Winter 2003's El Nino left the B.C. Okanagan without much snow. So far this season most of the snow fall has landed far south of us. Washington and B.C. have experienced unseasonably warm, often sunny weather. But, a suicide note, this isn't, since warm, dry weather equates to low, clear rivers and good fishing opportunities.  So we blew out of here (Apex Ski Resort) Jan 12th, in search of some deep winter fun on the rivers of western Washington.

These trips begin with a flurry of fly tying: black & white versions of Clouser's Minnow, Alaska Mary Ann's and the killer Comet of Patrick's Fly Shop's, Les Johnson.  This may sound a bit far-fetched, but the Comets seem most attractive (to fish? or fisherman?) if little eyeball decals are glued on the barbell which weights/sinks the fly.  So, first Seattle stop was Patrick's Fly Shop to acquire the stick-on eyeballs.  Patrick's owner, Jimmy LeMert has been fishing a day or two every week this fall and winter, as something of a sabbatical from the business end; and we were destined to join him for three days on the Sauk and Skagit Rivers, angling for Dolly Varden trout.

After a great visit with son, Rob (recently back from two months working between Alaska and B.C.) and a riotous all night birthday party, we headed north on I-5.  About an hour out of Seattle having passed a juggernaut of in-bound traffic stretching past Everett, we exited east towards the hills.  Cezanne queued "Dueling Banjos" on the stereo.  Destination: serious Bubba country.  Yes, very few indigenous fly fishermen around Skagit County.  Local fishing looks more like a half dozen or so guys/pickups gathered around a camp fire near the riverbank. Lots of Bud and gallon zip-lock bags filled with salmon eggs (lunch?), but no coolers, as it's plenty cool outside.  A rod or two are attached firmly to the bank, with line dangling into the river.  On the river, these Tar Heels (Puget Sound lingo for everyone west of the Cascades, north of Hwy 2 and east of I-5) don't stray far from town - that town being Darrington.

Luckily, the only motel in town, the Stage Coach Inn, wasn't that bad. We were the only tourists in town (big surprise), yet the Stage Coach was pretty full – mill workers up from Oregon.  Our Darrington discovery survey revealed: the Burger Barn; the State Liquor Store, housed in a tiny corrugated tin lean-to; a small cafι; a modest super market and one of those smoky, fried-food taverns.  Despite the limited services the views are spectacular. Whitehorse Mountain's snowy Matterhorn-like pyramid, rises behind stately evergreens. While we could have opted for nearby Concrete, WA's North Cascades Inn, right on the Skagit, we wanted to be closer to the Sauk.

Checked-in and we were off to our first piece of Sauk water. Getting geared up, you don't want to step too close to the road, as logging trucks just RIIIIIPPPPP past, rocking the suburban.  Then, there's the matter of finding the river. Since the Sauk drains a number of North Cascades Mountains, it is subject to massive fluctuations in height/breadth which can result from rain and snow melt. The entire river bed must be a quarter-mile wide, with all sorts of shallow/dry channels, gravel berms, small forests and fields of shag carpet-like moss. In summertime, it runs opaque with glacial till. Jimmy found the right patch of shag and we followed it like the yellow brick road. The trick was to find the same one for the trip back. As with all coastal Northwest rivers in winter, a vast number of decaying former-salmon create a fetid miasma. Dog owners can imagine Fido's popularity after a good roll on a salmon carcass.  Then, there's the view, the single greatest impediment to fishing concentration: Baker's cone to the north, Whitehorse to the south and a panorama of North Cascades peaks along the east.  Bald eagles everywhere.

Beautiful fishing till dark on two different drifts. Jimmy mustered a winter grandslam (sic) - a suckerfish, whitefish and thankfully a very nice Dolly. He and Les have developed a technique for attracting winter Dollies and Steelhead to the fly.  These fish are on the bottom, in two to four feet of water, and there's no point in fishing above them.  But, hooking every rock and stick in the Sauk is to be avoided. Miming Jimmy, we flung and plunked our way downstream - throwing a long high underhand lob to the upstream end of the slot then mending and high sticking the fly down.  Speaking of rocks, the Sauk must have a violent geologic history. The river bed and bank are composed of every sort of stone imaginable – marble, granite, glittery quartzes, composites loaded with fossils.  Early miners must have gone nuts around here – though they never found much gold.

