Guest author Joe Jackson shares a steelheading story from the Situk River, a 19-mile waterway that drains a pair of lakes in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. TRCP is working to ensure that conservation measures are being taken in the Tongass to ensure quality sporting opportunities, like catching steelhead in clean, cold water, is possible for future generations
These steelhead — Aashát, in the indigenous Tlingit tongue — have hatched from globules no bigger than a pea, survived perils ranging from mergansers to salmon sharks, and traveled hundreds if not thousands of miles under their own propulsion to be here. All I had to do was board a flight to southeast Alaska in early May.
The Anchorage airport in May is full of fly rods. It’s not every person that’s got one, but it’s pretty close. Some of them strut like horses because they’re going on a fishing trip; others wander dejectedly, faces grim like they’ve just been diagnosed with stomach cancer, because they just got back. We all pass one another, at once anonymous yet joined in solemn union. We are the enlightened; the caste that knows steelhead exist, that this is their season. Occasionally we’ll nod at one another, acknowledging, but mostly it’s just a fleeting confluence of gazes and no-grins pleated over skulls that frenzy for the anadromous.
Snatches of conversation in the terminal go like this:
“Lost a thirty-eight incher in a logjam.”
“We tried soft eggs this year, don’t know if they helped.”
“River was skinny as a meth-head while we were there. They’re gonna be gettin’ rain this week, though. Anybody headed there now ought to be in for a treat.”
Steelhead, at least when you’re headed toward them, have the pleasing effect of most depressants. By that I mean you can board a plane and sit back and relax, and you really don’t care what happens around you so long as you get to a sea-run rainbow trout at the end of it.
My friend Ryan, who would accompany me on this fishing adventure all the way from Missouri, met me in Juneau. Since there are only a couple of jets in and out of our destination per day, his flight from Seattle had to wait for the passengers of mine to flurry onboard before taking off. We snagged seats next to one another and chatted the way old friends do. It was the same old Ryan sitting there next to me; same reticence, same gladiator gleam in his eye that I’d seen those years ago as we chased cohos, trout, grayling together when he was living in Alaska – the gleam that suggested he wanted nothing more than to fish himself to death. The world changes and so does your life but fishing buddies rarely do.
We landed in a growing drizzle, the grandeur of mountains and ocean dulled by thick sheets of cloud. Gravel popped in the undercarriage of the rental car as we headed into the village. The upholstery smelled like rainforest.
Our destination was the Situk River, a 19-mile waterway that drains a pair of lakes in the northwest of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. The Situk is a heavy-hitter for fisheries productivity, even by Alaskan standards. It receives runs of all five Pacific salmon species, as well as one of the highest (if not the highest) steelhead runs in the state. Every spring, an average of 7,000 steelhead make their way from the Gulf of Alaska to the Situk to spawn. As you’d imagine, it’s become a Mecca for steelhead enthusiasts like us.
Ryan and I fished for a couple hours and got a feel for the river, which, as those voices had suggested in the Anchorage airport, was rising steadily with the pounding rain. We weren’t alone out there. Nearly every pool was bestatued by a fisherman, some by two or three. We passed them all, nodding, muttering, seeking our own water. Eventually we found it and I managed to land a bright hen steelhead on an egg-sucking leech. She was maybe eight pounds and pretty as could be; the kind of fish that makes you sit back a little and think about what you’re doing, and maybe why.
I think one of the things about anadromous fish that so fascinates us is that they lead such big lives. Take a second to imagine it: a puny little steelhead fry wiggling around somewhere out there, no bigger than your little finger. In just a year or two they’ll swim out into the open ocean the same way a college kid finally says goodbye to Mom and Dad. They’ll head off into the world and if they return it means they’ve made it and that they’ve achieved everything and exactly what they were meant to. This is something humans rarely do, so, naturally, we envy the hell out of it.
Someone’s first steelhead is a big deal. It ain’t like catching your first bluegill. Steelhead are said to be the fish of a thousand casts, and maybe that number is dampened a little in this place, but it’s still respectable.
All fish are, to some extent, sensitive to light. Steelhead especially. The very best time to catch one is right at or in close proximity to sunrise and sunset; just about when darkness either cedes authority or takes up the reins. You can catch them in the middle of the day, sure, but your chances are higher at low light. They feel safer, the water’s slightly cooler, and, ideally, they’ve forgotten most of the angler harassment they endured the day before. With sunrise being at something like five in the morning for that region of Alaska, Ryan and I knew we’d be in for some early wakeup calls. You want to chase the dark off the water, so to speak, so we planned to rise at three, get prepped, hike in, and be fishing through headlamps about as soon as civil twilight began.
