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My friend Wayne and I were itching to get back to Alaska. He wanted to go fishing; I wanted to explore some more. A hard to get to spot on a map, a paucity of information, and we were imagining the big ones that wouldn't get away.
I think these are all digitized copies of pictures from Wayne; I can't seem to find mine.
We decided to do a short trip on the Ongivinuk River, a well-known place with reasonable fishing. Maybe we'd hit it just right and have a great time. Then we'd have our pilot, Rick Grant, fly us over to "the other place" and we'd check it out and decide from the air. The airlines lost Wayne's bag, so we lost a day waiting for it to arrive in Dillingham.
Rick dropped us at the lake at the head of the Ongivinuk. We set up camp on the north shore, then rigged up our boats and fished around. Wayne had his 12' inflatable kayak; I used my 7' Water-Master raft. We caught a fair number of char, about 16" all around the lake. There were loons on the far shore calling, and it was a wonderful welcome to the place.
There were some big fish jumping clear out of the water; they sounded like someone throwing boulders.
The mosquitoes were pretty bad; I spent the whole evening with my headnet on sitting in the smoke from the fire. The next day was pretty mediocre fishing. We caught some early on, but when we wanted some for dinner we got skunked so we ended up with spaghetti.
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| Camp at Lake | Ongivinuk country | Wayne with Char | Wayne with Char |
On our first day floating down the river, I broke my good Winston 5 weight. I had a lead leader on and the middle section broke on a pick-up. I finished the day with my 10 wt. I had brought for salmon. That night I duck-taped a fiberglass rod from my foam pad/chair to it; worked after a fashion...
We saw a couple of moose one the morning, a fun diversion. while trying to figure out where we were on the map, I discovered my compass had swapped north and south. Good thing we had a reference point and a vague idea where we were so we discovered it, or we would have been floating upstream :-).
The fishing wasn't great; my diary says Wayne caught 42 fish one day, but we didn't get the rainbows we were looking for. The scenery was wonderful, par for Alaska. Even though the mountains are only 3000' high, they are rugged and wild. It would be a hellacous country to bushwack through. Mosquito-infested willow thickets, and foot thick lichen and moss higher up.
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| Camp along river | Ongivinuk country | Wayne with Char | Wayne with Grayling |
As we got down towards No Lake Creek, we started catching chums, sockeyes and one king in addition to grayling and char. Wayne caught one nice rainbow and I finally pulled a good-sized one out from a big rock, but other than that we were disappointed on the rainbow front.
One evening a bear wandered down to the gravel bar we were camped on. We tried to discretely get our cameras and pepper spray, but s/he noticed and disappeared into the bushes. Chilli and ash-cakes for dinner. Jam in a Gerry-tube is a bad idea. It gets runny when it gets warm. I knew that. I forgot. Doh.
On our last night we camped on a gravel bar at the mouth of the Ongivinuk. The Togiak at that spot is a wide, braided fan, with no good holding holes for fish. We had thrown back all the fish we caught earlier, and had been trying to catch a sockeye late in the day for dinner. We didn't but I caught a chum so we had that. We got to bed about 1:00 a.m., with no need for a flashlight.
We moved on down river, planning to camp on the gravel bars at the mouth of the Nayorurun. But they were under water, so we went a bit further down. We both caught quite a few salmon, kings and chums and a pink.
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| Griz butt | Gary with fish on | Lower Ongivinuk country | Big rainbow rock |
Rick picked us up on our gravel bar on the Togiak, then ferried us up Nayorurun Creek. We were going to put in on a small pond at the head of the creek, but Rick decided it was too small for him to land and take off in the beaver. From the air, Nayorurun Creek didn't look too bad; there was one obvious waterfall, but that's about it. So we back-tracked and flew up Nagugun Creek. It had more white water, but we decided it was runnable. Rick said something like, "Heck, if you can run that, I can show you lots of things to do..." He dropped us off on Nagugun lake. We fished a few of the side streams and caught a lot of 10" - 14" char, one to 20", but that's about it. We were going to spend a night at the outlet, but, we weren't impressed with the fishing. So we started on down the creek...
