The Best Pool...
The BEST Pool My Clients Won't Fish
I’ve been lucky enough to fly fish in a lot of beautiful places, but one of my favorite spots anywhere is a trip that most of my clients choose not to take.
Granted, It is a three and a half mile hike back to Icannottellyou Creek. (Google it if you need to.) All I will tell you for sure is that it’s in the Denali area and I’ve never run into anyone else fly fishing back there. Although once, on the way out, I passed a guy glassing the hillsides for Dall Sheep and during moose season I’ll sometimes run into folks. But no fly fisherman. And that’s what matters.
Three miles really isn’t that far, but most of the folks I guide don’t want to take the hour and a half it takes to reach this spot. They’re hot to fish. I get it. I understand. They want to get right into some grayling. But a hike in does--I think--make you appreciate each fish that much more: and once you do get back in this valley you feel…privileged. The scenery is epic, with sheep sometimes feeding high above you as you fish. I also sometimes spot moose on the way in or out and we tend to jump a ptarmigan or two in the willows along the river bank. Oh, and the grayling fishing rarely disappoints.
There’s really just one good pool to fish and, of course, that’s another reason why most folks don’t want to make the hike in. But what a spot. It’s a long pool at the base of a cliff that looks as if it was created for dry fly fishing. Standing beside it, it’s hard to say how deep it is because it’s so clear. Clear like vodka, so that when you drift a fly over it some people strike too soon, expecting that a grayling has already taken the fly, when in fact the fish is still heading for the surface.
When fish do rise off the bottom (some of them so dark they look almost hockey puck black) you wonder how it’s possible that you didn’t see them when you first looked into the water. When you land one of these big males, you realize these fish are actually darker blue than black, with silver sides and a lighter belly. When you let them go, they seem to vanish shortly after leaving your hand. Like smoke in the wind. How they blend in so quickly and so well, I can’t say.
Last summer my son and I made the hike. He’s fifteen and he complained for the last mile or so. Not that it’s a hard hike. It’s just that he’s a kid. There’s a low area that’s a little boggy and wet and apparently teenagers don’t mind that sort of terrain because he didn’t complain then. He liked slogging around in that stuff. It was only when we started to gain some elevation that I heard his grief. If you ask him now, I’m sure he’d tell you otherwise.
He caught some gorgeous fish that day and I mostly watched. I’m old enough now and I’ve caught enough grayling that I sometimes do that. After he’d caught six or eight good ones, I cast to some runs that he couldn’t quite reach, landing a few good fish before lunch: Lipton Cup of Soup cooked over a little Jetboil stove. Cream of chicken, I think.
On the hike out there was no complaining: I think because he had all those fish to recatch in his mind. It had been a good day. We’d hiked. We’d fished. We’d eaten some hot soup on a gravel bar. We caught some of those big, dark grayling, and on the way out my son spotted a cow moose with a calf. All in all, not an unusual day in this part of Alaska. But a darn good one.
If you’d like to fly fish the Denali area with us, we’d love to hear from you. Maybe you’re up for the hike? Email me at denaliangler@gmail.com.
Take care,
George Rogers
Owner and Fly Fishing Guide
Denali Angler