See all Izaak Walton Fly Fishing Club transcripts on Youtube

Speaker 1

00:15

We're very fortunate to have him here and sharing his expertise with us. Thank you very much, James. And go ahead.

Speaker 2

00:23

Thank you very much. I appreciate the introduction, Brian. I'm delighted to be here tonight talking about probably my favorite fly fishing trip that I'm fortunate enough to do every year.

Speaker 2

00:36

This is an area where I just love to fish and an area where I've learned to read the water pretty well. I just have a great time. And so I wanted to share a little bit about why it is that this is 1 of my favorite spots. So we're going to talk about fishing the southern Canadian Rockies and the area around Coleman.

Speaker 2

00:56

So what do I love about this trip? Well, I think there's 3 main things that I love about this trip. The first is the mountains themselves. They're just spectacular.

Speaker 2

01:07

They rise up to 10, 000 to 13, 000 feet, and we're probably fishing at closer to 4, 000 feet. So just a lot of elevation, beautiful turquoise water, and solitude. You're often fishing, maybe you'll see 1 other person in the day, if you're on a weekend, you'll see a few more, but I've fished entire days and not seen a person when I'm fishing. The fish themselves are tremendous.

Speaker 2

01:34

I'm not so much about fishing, I much prefer to catch. I'm just not patient enough. Maybe it's an old sales guy thing. I'm just not patient enough to fish.

Speaker 2

01:41

I prefer to fish where there's strong fish. And I can't recall how many times I've talked to somebody about places they like to fish and the complaint they have is there just isn't enough fish. And I just don't have that complaint here. There's good numbers of fish.

Speaker 2

01:55

There's good sizes of fish. I think I would say the average size cutthroats are sort of 17 to 19 inches, and you can get them up 21, 20 inches. And it's exciting because they're on dry flies. I fish, most of us that are fishing, and a few of us are on the line here today, fish almost exclusively dry flies.

Speaker 2

02:15

So you're seeing them hit the surface. So a lot of excitement. And then the third 1 is the hospitality. The place that we stay is very good quality, reasonable price.

Speaker 2

02:25

The people we're staying with are great to visit with. So where is this located? This is in the very southwest corner of Alberta, right against the Great Divide, the highest point of the mountains. And then that area is broken out here.

Speaker 2

02:43

I couldn't find a good map that I liked that would show up in a Zoom meeting well, but we're fishing in the Crow's Nest Pass area. And you can fish the Crow's Nest River, but it's probably the weakest of the ones that fish. The old man in the Livingston in the north are really strong. The Castle and the Carbondale and others on the south are also really strong.

Speaker 2

03:03

And they're all within, you know, 45 minute drive, certainly an hour drive. And you can be on a different water and you can fish for, I fish for 10 days and never cover the same pool twice. So you can certainly fish, you can fish for 2 weeks and not have to double yourself. So lots of variability, lots of good water.

Speaker 2

03:24

And I just find that's really, really a great spot. So we'll talk a little bit about the wildlife. First of all, the ones without legs, the ones with fins, cutthroat dominate this water and the cutthroats are big. I'll stop here and just thank a couple of the guys from the Hamilton area fly fishing and tying club, Carl Peters, Rick Crawford, George Genick.

Speaker 2

03:48

They forwarded me, the first 2 forwarded me a number of the slides so we're very thankful for their pictures here. So the trout are big, so this is an example of some of these cuts. And again you can see it's a dry fly in its mouth. And they're also shallow.

Speaker 2

04:05

We're often getting them in, you know, 6, 10, 14 inches of water. I mean, you can catch them in 2 and 3 feet, but you can also often catch them in shallower water, especially if there's a little bit of current. The thin part of the wildlife, cutthroats dominate, but there are other things. You can catch specks.

Speaker 2

04:25

You can catch bull and bull trout in certain sections. They quite dominate. And you can see them in the pools. They just run around like fish on testosterone plus.

Speaker 2

04:35

They just kind of own the whole water and are really aggressive. You can go for brown trout, especially downstream. They're quite plentiful downstream from where we fish. There are white fish and there are, you can go to certain spots to find grayling, but the grayling aren't plentiful in the streams of the fish.

