We rafted six days down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, and except when we had to sit down through rapids we fished. We caught and released fish too, lots of fish: native west slope cutthroats, a couple of small parr-marked rainbows evidencing a prior successful steelhead romance, and two eight-inch Chinook smolts ready to attempt the 1000-odd mile trip to the Pacific. We didn’t raft on our own; Kris never rowed and I never set up a tent. We were with Solitude River Trips, along with 16 other clients and 11 guides. The guides did everything of importance, including rowing, making coffee, cooking food, and untangling leaders. The guests were an unnecessary but happy accompaniment to the guides’ good work.
The guests drank coffee in the morning and beer in the evening and fished. I gained weight during my wilderness experience, which weight gain was fun at the time but not so good in retrospect.
The Middle Fork of the Salmon cuts through the Frank Church Wilderness, which is the largest contiguous protected wilderness in the lower 48, which is a long way around to saying it’s big but don’t forget Death Valley and Alaska. Under the 1964 Wilderness Act no new improvements–roads, mines, convenience stores, or apartment complexes–are allowed. It’s name is actually the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, changed in 1984 to honor Idaho Senator Frank Church.
The Salmon River Mountains dominate the Wilderness. The Mountains are a discrete range of the Rockies, defined by the Salmon River and its tributaries. The Main Fork canyons are actually deeper than the Grand Canyon, though not so sheer or dramatic. It’s plenty dramatic enough. There’s low brush and trees along the river, steep barren elevation changes marked by scattered pines and granite faces, blocks, and scree, and high crags covered by new snow. Like I said, plenty of drama.
It isn’t the River of No Return Wilderness because you go there and never come out, but because if you come out by river you can’t turn around and go back by river. Even going down the Salmon is hard, and the lower canyon of the Middle Fork is impassable except by boat. I guess that’s why somebody named it Impassable Canyon. I’m quick that way.
When Lewis and Clark reached the Salmon they abandoned their original plan to float the river to reach the Pacific. It could have been done, the Salmon to the Snake, the Snake to the Columbia, the Columbia to the Pacific, but it ain’t easy. The Middle Fork is the same only more so, and in these late days while the Main Fork is generally accessible by car we could only reach the Middle Fork by bush plane.
Bush plane, a tiny four-person piper, to the put-in at Thomas Creek Airstrip on the Middle Fork. The pilot Mike pointed out we were often flying below terrain. That meant that when we looked out the window we were as often as not below nearby mountain ridges. It was all pretty exciting, though Mike wouldn’t roll down the windows and let us fish.
The Middle Fork runs northish, and the guides brought the rafts downriver from the south to meet us when we got off the planes. During higher spring and summer water the float trips are longer, 100 miles. We did 60, which made things both leisurely and less crowded. School was back in session and late-fall Idaho weather can be iffy, wet and cold, so there weren’t a lot of other parties on the river. Flows were very low, about 1.6 feet at the USGS gauge near where we put in. While coming downriver we could look up to see 15 feet above us where early-season high water had slammed debris into rock crevices and the forks of trees.
The weather, by the way, was perfect. Sunny and cool, clear except for a bit of spitting rain one afternoon and a lot of wind the final day.
We were there for west slope cutthroat. Seven states have cutthroat as their state fish, and the list reads like a Who’s Who of western fly fishing: Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. William Clark wrote the first description of cutthroat, and the species, Oncorhynchus clarkii, was named for Clark. The subspecies, west slope (Oncorhynchus clarkii lewisi), was named for both Lewis and Clark. It is such an American fish.
There are 14 identified subspecies of cutthroat, spread across the western states and Canada. Two subspecies are extinct. Two subspecies, the Lahontan and the greenback, were thought extinct but were rediscovered in remote streams.
Loss of habitat has decreased cutthroat populations. Because of its seclusion, the Middle Fork remains one of the great cutthroat rivers. The great fish, like the great places, often survive on the margins.
The cutthroat looks like its closest kin, the rainbow, without the brightly-colored side-bands. The cutthroat’s distinguishing mark, and one of the prettiest (and most violently named) marks in fishdom are the crimson symmetrical slashes at the bottom of its jaw, the slashed throat, the cutthroat. The west slope’s back is green, and marked by tiny sparse fine dark spots towards the head accelerating in density down the back and sides through the tail. The belly is bright silver. In the middle fork they are small, with a good fish at 14 inches, and until the wind drove me to a 5 weight a 3 weight was the very thing.
The Middle Fork runs into the Main Fork, where we would take out six days after we put in. The anadromous fish, steelhead and salmon, make the run the opposite way from the Pacific to have sex and die–which I guess is better than making the run the opposite way just to die. Even though impeded by power dams and predators and whatnot, there are still both salmon and steelhead that make the journey, the longest fish migration in North America, the river of sometimes some return. Do you think salmon quote Kipling as they head upriver? Ours is not to wonder why, ours is but to do or die. It is such a cruel joke: Sex and death: they’re just piscine Romeos and Juliets.
After packing the stuff in our tent–the hardest work of our day and really almost too much to bear–and after breakfast we were on the river by 9ish. I played the guitar in the morning, sitting as close to the river and the fire as I could get, drinking coffee, trying to remember bits and pieces of Bach and Gaspar Sanz and Tárrega. It was the most pleasant thing in the world, at least for me. I can’t speak for the poor people who had to listen.
