Way up North
Steelhead Fishing the Rogue and Klamath Rivers
As seen in California Fly Fisher,
September 2005
© 2005 Jim Zech
By writing what I am about to write I will be called a liar. It is inevitable. What was once unorthodox has now become orthodox, and to espouse outrageous success with the old orthodoxy is to be a heretical dissembler. So be it. I am what I am.
Here goes: one day while fishing on the upper Rogue River in late November a few years back three anglers, myself being one, hooked 52 steelhead fishing swung flies and not nymphs. There, I’ve said it; commence with the accusing.
Common wisdom on the Rogue and many other steelhead rivers, the “new orthodoxy” if you
will, is that the steelhead there will not take swung flies and if you ask most guides they
will tell you that you are a fool to try. That is why I am a liar. Stating that 52
steelhead were hooked by any number of fly fishers on swung flies is not the party line.
Guides, get out those talking points!
“The water here is too cold!”
“The fish are too dour!”
“These fish eat only bugs!”
“We’ve got to nip this talk of swinging flies for steelhead in the bud!”
Okay, maybe that’s a little too over the top. I guess the real point should be that three fly anglers hooking 52 steelhead on any technique means that they were fishing in a really good spot, and that’s what I should be talking about and I will: two good spots in fact; one the Rogue and the other the Klamath.
For those of you unfamiliar with these rivers, the Rogue is just across the California border into Oregon on Highway 5, at least that is where the part that I like to fish is to be found. The Klamath River is just inside the California border down from Oregon on Highway 5, at least that is where the part I like to fish is to be found. They are separated by merely a half-hour drive. Thus a combined trip fishing the two rivers is not only feasible, it is nearly mandatory!
I’ll admit that I haven’t spent near as much time on the Klamath as I have the Rogue, nor have I had the same kind of success, but I’ve done alright. The Rogue is just easy; lots of places to launch a boat, raft, canoe, or pontoon, an easy shuttle, lots of places to eat too much and drink too much, and lots of places to sleep off eating and drinking too much. The Klamath is frankly wilder, and thus more adventuresome, or harder, depending on your attitude. And in general over the last decade the Rogue has been a more consistent place to actually catch steelhead on the fly. However, I’ve really liked what I’ve found on the Klamath. What I’ve found is steelhead–some, at least–and the talk around the campfire is that the fishing is definitely getting better. What I’ve also found is a very long stretch of good steelhead water with a very short roster of anglers standing in it wetting flies.
I was first really
introduced to the Klamath by my friend Dave–o about 15 years ago.
He fished the Klamath often and every time I travel up to fish that river or even drive over
it I think of him–I think of his gold pinky ring as he would put his hand on my shoulder
saying, “Duder, we need to fish this run again; I know that there is a little henny in here.”
(All fish were “hennys” to Dave-O even if they were males.) He would have made this comment
either smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer, or, before his teeth got too bad, eating a piece
of jerky or an Abba Zabba, or ingesting some combination of the aforementioned. Every one of
these substances was in a competition to be the first to kill Dave–0. The cigarettes won.
The part of the Klamath that Dave-o loved and that I’m talking about isn’t that lower section that gets all of the good press. That’s the part where giant schools of thousands of generally smallish steelhead wait eagerly to jump your fly as it passes in front of them as if they were thousands Australian sheepdogs waiting to jump a well-tossed Frisbee. I fish the Klamath from Iron Gate dam down to Happy Camp and mostly I fish the section downstream from Highway 5. To me this water is the most “classic”. And it is the section that seems to hold the fewest number of anglers and also seems to hold the highest numbers of wild fish, if you fish it at the right time.
The first time I fished this area was with Dave-o in a snowstorm in mid-December.
He told me as we traveled north up over Black Butte Summit that the fish we’d expect
to catch would be about a cubit in length. I wasn’t quite sure how big that might be
and for all I knew a cubit was 7 feet long. I soon learned, however, that a cubit, at
least in Dave’s mind, was the length of his forearm, and Dave–o was a short man with
appropriately proportioned limbs. Based on the Klamath fish I’ve seen since then,
Dave-o’s estimate was about right. Most of the fish we’ve caught have been 16” to 24”
long, which is smallish on the steelhead scale, but they make up in enthusiasm what they
lack in size. And there are also a few that go bigger, although I’ve yet to personally land one.