Speaker 2

04:55

So you've got, if you get tired of fishing for the cutthroat, certainly chase a few other fish. You're also in a wild area so there's also other wildlife with legs. Lots of white-tailed deer and mule deer. This is a mule deer that I took a picture of in Coleman, this was with my phone, I was literally 15 to 20 feet away from this mule deer.

Speaker 2

05:22

So they're not always super spooky. There are grizzly and black bear, so if you're nervous about being around bears, best to fish in pairs and most people do. Either way, I fish solo most of the time, but either way you certainly want to have bear spray with you and just be aware. There's other things, marmot, prairie gophers, porcupine, all sorts of other wildlife.

Speaker 2

05:46

Also cattle, farmers put their cattle up in the high areas to feed all the way through the summer. So you have to watch where you're stepping or you could find a cow pie. But if you're not comfortable walking around cattle, you might get comfortable because you'll probably walk into, you'll see a few of them wandering around. The water itself is really interesting.

Speaker 2

06:10

On the north side, there's the Old Man and the Livingston, and I think those are some of the mainstays of where we fish. On the south side, there's the castle and the Carbondale. And those are where we catch lots of good numbers of cuts. But there's small tributaries are kind of interesting too.

Speaker 2

06:29

I mean, if you want to have a hundred fish day, just go to a small tributary and you can catch fish until your arm is really tired. And although they might be smaller, you'll still come into a couple of

Speaker 1

06:43

15, 16,

Speaker 2

06:44

17-inch cutthroat trout, even in very, very small streams. The water tends to be freestone streams. It's very castable and wadeable.

Speaker 2

06:55

You sometimes do have the walking on bowling ball issues because some of the boulders are fairly rounded but you don't have a lot of stuff in the way of making your casts the way you would in southern Ontario and it is wadeable. I used to bring chest waders but I've since switched to either just pant waders because It gets pretty warm by the afternoon and I don't want to be that hot and it's not that deep But also wet waving is really good, too It's a little cool first thing in the morning Gear would typically be like a 3 weight or a 4 weight and if you're fishing for the good size cutthroat You'll certainly want a 9 foot If you're fishing on some of the smaller streams and they're only 6 feet across and you're going for large numbers, you can go back to a smaller, you know, 6, 7 foot rod. We often fish 5X Tippett. You could go lighter, but you don't need to.

Speaker 2

07:44

And the fish are of size and you've got, you know, rocks and logs so 5X tip it seems to do very well. I've listed the ones there and you can look to match the hatch. I'm very fond of the terrestrials because if you get a terrestrial that's working you actually don't need to match the hatch too much and you can cover a lot of water and see a lot of fish. And I don't know if you've tried this, but I discovered I was complaining to 1 of the guides out there and he recommended this catch and release tool, which I tried.

Speaker 2

08:13

And here's the way it normally looks. And if you turn it sideways, there's that loop over here turns around, there's a little slit and you can push that in. And then the front end of this little tool will push down across the fly. You put your line through here, it'll push down across the fly and it'll just catch the hook at the very end and it'll pull over any hackle you have on your dry fly and it just pops out.

Speaker 2

08:38

So you can literally just run it down, pop it in, don't even have to see where it is. If it's inside the fish's mouth, just slide it in, pop it in. Anyway, I just thought releasing fish becomes more and more important, especially as the water warms up. And the water is starting to get a little warmer.

Speaker 2

08:52

Last year, they had for the first time a closure window in the afternoon where they stopped the fishing at 02:00 on every piece of water in the watershed. I haven't seen that before, but I think that's a nod to the issue that the fish are vulnerable as the water warms up. And so both watching the water temperature, but also watching how you release, I think becomes even more important. In terms of logistics, it's pretty straightforward.

Speaker 2

09:18

You fly into Calgary, you can find inexpensive car rentals offsite from the Calgary airport. I also discovered this year, you can do it through a ride sharing or a sharing rental program where individual citizens rent their vehicles out called Turo and you can get that through kayak so I cut my rental car costs in half. Coleman is the central location for all the waters that we're talking about. There's a number of places you can go, but I highly recommend Country Encounters.

