’t actually even know that half the time, I don’t think they’re telling you the real name of the lakes. Oh right. Or the streams. ’cause I, I, who knows, but they, they just said you want to go to Rainbow today? We went Tora, what they call Rainbow twice. And it basically, you land on a lake and it has a, you know, a pretty decent sized stream. I would say the river probably had, oh, maybe 300 cubic feet a second coming into it. Something like that. You know, a decent sized small river if you will. Not, not large, but bigger than a creek. Lance (1h 6m 45s): And it had this slow kind of curved depth that had, you know, deeper slot that had carved out, I’m sure at higher water that led into the lake. And you could just walk up a bank or on the inside shallower edge the inside of the bend and just watch for a fish to rise. And there seemed like there were just rainbows cruising in and outta the lake. You’d see some moving upstream, some moving downstream and some that were just positioned around structure, but really clear water and just sight fishing a lot of times to rainbows or at least sight fishing to risers. And we hit it while there were some green Drakes around, there were few oh nice. PMDs around. We caught a bunch of fish on bionic ants and you know, smaller terrestrials it, that part was incredible. Lance (1h 7m 29s): And these fish are like mini steelhead. They were, I would say the biggest of them were around 20, 22 inches. I’m sure they cat, they get a few larger than that. But that seemed most of them were around 15 to 19 inch rainbows. And they were just torpedoes, heavy, strong. I mean, you’d hook one on a, you know, you could hook one on the inside of this river and on four or five x on, you know, a, a small little dry fly or something and you’d be to your backing knot in about three seconds. Oh man. They’d just scream across the river and then, you know, the battle ensued to get ’em back to you release them and, and almost every one of ’em would do that. They just peel off line. You know, I have similar sized rainbows in a tailwater fishery near me, but they don’t fight. Lance (1h 8m 14s): They fight well they don’t fight like that. I don’t know if they have some steelhead blood in them from way back or what, but they were, they were supercharged rainbows for sure. Dave (1h 8m 21s): That’s right. Yeah. I think they might, again, I’m just guessing. I think, I think there is a connection to, because I, I believe it flows down into the Chena system, which is obviously known for the sche of steelhead. We’ll have to fact check this, all this here with, with Daniel. But I believe there is a connection to the skin. I think there’s some natural barriers or something like that now, but Lance (1h 8m 41s): Sure, that would make sense though. Dave (1h 8m 43s): Yeah, it makes sense. So yeah, in the 15 inch rainbow, I mean I always say too, I feel like the 15, 16, that range is always a solid fish. It seems like right there there’re maybe more active than some of the bigger ones. I’m not sure. Do you find truth in that when you get up to the 20 plus? Lance (1h 8m 56s): Yeah, sometimes. I think it just depends on the fishery of course and the mood of the fish. But I, I think you’re right. Sometimes I think when we’re catching a, you know, a trout especially that’s 20 plus inches a lot to get to that size. In most situations it’s probably an older fish. Maybe not in the prime of its life. Right. Yeah. I guess I would make the, the parallel to, you know, is a a 25-year-old or a 65-year-old more athletic, you know. Dave (1h 9m 24s): Yeah, exactly. I Lance (1h 9m 25s): Think we all know the answer to that. That’s Dave (1h 9m 27s): True. Yeah. It is funny because I’ve met some and you probably have too, some 80, 90-year-old people that could crush you. I always go back to the Frank Moore when I, you know, when I interviewed him in person and, and he’s this great steelhead angler who passed away, you know, a few years back. But when he shook my hand, I mean he literally, he was 95 I think at the time. He almost crushed my hand. He was so strong. Yeah. You know, so I mean there’s always those outliers, right? Lance (1h 9m 51s): Always, always. Dave (1h 9m 52s): Yeah. So, so no, this is great. So you have, I mean basically you had a great trip, all these species. Talk real quick on technique ’cause you are known, well you’re known for a lot of things, but I think euro nipping stuff like that, you know, I think is big with your background. But were you guys doing a little bit of everything out there? Lance (1h 10m 7s): Yeah, we did a little bit of everything. I didn’t do much Ming personally a little bit, but I think just one day that I recall, I did it for a couple hours. Most of the time I was fishing dry. I, that’s my favorite thing to do. So I was fishing dry, I fished streamers a bit as well. You know, the lakes, we were fishing stripping streamers as well as throwing just big dry flies out at the la fish on the pike. Obviously we were throwing streamers And then we also threw some top water divers and poppers for the grayling. It was mostly a dry fly game, although you could nymph some of the runs for them. Also the bull trout, I caught all the bull trout on streamers for sure. What else? I mean that was most of it for me. It was mostly spot in stock. Lance (1h 10m 47s): Dry fly fishing is kind of the, the favorite thing to do when, when there were some bullies around, I would spend part of the day throwing streamers, trying to catch some bull trout. Dave (1h 10m 56s): Some bull trout. Yeah. And the bull trout is interesting because it’s similar, right? Similar to the, the lake trout. Does it look similar? Does it fight? Talk about that a little bit. Were those bulls similar size? Lance (1h 11m 5s): You’re right, they are similar. They’re, I guess technically we call them trout for some reason. Both those species are