We started with our rods out, intending to fish our way down. I went about 100 yards, then pulled over, cased my rod, donned my life vest, and got down to serious maneuvering. It rapidly got to be continuous whitewater. Not deep, but tight, continuous, gnarly. We finally pulled over at one point and lined out boats down about 100 feet. After about three miles it eased up. Somewhere in there Wayne put a hole in his floor. We stopped and re-rigged, and he rode on the tubes the rest of the way. Fortunately we were past the worst of it by then. We pulled over and made camp, and spent the next day drying out and repairing things. We went swimming / took a bath. When the sun came out we started a fire and spread Wayne's week's supply of granola out on a poncho to dry. Then we worked on patching up his boat.
For the record, chocolate bars like Kudos tasted good the first few days, but after that fruit-filled granola bars tasted better. Dried strawberries were too sweet. I don't believe that, looking back on it now, but that's what my diary says... Regular dried fruit bits were ok.
There were no fish in the river by camp, unfortunately.
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We floated on down to the falls, catching nothing along the way. When we got to the falls, we saw why... it's about 30 feet high, and a complete fish passage barrier. From the plane it only looked to be about ten feet... In the middle photos below, note Wayne standing on the far bank for scale. We floated right up to the lip, as the bank was pretty brushy and we didn't want to portage any further than necessary. Fortunately, there was a good game trail around it. The portage around the falls was easy, on a game trail river right. It wasn't exactly short, but we didn't have that much gear anyway. We camped on one of the cliffs overlooking the falls, as there is nothing but uneven cobble on the bar at the bottom.
We figured from the map that Nagugun Creek drops about 100 ft / mile, average, for three miles. My guess is that it's 200-250 in places near the top.
We had a great view of salmon trying futilely to work their way up. It was heart-breaking to watch, knowing they could not make it. I really wanted to have a big net and help them up over. Anything that tries that hard deserves to succeed eventually.
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| Above Nayorurun Falls | Wayne on Far Bank | Wayne on Far Bank | Wayne on Far Bank |
We caught a few salmon and a bunch of grayling as we floated on down below the falls the next day. They seemed to be feeding on salmon eggs, but also anything edible on the bottom. We didn't catch any char, and no rainbows. I was thinking of climbing one of the nearby hills, but the bottom 500 feet of obnoxious brush dampened my enthusiasm. The next day I wished I had.
The next day we camped on a gravel bar, as usual. Before packing up in the morning, we waded out into the river and were fishing when a griz came down to fish just below camp. When s/he finally smelled us s/he took off in a hurry. Wayne decided to test his pepper spray; he'd bought an unused one from a friend that was several years old. It fizzled and dribbled blobs of goo instead of spraying a mist; good thing the bear wasn't more curious. The bear didn't go far; Wayne was first to leave camp, and as he floated around the corner they came face to face in the next pool; all parties back-peddaled in a hurry.
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| Salmon in pool below falls | Wayne with Char | Lower Nayorurun |
We caught quite a few fish in the lower Nayorurun; Wayne caught about 80 one day. The mosquitoes were fierce, so we spent non-fishing hours huddled in the tent.
On our last day we caught a few nice rainbows and char. The char seemed to be moving up the river, and were bigger than the ones we had been catching before. We thought they might be following the salmon, but don't know for sure.
Wayne got hung up on a tree and had to bail out of his boat and got soaked. Both his rods went overboard. Fortunately, the river was small and you could touch bottom. I found the rods, much to my surprise. We pulled up on a gravel bar and he changed and dried out.
Toward the end of the day we got into some good fishing just above the mouth a mile or so. We caught some nice char at the mouth as well. Our pick-up day was socked in, so we had to wait an extra day for Rick to pick us up.
We knew when we started that most good fishing in Alaska has already been exploited and is well-enough publicized, but we still couldn't resist the temptation of a place no-one goes. If we had it to do over... we'd probably still do it again. Maybe we're not real bright, but unexplored places are difficult for us to pass up. An adventure not to forget!
This page last updated on 2013-10-23.