That first day was full of rain. Cold — startlingly cold — and clammy and relentless. Our souls huddled together in it, first as we strung up our rods and then as we hiked upstream, reminding ourselves that this was steelhead weather, and steelhead weather brings steelhead. Boots squelching through mud, the trail more of a suggestion. Waist deep in the stream. Logs smooth like mammoth tusks.
Morning passed. Ryan almost hooked a fish but didn’t.
Steelhead weather brings steelhead — steelhead weather brings steelhead —
Lunchtime. We struggled upriver, wallowing in snow that was up to our belly buttons, climbing like toddlers under downed trees. We knew the trail ended about two miles up from the bridge, and though this distance was academic on the map, it felt like forever out there. Finally we reached a pool that became our favorite; a starting point, a lunching spot, an ace-in-the-hole, a coffee break. Ryan managed to land his first steelhead there toward mid-afternoon, and though I almost bungled the net job, I didn’t. I guess it was a fish he was meant to have.
Someone’s first steelhead is a big deal. It ain’t like catching your first bluegill. Steelhead are said to be the fish of a thousand casts, and maybe that number is dampened a little in this place, but it’s still respectable. Even if they’re the fish of five hundred casts, to catch one means that you’ve made those five hundred casts, and that you’ve made them in such a way as to be effective, and that you’ve braved the elements that steelhead find conducive to procreation and that you’ve outwitted a fish notorious for being supernaturally moody. A special occasion to be sure, and one to remember for a long time, probably forever.
We caught a few other nice steelhead that day before heading in at dusk. The fish weren’t all that big, but when you’re talking wild steelhead, you don’t complain. Back at the lodge we were filled with aches and the kind of bone-deep cold that only hot showers could take care of. We hung our waders and soggy rain jackets and knew we’d be sliding into them damp the next morning.
Pretty soon we were tying more flies — black woolly buggers because we thought we’d figured out a pattern — and you could just see the old fire, reawakened, in Ryan’s eye. First steelhead. No goin’ back. By the time we called it quits it was pushing eleven o’clock. Alarms would sound four hours later.
I had to envy Ryan’s passion. He was here to fish, and by God he was going to wring out every second of it that he could. Like all those stream miles we’d shared when he lived in Alaska. I laid there listening to his snoring, wondering if I had what it took to keep up with him; if I could do this for another five days, sun-up to sun-down; if I even cared enough.
Just before sleep bagged me, though, I realized I didn’t have much of a choice.
Steelhead mired our dreams at night, each one playing out to the ratcheting click of things unfurling; our reels, our minds.
We fought the river as it rose each day. Rain hammered us for the first couple, but it would relent occasionally and the clouds would part like curtains to reveal the sun and blue skies. We’d bask in these ephemeral heavens. We had fly rods in our hands, everything we could ever need on our backs, and more often than not we’d be staring down a jag of steelhead that were so big and numerous they looked like salmon. All of the world’s problems could be solved from right there.
Fish to hand didn’t come easy — turns out our supposed theory about black woolly buggers was all wrong — but they weren’t impossible, either.
Eventually — around day three or four, I think — the weather came to be dominated by partial sun rather than those wool-sock clouds that leaked rain. It was a welcome change. The river finally started dropping and I could hear the echoes of all those voices in the Anchorage airport:
“Anyone headed there now will be in for a treat.”
They weren’t talking about the surge of rain. Well, they were, but they were mostly talking about what would happen after it stopped. The river had been low and clear and not very conducive to steelhead movement for weeks leading up to our arrival. Then all of the sudden, the rain came and water levels rose and the stream temps dropped within the range that steelhead like to party in (somewhere between 39 and 42 degrees Fahrenheit). Now, with the atmospheric spigot turned off, the river would likely hover in the correct temperature range, while its levels would slowly drop and constrict steelhead to fishable water. In short, it was an ideal set of conditions, and our days somehow got longer and longer just trying to capitalize on our improbable luck.