When we weren’t on the river we spent considerable time lazing around with the 16 other clients while waiting for the guides to do all the work. We were from a narrow range of circumstances. The largest contingent was from Portland or just on the Washington side of the Oregon-Washington border. There were five Texans (including us), with four from greater Houston and one from Austin. Two clients were from New Mexico, two from Idaho, and then some outliers, Alabama, Maine. There were doctors, lawyers, hydrologists, retirees, a nurse, and a consultant.
It was a congenial group, educated, mostly older, tending towards the same predispositions and attitudes. There was an evening when I sat with Lynn and Dan, Mike and Carol, Russell and Cathy at dinner, and we veered into politics. Lynn from Maine believed that Susan Collins would retire rather than run for the Senate again, which was interesting to me. No one was injured because of the political discussion, which was also interesting to me, but then there wasn’t a lot of voiced disagreement either. I suspect some who differed from the voiced opinions kept their mouth shut.
On the way downriver groups are permitted for designated campsites, and at night we would arrive with tents up and dinner underway. We hiked some during the day, once to see Shoshone pictographs, once to a waterfall, but mostly we floated and fished, or in the two boats of non-anglers floated and watched the wilderness. I supposed at my most intense all of the Middle Fork looked to me like the couple of square feet of water around the fly I was fishing. It’s no wonder that back home from time to time I find myself standing in the middle of a fire ant bed. I kinda narrow my focus when I fish.
We fished dry flies, big hoppers mostly, or hoppers with a purple haze dry dropper, or hoppers with a weighted underwater purple prince nymph dropper. It didn’t matter. The fish were gullible and eager. I had checked the hatch chart–the chart of bugs that are likely to appear in that place at that time–in my ancient copy of Great Hatches, Great Rivers, a classic that I’m sure is on everyone’s shelf. The Middle Fork isn’t one of the listed rivers, but Silver Creek was, and I figured that was close enough. Grasshoppers it said, grasshoppers and flying ants and blue-winged olives.
I tried to tie some size 20 blue winged olives, tiny wee things that could fit four flies comfortably together in the cup of a contact lens. It wasn’t my best effort, producing lumpy, misshapened mayfly imitations that would have embarrassed the Creator if they looked like anything in creation. It took me three weeks to crank out five, and then I left them in my box, ashamed and distrustful. Hoppers on the other hand were more in my wheelhouse, and I found an easy pattern from FlyFish Food that I could crank out simple as kiss my hand. Flying ants were easy too.
And I caught stuff on the hoppers, if not the flying ants. So did Kris, and for the most part Kris caught better fish than me all week. There was a day, my birthday, when she outfished me all day and I spent most of the day untangling leaders and maybe, maybe, managed five fish. I reckon God was punishing me for those ugly blue-winged olives and for being old.
There was a day too when I outfished Kris, and at the end of the day the guide held the boat past an underwater granite shelf where clear green water dropped off of a riffle into a deep slow hole. I made perfect casts back over my shoulder and each time caught a fish and too often crossed Kris’s line. I had already caught dozens of fish over the course of the day and Kris finally caught two, all day, and not that we’re in the least competitive but yeah, we are sometimes competitive. I’m lucky I made it off the river and am not still treading water in that deep green hole. In any event the last day I was punished and sent to the back of the boat.
The middle fork is a wild and scenic river, undammed, as is the Main Fork. At dinner the final evening—steak night! Baked potatoes, surely from Idaho! Sautéed mushrooms! More red wine! Did I mention the food was just fine? And red wine?—Mike and Russell discussed Snake River dam removal. In 2020 the Corps of Engineers is scheduled to publish its report on removal of four dams on the Snake down drainage from the Middle Fork, so the report is likely to be completed in the next decade or so. In the Columbia River drainage most dams were built first for cheap power and second for irrigation and flood control. Woody Guthrie, that shill for Bonneville Power, wrote Roll On Columbia and 25 other songs in the 30s as damned dam propaganda. Cheap power changed lives. It also changed rivers.
Mike sided with dam removal. Russell argued that removal wouldn’t matter, that there would still be plenty of dams left to kill salmon and steelhead on their way to or from Idaho. Mike said the loss of salmon and steelhead was increased incrementally dam by dam. Russell countered that collected sediment made removal impractical and probably harmful. I stayed quiet, but that last seemed like an engineering problem, and the popular notion is that rivers heal quickly after dam removal.
Russell was passionate, Mike was passionate. Russell said that the economic upheaval from removal would be enormous. Oddly the damaged people were more abstract to me than the restored river and the steelhead and salmon—my reaction reminded me of the incident in Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitude, where Abbey says that he’s a humanist, that he’d rather kill a man than a snake. I was a bit surprised at my own callousness, but all-in-all I’d just as soon let both the man and the snake be. If I parsed it correctly though Russell’s argument seemed to be that people who depended for irrigation and recreation from the dams have a right to dam preservation.
I doubt that there is any right to preservation, or if there is that it couldn’t be compensated–that’s my lawyerly training–but I have to admit my own reasoning was largely selfish. Those wild cutthroats in that wild river were not trophy fish, there were plenty of places to go to catch bigger fish and rarer fish, but these were wild and native fish, fish whose species and subspecies had been in that drainage from before our predecessors crossed the Bering Strait. Each one we caught was a beautiful fish, and when you watched them rise to your hopper, suddenly appearing suspended in the river a foot below your fly, it was somehow just better, better than other fish, as perfect as anything in all the world.