The second drift we hit just before dusk. Pink mountains, mist on the river, eagles and an owl in the trees. No fish for the humans here today.  But unfortunately, Jenny, our puppy, scored.  She found just enough of a rotten chum to get her ears and shoulders covered in the strong and unpleasant odor.  One third of a bottle of puppy shampoo later… The fetid collar rode with us in the suburban for a few more days.  Swinging like a cardboard air-freshener, hints of molded tennis shoes wafted thru the car with every road bump.  We eventually tossed it.

The next day we joined John Farrar, the NW's premier steelhead guide, who has set up his winter 2003 Skagit/Sauk steelhead guiding operation in Concrete.  First spot was a beautiful run on the road up to Ross Lake.  No takers, but we did see a flotilla of one-man pontoon boats.  It seems that these craft  attract carefree users that are missing some of the basics of river etiquette - this pod was no exception,  in our next encounter with them they smiled and waved as they floated over our lines and then beached right below us and fished the water we were working.

The second drift of the morning was littered with hundreds of beached salmon carcasses. Jenny was grounded and remained in the car. We waded out thru the racks of bobbing chums, and started casting. John hooked a submerged and very dead member of the spawners. It gave him quite a tussle. After hooking a nice collection of stickfish, leaffish, rockfish, logfish and that one gelatinous corspefish, Cezanne caught up with the real thing. The boys got some nice pictures of Cezanne and a Dolly Varden. After lunch, John fired up the jet boat and we tried out a couple of his favorite drifts downriver. Jenny loved the trip.  Zipping downstream in the open boat, tongue out and ears blown straight up, tons of birds, too cool…
The light was fading when Jimmy hooked into what was either a good steelhead or monster Dolly Varden. We'll never be certain, as it shook the fly loose just as Jimmy wrestled it to the bank. Visibly irked, Jimmy reeled up, pirouetted towards the bank, caught his boot on a rock and took a baptismal plunge up to the shoulders.  Oh well, there's nothing like a baptism to change the fishing luck.  He may not want to fish any more with the jinxed Alexanders, as 2 of his 3 lifetime dunkings have occurred in our presence. (We  also feel at least psychologically responsible the destruction of two very experienced guides' vehicles - did our mere presence have anything to do with one totaled radiator - punched driving over a large rock that wasn't supposed to be there and on another occasion, the simultaneously loss of both wheels of a boat trailer on a highway? )

Many good laughs over dinner. Then talked turned to the wild rivers of the Olympic Peninsula. We wrapped up our fishing with another great morning on the Sauk, where Cezanne hooked a trophy suckerfish. We dropped Jimmy off at his eclectic Seattle home and headed back to Canada - Oops detour - somehow, en route, we found ourselves on a ferry heading west. As we pulled into the Town Motel in Forks, the Talking Heads line "How did we get here?" popped to mind.

When was the last time any of you North Westerners visited Olympic National Park? A hundred miles of the wildest, most primitive and wonderful hiking beaches on the West Coast.  Real rain forests.  Almost unexplored glaciated alpine ecosystem chock full of elk, goats, deer and smaller creatures.  And of course, the Park contains the healthiest, most diverse habitats of salmon and trout left in the lower 48 – the incredible Hoh and Queets drainages. And if the Town Motel isn't your speed there are the delightful accommodations and meals at the Quinault and Kalaloch Lodges. Naturally, it's hard to overlook the 160 annual inches of rain (+ another 30" of mist/dew!) and the clear-cut, ravaged appearance of everything outside the Park. Oh, and then, there's residential squalor, the result of poverty plus mud.

Knowing nothing of Olympic Park fishing, we first visited Bob Gooding at his Olympic Sports, in Forks. "Les Johnson sent you? Don't know anyone named Les, are you from the IRS? – h'yuck h'yuck."  Bob treated us to humor and a strong recommendation that we start on the upper Hoh, inside the Park.  Since his fly tier was vacationing in Mexico and we'd left the vise and materials at home, no hot pink hamster sized "Popsicles" for us.  We would have to make do with those Sauk flies.  It's all fly fishing inside the Park – catch and release for wild fish – and we had the upper rivers almost exclusively to ourselves.  Rather surprising in hindsight, to a couple of faux Canadians who didn't realize it was the MLK weekend.  Near the end-of-the-road Hoh campground we started on a perfect, 200yd stretch of river, a drift which exuded the presence of steelhead: current moving at a walking pace, gin-clear water about three or four feet deep in mid-river.  Somehow, the morning just kept warming up. By the time the temp hit 60F, we had a sizeable pile of unneeded clothes on one of the 150', old-growth cedars lying prone on the gravel bar. Cezanne was intently employing the Sauk River approach with her 7wt rod and Bob was learning to cast the new 14', 9wt two-hander.