For literary symmetry here I’ll just state that the part of the Rogue that I generally like to fish is upstream from Gold Ray Dam. This section seems to hold fewer of the “half-pounders” than the section from the town of Rogue River on down, although both sections can be crowded at times. I’d have to say that the average fish in this section of the Rogue is probably in the 3 to 6 lb. range, although most anglers testify that the fish they catch average much larger. I guess these much larger fish just aren’t often caught while I’m around.
Timing
The crowded
time on the Rogue starts at about mid-September,
but the crowds start to thin by the end of October. The crowded
time on the below–highway–5 part of the Klamath is never, but there
are several guides, locals, and itinerants that work the section from
Highway 5 to Iron Gate in September and October. The preceding statements
in conjunction with the fact that I don’t like people at all act as premises
to the conclusion of why I like to fish the Rogue and Klamath starting in November,
weather permitting.
Both the Rogue and the Klamath get good numbers of hatchery steelhead returning to their upper stretches starting in about late mid July. In the Rogue mixed in with these hatchery fish are “wild” fish, meaning mostly that they don’t have clipped fins, although their being of pure wild lineage is suspect. Here are the total fish counts at Gold Ray Dam for the last 9 years, showing that a lot of fish arrive in that stretch in the summer. (Y&ear/total July 15th/total end of year) (1996–1,043; 11,680); (1997–1,128; 7,538); (1998–1,158; 6,056); (1999–478; 4,785); (2000–1,409; 6,734); (2001–383; 16,114); (2002–4,039; 29,296); (2003–4,656; 20,297); (2004–3,727; 13,658); (2005–3,071; N/A). However, during the summer the flows are higher than they usually are in the fall. The summer the flows out of Lost Canyon Dam, the dam at the top of the section of the Rogue that holds steelhead, are usually somewhere between 1500 and 2000 CFS. That and the summertime heat combine to draw a lot of rafters. Sometime in mid–October the flows are intentionally reduced to about 900 CFS, and that is when most fly anglers prefer to fish there, both because the rafters leave and because the river is easier to fish with those flows.
The hatchery fish of the
Klamath seem to quickly run through the river to the water of
their nativity in the hatchery at Iron Gate. And they seem to do so mostly in September and October.
But on the Klamath after October something old happens: wild fish slink slowly back into the river and post themselves throughout its length, waiting for the first big flush of rainwater to draw them into the full flowing creeks to spawn. And therefore, the efficacy of fishing the swing on the Klamath, savvy? No sabe? Let me forcefully and with surety elucidate my confident conclusion with the support of nothing but anecdotal evidence and not even much of that.
When you fish the swing you can cover a lot of water well. Nymph fishing is a good way to cover a little water very, very well. The middle Klamath is a lot of water with fish in it…somewhere. Besides that, most of the water that I’ve seen on the middle Klamath consists of long classic runs. If you concentrate on a small area of the run with a nymph you may never find the fish. And also fishing the swing with a classic Klamath fly is just plain bitchin’. But to be honest I’ve never really tried nymph fishing on the middle Klamath, so maybe I’d have caught thousands if I’d just have been a little less enthusiastic about swinging a fly. (For information sake, the Klamath below Iron Gate Dam has more nymphing water than below Highway 5.)
Contrary to my expressed attitude, I have fished nymphs on the Rogue and will state that they do work really well for catching steelhead there. The water on the Rogue is generally more conducive to nymph fishing than is the Klamath, especially the closer you get to Lost Canyon Dam and especially when the water is lowered in October. Nevertheless, I still fish the swing on the Rogue instead—somebody’s got to do it.
Gear
My most essential piece of equipment for fishing the Klamath and Rogue rivers is my
trusty steed whom I call “Pontoon.” “Whoa, Pontoon. Settle down, boy; easy..easy.”
