Wayne Trzyna, a friend of mine from Ft. Collins, Colorado, came up for a week in August, 2001, and conned me into accompanying him on a fishing trip to British Columbia, Canada. The plan was to fish the Elk River, a tributary of the Kootenay, and then cross over to Alberta to fish the Castle and a few others in its vicinity and maybe the Bo.

We drove up to Fernie, BC, and stopped at the Kootenay Fly Shop to get some information, We decided that instead of several day trips, we'd do one longer trip, camping on the river. We arranged for the folks at the fly shop to shuttle Wayne's truck, then drove to the put in and camped for the night. But, since we were camped on the river, we kinda had to start fishing before going to bed. We did pretty well, and caught a number of nice cutthroats before calling it quits because we couldn't see squat.

Here we are in the morning getting ready to actually shove off.

The scenery in the Canadian Rockies is spectacular. Whether we caught fish or not, floating the river was pleasant. The one downside is there is a railroad or a highway within earshot the whole time; often within sight. It's not a wilderness experience.

Here's one of our camps, the next morning, and some of my gear before I got the boat packed. Much of our fishing was with nymphs or streamers, as the fish weren't rising most of the time. They did rise late in the evening, so we tried to camp near what looked like good holes.

Besides cutthroats, there are a fair number of Bull Trout in the river. The river reaches alternate between catch-and-release and limited take sections. I don't remember what the limited take was, but it was fairly restrictive, and the fishery seemed to be in reasonable shape. Here's a shot of me with a bull.

Here's a shot of Wayne fishing a typical riffle, and another one of him trying to figure out how to get to a pod of fish hiding under a log mess. We did get one nice bull out of here, but most of them were pretty safe.

That's about it. After we got off the river, we had a tough time deciding what to do next. The fishing wasn't exceptional, and it wasn't that uncrowded. Fun, but not something you'd travel that far to do. So what to do in our remaining time? We decided we didn't want a repeat, but we couldn't come up with any obvious good options. After much wavering back and forth, we headed off to explore some unknown territory.