Steelhead mired our dreams at night, each one playing out to the ratcheting click of things unfurling; our reels, our minds. We’d rise to the wails of alarms, eyes stinging, bones pleading, up into the moldy dark to the kitchen where we’d make the first pot of coffee, where we’d heat the burritos and scarf them down and move like arthritic dogs to load everything in the car. There we were in that slice of time, driving mindlessly to the gabble of radio, following headlamps that cut open the forest, wandering the river like mink. Chasing the dark just as hard as we could.
The second-to-last day is when things really started to happen. We’d slowly worked out the fly patterns that caught fish, more or less. We also figured out things like where those fish would be holding, how to approach them, how long of a leader to use, and how much lead split-shot to crimp on.
Things began that day, like usual, at our pool. That sounds pretty casual as I write it, but in the moment I remember I was festering like a splinter.
Every muscle ached and I was running on twelve hours of sleep for the last week. Little things irritated me at first and then infuriated me; how I was the only one with a net, how I always had to be the one to heat lunch, how Ryan would somehow crave the exact opposite of what I wanted. One second I’d want to fish a run carefully and off he’d go blasting downstream; the next he’d stop heron-still and cast to the same fish for an hour, maybe two, while I just wanted to see more of the river.
Anyway, curmudgeon Joe was tampered a little after I’d caught a nice steelhead on a Copper John nymph that morning. One that I’d tied for grayling fishing. Then about ten o’clock Ryan hooked a fish and, in the commotion, an absolute whopper of a steelhead sidled out from under a log to see what was happening. He took on my first cast, and for the first time all week, we were doubled up. Ryan got his netted in short order, but mine was big enough that I couldn’t do a whole lot right away. We danced in a stalemate for a while; the fish trying to bulldog back under the log, me walking the tightrope of just enough pressure to keep him out but not enough to snap the tippet. Just when I thought I had him, and I went to scoop the net under him — Ryan was holding his fish in the water on the gravel bar — he took off and the angle was all wrong and the hook popped out. Kapow.
Well — that blew a fuse. I had all of a million accusations to throw at the world, at Ryan, but in the end it came right down to my own fault. I’d gotten caught up in the hype; I wanted a steelhead double to snap a photo of for my article. Of course you don’t see that when the blood’s running thick through your eyes, though.
We fished downstream like we did any other day. I was moving fast just wanting it to be over. I’d put big stretches between Ryan and I; sometimes a couple hundred yards, sometimes farther. Later in the afternoon, Ryan hooked a fish way upstream and when I heard his shout I could’ve killed him. Just call it a day, for Pete’s sake. I had an article to write and I couldn’t do it following his lunatic ass up and down the river. And hell — I hooked that behemoth a half hour ago and where was he with the net? I hoofed it upstream for something like a quarter mile before I finally got to him.
It’s a horrible thing to say now, but I wished that fish would just snap him off. Give him a taste of that ugly plummeting feeling; make it so I wasn’t the only one. But that didn’t happen. He got the fish in a spot where I could net it, so I did, and he whooped like he always did, like a kid who just won a baseball trophy.
Same old Ryan.
Finally, near dark, things went my way. I cast a pink stonefly that I tied in my classroom all those months ago to a coin-slot of fast water. A bright hen steelhead obliged the cast and stuff happened like it’s supposed to and Ryan netted her. It turned out to be the longest fish we’d seen thus far, and one that threw me from despondency to euphoria.
You lose a fish and you might as well kill yourself, then a half hour later you land one and the world is yours, there in the palm of your hand like a seed. This is what those faces in the airport know, the glowing and the forsaken. Those heading home and those leaving it. They know what it is to chase steelhead and to play with fire. They know how it all tends to shake things loose inside you.
The fish lay panting in the net and we both stared. Then Ryan grinned from ear to ear and held out his fist. I knocked it with my own. My knuckles said something along the lines of, “I’m sorry for being a butthead earlier, and I’m actually enjoying the hell out of life right now,” so that my mouth didn’t have to.
Same old Ryan. The world changes but fishing buddies rarely do. Thank God.
Joe and Ryan caught these steelhead in southeast Alaska in rivers flowing out of the iconic Tongass rainforest. TRCP is working to ensure that conservation measures are being taken in the Tongass to guarantee quality fishing opportunities like catching steelhead in clean, cold water is possible for future generations. If you want more information on conservation opportunities in Alaska, sign up for our newsletter HERE.
This is an excerpt from Joe Jackson’s outdoor memoir, Chasing The Dark, published in August 2024 by Epicenter Press. You can find more of Joe’s work at josephdjacksonwriter.com.
