Young fly fishers, whether by age or how green they are in the neck, seem to like traveling to other rivers and streams, continuously trying new things like a kid who turned 21 and is discovering what beer from a cooler will be their beer. The old fisherman, whether by age or experience, are the old drunks at the bar who order the same pint of cheap beer and a well whiskey back that they always have. I am usually the old drunk in Boundary County but a few days ago, I felt like tipping a bottle of something I wasn’t normally a fan of: something fruity, something that I thought was shallow in flavor and only good in short spurts. I decided, after an informative email from an acquaintance that I am slowly believing will be more of a kinship, that I would make my way up a creek that never got too much of my attention in the past due to small fish, the time investment needed to make it up there (which is a huge consideration to a family man on a time budget), and the fact that I have my go-to, staple creeks nearby that I am very comfortable with and know that I can find a few lunkers in.

The email was from a wonderful man and fly fisher named Bill. The email went into detail about a spruce moth hatch that he had stumbled upon far up a northern creek. Among the doug-fir and the hemlocks that shaded the running creek in the late summer of 2023, the sky erupted in the flight of the spruce moth (or the western spruce budworm depending on who you ask) and the trout began to go crazy. Any time one was near the surface of the gin-clear creek, a trout was there to grab it. He described the event as an “epic event similar to what fly-fishers experience in southern Idaho and southwestern Montana where spruce budworm outbreaks are more common. Only the fish were much, much smaller [here].”

Now, while I have been around a few spruce moth hatches here and there and everywhere, I had never been around one up in Boundary county and it sparked my interest. To a fly fisher, a phrase as simple as “there may or may not be a hatch, but if there is one, it would be a biggun” is enough to dive into the Black Book of Excuses and try every single one out on your loved ones with hope that they will let you make a run to the mountains. Lucky for me, I did not have to break the excuse book out. Unlucky (depending on how the moods were when we got out there), my son and my wife would be joining me. Joking aside, even though there can be tension if the toddler is not listening as well as he should be, it is always a great time to have them out with me.

We loaded the car with snacks and toys, extra clothes and gear and left our house behind for a trip up into the mountains, albeit mountains that we could not see as the smoke from numerous fires surrounding our county have filled the Kootenai Valley in a dense haze. As we drove up 95, we saw a beat up truck driving south with a dressed pig hanging from its legs in the bed. Rachel turns to me and quips, “must be going for the natural smoking process.” A great joke, but honestly at this point it could have been the truth. Olaf was in the backseat asking where we were going and if we could point it out, and the best answer we could give him was “north”.

As we made our way up the dirt road, the tips of the pine began to become visible and blue skies with white puffs of clouds showed us that we did in fact make the right choice today. After a decently long drive (enough for four or five “are we there yet?” questions from the back seat) we found a good place to park next to the creek. Now, I have fished this creek a few times lower down in the valley where it just looked like any other creek. But this far up, it had a whole different personality. It was rolling, curving, full of fast runs and slow pools. There was plenty of shade from the doug-firs lining the banks, plenty of room for back casts and deep roll casts, plenty of fish slurping small, brown caddis flies from the surface. It was the type of creek that a fly fisher stands in and says, “yep, today will be a good day”.

A small mountain bluebird and its vibrant blue colors that encapsulate wholly why it is Idaho’s state bird bathed and fed in a shallow pool left on a dimple in a large boulder as I pulled my first beautiful cutthroat trout, Idaho’s state fish, from the riffle that raced around the north side of it. It was one of those many moments one gets outdoors up in this neck of the woods where one honestly has to pinch themselves because there is no way that what they are experiencing is real. It was one of those moments where I look around and say to myself, “if heaven isn’t like this, why would I even want to go?”

I fished up and down the creek with a simple setup: my go-to Moonlit S-Glass 3wt rod and a simple #14 Adams fly I had tied this last winter. The fish were eating, the sun was shining, the child was only driving my wife crazy about half of the time. There was a pool down a ways below us that I really wanted to hit, so I grabbed Olaf and took him down there with me. The second cast of mine across the pool to a sunny slower section exploded just as the fly hit the water and my rod instantly bent over while my son started yelling, “it’s a keeper, it’s a keeper!”

Now, there are a few brookies in this stream and I do not mind taking home a decent sized brook trout to cook up considering they are an invasive species here. But this was no brook trout. This was fighting like a larger cutthroat. I have a strong opposition to killing and taking home any cutthroat trout for numerous reasons. 1) they are a beautiful, native fish that has been struggling over the years to really thrive as more aggressive and invasive fish have been introduced, 2) they are my favorite fish in the world, not only because of their beauty but also the way they fight and their historical influence in the area of the greater Northwest. I talk about small gods of the stream quite often, and usually I mean the cutthroat trout.

After a decent fight to get the fish to my net, my son and I were face to face with a gorgeous granite colored trout with a bright orange slash that was about 10-11” long and full bodied. Then, I noticed where he had been hooked. The fish had brought the fly in deep enough that when I had set the hook, it had jammed into the left side gills. Though I always fish with barbless hooks, a gill-set is never a good thing to see. As the hook slid effortlessly from the gills, the fish began to bleed quite profusely for such a small being. When this happens, the fisherman has two options: either let it go and have it die out in the stream to become a part of the landscape, or put it out of its misery and put it to use in a fry pan at home. I chose the latter on this day, and though it does make me feel bad about taking the life of one of these wonderful creatures, a harvest every so often (especially in this situation) is not the worst thing one can do. With a quick slice down the back of its neck and a slit up its belly, I removed the head and the insides in one pull from the jaw and cleaned the fish out in the creek where it once lived. To me, this is not only the ideal way to clean a trout, but it is the respectful way. I also showed my son the opening of its stomach and how to examine the contents to see what it has been eating. A few baetis of some type, two small stoneflys, and one fascinated young boy.

We made our way back to my wife and placed the fish in a clean bag and on ice. But as I set out into the water across from her warm, flat rock that she had been laying on (she is quite the lizard), I saw something that disturbed me greatly. Hidden behind a different boulder in the water were the remnants of at least twenty smaller cutthroat trout, head and guts, where my guess would be that none of them were above 8” or so when they were harvested. I understand that people enjoy the catching and cooking of fish, and that there are no limits in this creek to what you can keep, but harvesting these (especially all the small ones) is not sustainable and honestly it would not make for a very large meal as well. If one can avoid the necessary harvest of these small creek fish, I believe that one should let them go every single time. The goal here in these streams, these rivers, these waters should be to let the fish population thrive once again and let these trout grow, reproduce, and contribute to the well-being of our fisheries. I want my son to have better fishing than I will have, and I hope that each generation has better and better angling. Take only what you truly need, knock out most if not all the dams, clean up your trash and stop shifting the natural state of the creek in order to make pools or stacked rock towers for no reason other than your own. These are very simple things to remember.

I did not see a spruce moth, and Bill did say that it may be a bit too late in the year for them, but this fisherman drank to the bottom of a new bottle of stream booze that I had only sampled before. Since it is such a haul to get there, I don’t know if it will replace the nearby dives that I spend most my angling time in but it was well worth breaking away from the norms that I found myself in through most of this year. I guess all that I want to say with this piece is that it is worth it to go and try out new spots every so often. Just remember to keep them the way that you found them, and enjoy your time while you’re at it.

Tight lines out there, friends.