That 7wt of Cezanne's met its match as she and a good-sized steelhead fought to a standoff. After an initial run, this fish wouldn't budge from mid-river and Cezanne persisted in drawing it towards the bank. It could be seen quite clearly and was the largest fish she'd ever been connected to.  She inched it closer and closer, screeching to Bob to hurry to the car to get the camera. (Didn't know that she could screech? Well it was a huge fish!) It's hard to hurry in waders, but Bob legged it up across the sand and gravel – Oh No! the keys are in the coat at the bottom of the discarded clothing pile.  He returned just in time to see a last-ditch, wild yank and twist and the fish escaped.  Spit the fly, which for those interested was the Dolly Comet – pearluminescent Mylar sparsely wrapped around a hook with weighted eyeballs. This left her exasperated and self-critical.  What followed was a solemn vow that the next time she was hooked up to one of these beauties, she'd play it as though Farrar was standing at her elbow coaching and encouraging patience.  Soon the sun was getting low and it was time to return to beautiful Forks, WA – famous primarily for its locals beating up an entire Hell's Angels rally sometime in the '60s.  Right before we left, Bob got caught napping by a "primordial" bump – triggering the typical violent fisherman's reaction  - the power strike - when slight pressure to the bank would have been better. The steelhead population being rather small, any missed opportunity is truly painful.

Day Two – up early, driving directly to yesterday's new-found, private, secret drift. Of course, we arrived two minutes behind a guide and client who thus got first pass at "our" drift. This guide seemed a brazen sort, as he didn't even flinch when we caught him stomping down the shallows, flyline flogging the water – apparently with the thought of driving fish downriver towards his client! To add insult to injury, his client soon brought a beautiful fish to the bank. If nothing else, we're persistent, though, and we were back on the same drift on Day Three.  About halfway down, Cezanne's flyline went tight then aerial, while a big silver beast made a couple of leaps near the other bank. Playing this steelhead in textbook fashion, Cezanne led it to the bank after about ten minutes of give and take. Tiring the fish and coaxing it that last foot into the shallows took a few more minutes and suddenly, it made a final run right up the bank at her - she had it! A three-foot fifteen pound wild buck! This time Bob had the camera at the ready. Getting the adrenalin under control took longer than playing her mighty fish. All grins, back at Bob Gooding's that afternoon, we didn't dare mention yesterday's unethical guide – no doubt, a son, cousin or nephew. Quipmeister Bob Gooding was flabbergasted at Cezanne's success, as he seems to put little faith in the efficacy of either fly fishing or women.  Since we were going to be taking advantage of the incredible mid-week rates at the Kalaloch, 30 miles south, Gooding suggested we try fishing the Queets River – glacial like the Hoh, but about three times as big – on the following day.

Day Four – a twelve mile gravel road through another dense rain forest and lots of elk took us to the Ranger Station, near the drift Gooding had recommended. The short hike to the river bank was every imaginable shade of soggy green and some of that thirty annual inches of dripping fog.  Our chosen stretch of river was so beautiful and fishable we hardly noticed as the fog turned to drizzle and on to real rain.  As the afternoon wore on, you could actually notice the river rising. The local ranger, the only person we saw on the Queets, suggested that the river would be brown and several feet higher in the morning. No action, but what a beautiful river.

Indeed, several inches of overnight rain brought Peninsula rivers up to their high banks and the color of chocolate milk. Pretty cool to re-check our drifts on the Hoh and Queets and find the spot where we had left our clothing just a few days before, under a foot of raging water. So that's how those big trees get there.  Another day of great beach exploration, storm watching and checking out the local real estate scene (anyone want to go in on a 30 acre piece of oceanfront? Less than $1million. The catch? Years of wrangling with the Quinault tribe and Jefferson county required to turn it into more than just a nice view). So back to snowless Canada. We were tempted to stop again on the Sauk - but it was up too.

Epilogue: now a week later, we've only gotten 6" of snow, and though the x-c skiing has been fun it's going to take a good bit more for the downhill to get into swing. This upcoming week is supposed to be dry, so we are heading back to that spot on the Hoh… Oh Boy!