It is the single best fly fishing gear purchase
I’ve made in the last 10 years. Driftboats and rafts work for negotiating the water,
but they do not give you the ability to ditch your fishing buddies in pursuit of a piece of water
to call your own. Pontoon boats=independence! Freedom! Rugged American Individualism!
And pontoon boats are not as easy to sink as is a driftboat, which is one of their most
endearing features.
If you plan on
buying a pontoon boat for floating steelhead rivers I’d highly
recommend getting one actually made for whitewater—the kind with urethane bladders that
is built with the same construction as a real whitewater raft. And get a bigger one than
the one you are probably considering. A ten foot boat looks huge inside a fly shop, but
it looks really small as you are sitting in it in the middle of a raging rapid.
Speaking of whitewater, the section of the Rogue above Gold Ray Dam has 4 to 5 major and accessible floats, and one is home to the driftboat-bottom opening rock called “the Can Opener” for imaginable reasons, which is to be found right at the end of a section of class 2+ rapid called “Rattlesnake”. Rattlesnake is the worst to be found on the upper Rogue, and in a pontoon boat it’s not very threatening. Rattlesnake starts with a challenge for a drift boat because it begins with a 150 foot long chute in the basalt bedrock as wide as a driftboat with the oars tucked in through which the entire flow of the river is constricted, in the low water of fall anyway. If your driftboat goes sideways in this section you are probably in trouble. Your pontoon boat is much less likely to have a problem if it goes sideways in Rattlesnake and it should just bounce off of the Can Opener, but I haven’t run either experiment. Oh ya, between the Can Opener and the basalt chute there are a couple of 2 foot drops that you want to make sure you hit squarely, otherwise you might flip.
The middle Klamath has some sections that are a little more challenging to the river running skills of the average fly angler. Goff Canyon between Seiad and Happy Camp is a long class 4 section. My personal solution to negotiating those sections is to not negotiate them at all–I’ll try a different section instead. But most day floats include at least one “fun spot,” so bring a rope. That way if you don’t feel comfortable running a spot you can just rope your boat through, or you can tie your buddy to his seat and push him through to see how he makes out. Don’t forget to wear your PFD regardless. I try and find the ones made with no floatation placed on your back below your shoulders–they are much more comfortable while sitting in your pontoon boat seat.
The Rogue above Gold Ray has 5 or 6 good floats, (drifts, runs), depending how you slice them. You need a key to use the take out for the first run above Gold Ray, so that one is kinda off the table unless you know someone. Every other put in and take has a good “ramp” for launching and good parking. You have to pay a fee of a few dollars to use them. There is a very reliable and affordable shuttle service that will move your vehicle from your launch down to your take out. Sweet.
There are a whole lot of ways to slice the Klamath from Highway 5 to Happy Camp into floatable sections. That part of the river covers about 70 river miles. There is a shuttle I’ve heard, but I’ve never used it. It can be expensive, since some of the runs require the shuttler to drive over 100 miles. Up ’til now I’ve floated the Klamath with more than one car, so to speak, so we’ve had the shuttle covered. I’ve also walked/hitchhiked the shuttle, but don’t count on getting a ride; Highway 97 is a low traffic affair.
Finding a place to sleep and eat is a little more problematic on the Klamath than the Rogue. On the Rogue you’ve got Shady Cove, White City, Medford, and even Ashland within a reasonable drive, so there is lots of trouble to get into there. On the Klamath you’ve got Yreka at the Highway 5 end, and then you’ve got bustling Happy Camp at the other. There are advertised some spots to stay between the two, but I haven’t availed myself of their services. There is a pretty good restaurant in Seiad, but we usually just drive back into Yreka to stay.
My other most essential piece of gear is (are) a small two-handed rod(s). My favorite is a 6 weight with power enough to handle the sinking tips that I usually use. If I am trying to cast a bigger fly or just want to impress the gals with the long and graceful casts that I usually fail to make I’ll use a 7 weight. But I also have a 5 weight that is a ton of fun with a full floating line and light classic fly on a long leader. And that reminds me of a story.