Speaker 2

09:48

It's a bed and breakfast for less than $100. You can have your own room or share with a buddy,

Speaker 1

09:56

$100

Speaker 2

09:57

per person. Get a hot breakfast and you get a really good supper. And these are professionally trained chefs that are cooking.

Speaker 2

10:04

So they're really good. The fishing tends to be good from 9 until 4.30. It often seems to get quieter for me at 4.30 or 5. I understand I haven't actually tried it, but I understand it also picks up later at night after 7.30 and there's an evening hatch as well.

Speaker 2

10:22

But I'm normally too exhausted after fishing and then coming back and having some food and libations at about 6 o'clock to try and go out and chase some more, but if you're super keen, you do that. There are 3 fly shops in the area and they're good. And you do need to have a license and you can go onto the Alberta Winds site. Just look up Alberta fishing license And you can buy a fishing license.

Speaker 2

10:46

I can't remember what the cost is. It might be 40 or $50 for the whole time you're out there for a couple of weeks. But yeah, there's a license, but it's nothing too peculiar and you don't need to have a guide. There's nothing unusual about what you need to do to fish there.

Speaker 2

11:03

You do need serious sunscreen. You won't feel it. You're up, you know, it's nice and cool. It's very dry.

Speaker 2

11:10

You're thinking you'll find but there's not much air between you and the sun and you'll burn a lot faster. So make sure to be serious about the sunscreen in your hat. And then the last piece from logistics that Rick and Carl are gonna laugh about this, but if you're fishing days on end, you might get tired of breaking your rod apart, packing it all away. We just leave our rods in the car and tie a piece of string from your rear view mirror down.

Speaker 2

11:38

You can put 2 or 3 rods into it. And even when you're driving up and down mountain roads and doing hairpin turns, they'll stay tight. It's safe. It's out of the way.

Speaker 2

11:47

It's quick. And you can use it going between the holes, then you can use it at the end of the day. It just was a nice little add on that saves a bunch of noise. And then if you get tired or your arms get sore, you can do something else for a day.

Speaker 2

12:03

And sometimes people do this also on their last day or their first day and just because it breaks things up. If you're looking for a few hours, there's the Frank slide. I think it's about, I want to say

Speaker 1

12:16

150

Speaker 2

12:16

or 200 people died when this side of the mountain collapsed, ran down and buried two-thirds of the town more than 100 years ago. Oh, by the way, the natives refused to camp there because they called the mountain unstable. So then we wiped out a whole town.

Speaker 2

12:31

It gives you a great sense of the scale of just how much rock came down and buried it. You can also do a coal mine tour which is very interesting to see how they, how they, the first industry in the area and how they work those coal seams. A head smashed in Buffalo Jump is a World Heritage Center that's, I think it's about an hour and a half away. It is amazing to see.

Speaker 2

12:56

They claim, and I have no reason to believe it isn't true, that the Blackfoot are the people most dependent on a single animal of any people in the world. They lived their entire life off of the buffalo. It was their food, it was their lodging, it was their clothing, it was their worship, It was kind of everything to them. And for me, what's fascinating is, I mean, when you're fishing, you're always asking the question, what would I do if I was a fish?

Speaker 2

13:22

And are you positive or negative? And what is the kind of psychology? Well, they were doing exactly that same thing to the buffalo. They would spend 2 or 3 days understanding the psychology of the buffalo and behaving in ways to affect the buffalo to get them to run over the cliff and to listen to that story and see how they do that.

Speaker 2

13:43

It is fascinating. And the other thing, of course, you can do is take a drift boat in Calgary or drift the elk in Fernie, BC. But to tell you the truth, for my money, I would hire 1 of the guys out of the fly shops and spend about half that and get them to take you out for 5 hours, 6 hours of the day and do something very personalized on a part of the stream and just tell them what it is you want to learn. I think I learned a ton more.

Speaker 2

14:07

But anyway, you can also do the drift boat stuff as well. Well, anyway, I hope I sold a few people on thinking about this 1. It is an amazing trip. The nice part is it can take some more pressure.

Speaker 2

14:22

There's just lots of fish. There's lots of variety. And in the 10 years I've been there and the 20 that Rick and Carl have been there, I don't think we've seen an overfishing of it. So it's a fishery that's not over pressures.