Steelhead Fishing in Idaho

Or was it river watching, only your hairdresser can tell. OK, how many of you are that old?



But it wasn't the best of years, fighting near record colds and low river flows because it was too cold for the snow to melt, the fish just didn't want to get out of bed in the morning and travel up river. The fishing was really, really good below Salmon but in the spring we go to Challis (that is another long story, you can ask later). The first night we were there it got down to 13 degrees. The heater would run for 5 minutes (hey, its a small trailer) and then shut off for 5 minutes all night long. And you are sleeping right next to the heater. I was up at 7 starting the generator because there was almost no juice left in the batteries.

And you may be asking, but there is no snow in the picture? Below Challis the river runs through a desert like area, think high cold desert. Go north from here and you run into pine trees as you travel up in the mountains. Keep going and you come to the Salmon river again as it loops back and makes another trip across the state. Think of it like going to from the South Rim to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and on to the North Rim. The bottom is desert. The top is pine trees. And here, the canyon is wide and about 1200 feet deep. As it cuts back across the state, it begins to rival the Grand Canyon. Upstream from the confluence of the Salmon and Snake rivers on the other side of the state, the Snake river is coming out of Hell's canyon which is deeper than the Grand Canyon because the Seven Devils Mountains on the Idaho side.

But I've wondered off point, if you go upstream from Challis back into the mountains instead of the desert, the snow was shoulder deep and it wasn't melting. Yes Nate, if you were to go fishing in Stanley this year, you would need to tramp through snow that was up to your shoulders. We drove almost to Stanley, actually to the old Sunbeam dam and I had to climb up snow that was up to my shoulder's to walk over and look at the dam.