My buddy Bill and I headed to fish the Klamath for a few days one December. The first run we were to fish is a favorite of mine since I had once landed six fish in it in a single pass. [By the way, I’m not really a numbers guy when it comes to steelhead, or anything else for that matter, including mathematics. I’m usually pretty happy just to be swinging a fly through a classic steelhead run with merely the hope and possibility that there is a fish in it somewhere. The talk here of big numbers is mainly for literary drama.] I wanted Bill to fish this run because he is my friend, but I wanted to fish it also and I thought that a fist fight to determine who went first might set a bad tone for the rest of the day. We decided instead that we’d flip a coin. The winner got to go first, but had to use a floating line. Bill won.
This particular pool is really quite long, about 100 yards of sweeping, steelhead-holding, black beautiful classic steelhead water, but the gut of the run is deepish, and it would have had to be a very aggressive fish to move that far for a fly swung on a floating line. The tailout of the pool, however, is one of the best spots I’ve ever seen for swinging a fly just under the surface. It’s strewn with exercise-ball sized boulders a few feet under the surface, and the current speeds slightly before falling out and into the next run. Bill grabbed a light spey rod and tied on a sparse and classically graceful silver hilton. He fished through the top and middle of the run with no action, but I had on a sink-tip with a small leech and got no lovin’ either as I fished down behind him. As he neared the tailout I got more and more eager for his fly to swing through the honey water, so I started wading down closer to him in an attempt to hurry his relaxed progress through the run. I was probably fifty feet above him as he got into the good stuff and he turned upstream to make a comment to me. Of course, when he did so and lapsed his concentration I saw a swirl approximately where his fly should have been swinging. “Did you feel anything just now?” I asked him.
“No. Why?” he cocked his head quizzically.
“Don’t take your step and do that exact same cast one more time,” I requested.
He did and a beautiful wild “henny” took his fly. It’s not an extraordinary story, it wasn’t a big fish, it wasn’t an epic battle, but it is one of my favorite steelhead memories nonetheless. I can’t wait to get back to that run and try again, although I have tried in the years since and have been unable to duplicate that memory. That kind of thing keeps me coming back.
Flies
Now given what I’ve already written here about presentation you can infer that I’m now going to recommend flies to swing, and I will. But first some nymphs, for those of you that are into that kind of thing.
Since it has long been illegal to use weight on your leader when fishing the Rogue
above Gold Ray Dam, the best nymphs have been heavily weighted ones. That is because
nymph fishing for steelhead works best if you get your nymphs right in front of the fish.
There have been some very cool stony stonefly nymphs and stony caddisfly pupas that have
been created for steelhead in the last few years; flies with tungsten beads and lead to
get them right in the fish’s face. Frequently on the Rogue because of the no-weight-on-the-leader
law these heavily weighted flies are also used to help sink weightless salmon-egg patterns to be
fished behind spawning salmon. Very effective. Another effective way to present an egg-pattern
behind spawning salmon is to use a fast-sinking, short sink tip with a very short leader—like a
foot and a half long—with a single glo-bug, a weighted egg pattern, or even a nymph. You get a
much more direct-to-the-fly contact with this technique and, if you are on the ball, feel more
steelhead takes. Since I tend to fish the Rogue later in the season most of the salmon have
spawned and died, so I don’t get a chance to fish the egg hatch much any more.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way on to the real flies, the ones used for swinging. If I had to pick one to fish with it would be a smallish black articulated leech—effective, but not so pretty. If I had to pick one fly to keep in my box to show to any angler who asks what I’m using it would be a red ant or grey hackle yellow on the Rogue, and a silver Hilton or burlap on the Klamath. Very sexy flies, in a Lauren Bacall classy, yet sassy kinda way—and all about the same age now too!
O.k., another story; I’ll keep it short: One late August day about 10 years ago before I knew any better than to fish for steelhead in August, Dave-o, Jamie C, and I fished the Rogue. Everything about that day was classic. We were in Jamie’s driftboat which is classically made of wood, we were classically fishing the swing, which back then was how most everyone fished, and we were using classic steelhead flies–I fished a red ant all day. It was as bluebird bright day as you can imagine for August, the air was about 80 degrees, and the water flow was about 2000 CFS. All these things combined meant that we should have caught exactly nothing. I still look at the photos from that day, photos of each one of us holding several different beautiful chrome steelhead. I write this to give the finger to all generally accepted concepts about when and how one should steelhead fish, even the concepts that I personally espouse. The fact is that if you have the time and if there is a reasonable expectation that you might catch a steelhead then go.