technically char kind of like brookies where they have lighter spots on a darker background versus the trout have dark spots on a lighter background. So they do look similar. In fact, the very first bull trout I caught, I hadn’t caught bull trout previous to this trip. So that was one of my goals is to catch a bully. So one of the, we were maybe three days in and I hadn’t caught one, a couple guys caught one on the first day, but I, this fish rainbow has rainbows and bull trout, but I wasn’t fortunate enough to come across a bully there. So by day three I was telling Daniel, I’m like, man, I gotta get bull trout. Lance (1h 11m 47s): This, you know, the week, the week’s almost halfway over. I got, let’s, let’s kick this into gear. He is like, I I, we’ll take you to a spot that has bull trout. So we went to this lake that has rainbows, has Lakers and has bull trout. And he took us out in the boat and pulled us, kinda motored us up to this near an inlet. But then in an area where there’s a big shelf that drops off and we just kinda cast streamers to the shelf. And I think I caught three bull trout and a couple of lake trout as well as some rainbows probably within about an hour. So I at least knocked it off the list. None of them were terribly large, but they were, you know, I at least checked the box And then we kinda motored up a little bit further in the lake to an inlet and a couple of the guys went up the inlet to go see if they could find out what was, you know, maybe find some rainbows or something in the stream. Lance (1h 12m 33s): And I ended up just kind of hanging out right where the inlet hangs goes into the lake and just fish streamers through there. And ended up catching my largest ra of the trip right there on a, like a white sparkle minnow. Just beautiful scenery. And yeah, the, the, the mix of species there is incredible as well. If we wanna be negative. The only real worry you have when you’re up there is there are bears around. I never saw one, but they certainly are in the area. They have grizzlies and black bears. Oh, Dave (1h 13m 3s): Nice. There Lance (1h 13m 4s): Were a couple of the fisheries that they carried, you know, shotguns and or bear spray. We never encountered any, I’ve heard on previous trips they have seen bears before, but Dave (1h 13m 14s): Yeah, you didn’t see any out flying or anything? Lance (1h 13m 16s): No, I never did. They say that they do sometimes when they come in for approach on some of the lakes they’ll see, you know, we saw some lots of moose that way. But the mm, cool. The bears were, I think there’s so much, I mean there’s so much wilderness around there that they don’t have to be, I’m sure if the bears hear anything coming, they should probably duck for cover. Yeah, Dave (1h 13m 36s): I’m sure even up there they’ve probably been shot at and probably figure it out that Lance (1h 13m 40s): Maybe, so, Dave (1h 13m 42s): Maybe that, that’s really, yeah, I mean the wildlife is the other X factor it feels like up there. Right? I mean you multiple bear species moose and you said sheep, right? Doll sheep or something like that too. Lance (1h 13m 53s): They, I don’t know if they, they probably do have doll. They had mountain goats and they had stone sheep. Okay. There are also, we saw caribou. Oh wow. There’s, they say they have wolves. I didn’t, you know, we didn’t see any wolves of course. But yeah, I mean there’s all kinds of wildlife for sure. It’s definitely, and I keep saying it, but it’s just an amazing place. It’s definitely a bucket list place. I didn’t even know it existed. A couple of my local fishing buddies had been taking trips up there and, and they actually the ones that invited me to go, Mike Sorenson and, and Al Peterson, but Oh yeah, it’s incredible. I’d like to go back every year if I can. It’s, it’s just an amazing place. Dave (1h 14m 30s): That’s so good. Yeah. I think I’m gonna be doing the same thing. So, so this has been great, Lance, you know, this is kind of a short one. I appreciate you coming on here. Any, any last words before we get on, at least from, from either Northern Lights or what you have coming up? You wanna give a shout up before we get outta here? Lance (1h 14m 45s): No, man. I’d say if you have the opportunity to get to Northern Rockies Lodge, do it. Don’t pass on it. Get up on the float planes with ERs or Michael or Daniel and go have a great time catching fish in a stunning, amazing place. Dave (1h 14m 57s): All right, Lance, thanks again and we’ll be in touch. Lance (1h 14m 59s): All right, thanks Dave. Dave (1h 15m 1s): Alright, quick call to action for you. Pretty much doesn’t get better than that. You heard it from Lance and from Phil. What they had, what experience they had. This sounds pretty awesome. Northern Pike, it’s one of the bonus species up there as well. Lake Trout, we talked about all if you wanna get in on this, check in with Daniel Right now and our adventures.com. You can also check in and let Daniel know you heard this podcast and you’re interested in checking in more, get more details on a trip. Alright. Please follow this show if you get a chance, you’ll get that next episode delivered right to your inbox. And that next episode is a big one. We’ve got, we’ve got Denny records back on Stillwater time. Denny’s gonna be back here. It’s been a while. He always brings it with his knowledge of Stillwaters. Dave (1h 15m 43s): So the great Danny Records. Looking forward to sharing that with you next week and I’m gonna get off to the next one. Appreciate you for stopping in. Hope you enjoyed that episode and we look forward to catching you on that next one. Hope you have a great afternoon, great evening, or a fantastic morning wherever you are in this world, and we’ll talk to you very soon. 5 (1h 16m 0s): Thanks for listening to the Wet Fly, swing Fly fishing show. For notes and links from this episode, visit wet fly swing.com.