Clothing/Cold
Steelhead fishing is supposed to be cold. And I’ve been colder on both the Rogue and Klamath than I have been fishing in the snow and ice in British Columbia. That is because I was prepared for the snow and ice in British Columbia but wasn’t prepared for the misty shady dark cold of these lower latitude rivers. Be prepared. Bring extra clothing in a dry bag. I once had to supply Stan with my spare warmies after witnessing him pirouette his way down a crumbling gravel bank into the cold, cold, Rogue halfway through a 10 mile float.
Of course, sometimes on those bluebird days of the early fall it can be really warm too. Once, after a fat lunch with cold beer, I fell asleep while drifting in my pontoon boat on the long slow water below the Can Opener on the Rogue and only woke up when I hit the bank. At least the water temperature of the upper section of the Rogue remains relatively fairly cold, so the steelhead don’t seem to suffer the warm temperatures as do the anglers sometimes.
On the Klamath in the early Fall the steelhead and the salmon can suffer the temperature as do the anglers. Sometimes they suffer from the heat far worse; I don’t recall ever hearing of tens of thousands of anglers perishing from the warm water temperatures as did the fish in the fall of 2002.
The rainfall in the Klamath basin this year was below normal again and the federal administration that encouraged the irresponsible use of water in the Klamath watershed that led to the 2002 die off hasn’t changed it’s water policy, (which they probably call “The Healthy Fish Initiative”). My fingers are crossed.
The fly fishing for steelhead on the section of the Rogue above Gold Ray is threatened too. It seems the decade-old fly fishing only regulations during the majority of steelhead season on that stretch of the river have been changed and that you can now use bait, at least on the river above Shady Cove and after November 1st. I guess the fish are mostly hatchery fish, but I’d imagine that fishing a gob of roe drifted under an indicator like a nymph would be about as challenging as using a Hoover to fish for dust bunnies. I’m guessing the fish mortality rate will rise. Consequently, I’m guessing the fly fishing catch rate will decline on that section of the Rogue in November.
I think that I will now conclude, again with mostly only apocryphal evidence, (apart from the actual fish counts themselves), with assertions that the fishing on both the Rogue and the Klamath rivers has improved significantly over the last decade. It will be interesting if nothing else if this perceived improvement will be maintained over the next few years at least. Who knows, maybe the Eel will start to fish well again. As a matter of fact, I heard this rumor last year…
Addendum
Here is a more full account of the epic 52 x 3 day. A couple of years ago and a few days before Thanksgiving my friend Stan and I went to fish with Dave, who guides on the Rogue. Although we were in Dave’s boat, it was a non-paying deal for him and thus he was planning on angling right beside us that day—we’ve known him a long time and when he heard that we were up fishing his river he invited us to join him in his boat.
That frigid November morning while we were launching the boat and
stamping around the ramp trying to get blood moving Dave mentioned that
we would probably want to fish nymphs on account of the river being only
45 degrees warm. “I know you guys prefer to swing flies, but these fish
ain’t going to move far to chase a fly when the river is this cold.
You’ve gotta put it in their face.” It is usually a bad idea to ignore
the advice of a guide, but Stan and I both did–we just didn’t feel like
hassling with the sacrilege of indicators when we had some beautiful
classic steelhead runs to fish. Long story short, Dave hooked a dozen
fish in that first run on nymphs, he was just roping them. But I hooked
8 swinging flies! Stan had started down below in some slower water and
landed a couple of silver salmon and a couple of steelhead. Dave
decided to quit fishing at that point because he had some guests
the next day and didn’t want to ruin it for them. Stan and I
continued fishing. Our buddy Dick arrived in his pontoon boat
and fished with us the rest of the day and by the end we had hooked 52, a
dozen on nymphs and 40 by swinging. (If we’d have all nymphed I’m sure we’d
have hooked even more.) I’ve never witnessed a steelhead day like it before
or since and don’t expect to ever again.
