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My interest in steelhead began at age four when I often tagged along after my father while he rode for cattle. He always had time to wrangle me a horse and I almost always wanted to go. Our ranch encompassed the White Bird Creek drainage and from about the 20th of April until around the 12th of May steelhead were spawning in White Bird Creek. My dad always watched carefully for them and for the next 12 years so did I. The most important thing I learned was that the;e was ver-; little of the creek that was suitable spawning habitat, probably less than 3%.
While in college my brother and I wanted to see the North Fork of the Clearwater River before it was flooded by Dworshak dam. We had a small rubber raft and while passing an area above Grandad Bridge we found the remnants of a jet boat that Potlatch Forest Industries had sank that spring (1966) on their annual log drive. We returned the following weekend and salvaged an inboard engine and a jet pump. The following spring we built our first jet boat and it had a large impact on our lives. Darell went on to start Bentz Boats.
In the spring of 1969 after coming home from college, I guided friends and a few clients with our original boat for spring chinook below White Bird. I keep a daily diary which records that we caught a total of 40 salmon. It was my first introduction to nitrogen disease. A large majority of the fish had sores covered by white fungus, mostly on their heads. It had to be devastating on the smolts and we only had 1 year in the remainder of the 20th century that we could have a season in Idaho for spring chinook.
By then I was addicted to fishing for steelhead and saimon. With our jet boats we explored the Snake River to Hells Canyon Dam, 200 miles up the Salmon River to the mouth of the Middlefork, and the Clearwater River with its tributaries, the North Fork, the Selway and the Lochsa.
In 1975 I bought an airplane and found another venue for exploring. The vast Idaho back country became accessible. In 1983 I flew my Cessna 185 to Alaska to go Dall sheep hunting. It was on that trip that my eyes were opened to the effects of glaciation. Starting in Northern Idaho and all the way north through western Canada and Alaska were wide valleys formed by glaciers with meandering streams. The majority of the stream bed had ideal sized spawning gravels, something I found lacking in many of the Idaho streams except for some high meadows. I returned a number of times to Alaska with my airplane and explored a number of rivers; the length of the Columbia, the full length of the Frazier River, the Thompson, the Chilcotin, the Skeena and its various tributaries, the Stikine, the Yukon, the Susitna, the Talkeetna, the Nenana, the Tanana, the Chena, the Newhalen, and the Nushagak. I also explored at least a section of each one of them with a power boat. They are all salmon bearing streams. I also did a 13 day f!oat trip on the Sheenjek River north of the Arctic Circle and a 2000 mile jet boat trip down the length of the Mackenzie River and through the Northwest Passage to the Coppermine River up to Bloody Falls. All of those rivers in Canada and Alaska have great spawning habitat.
For 40 years I owned and operated a fence and erosion control company. We worked many Corp of Engineer projects including almost all of the Corp fish hatcheries in the Snake River Basin.
Since 1999 I have had an Idaho Outfitters and Guides license to take steelhead and salmon fishermen. My brother and I built a fishing lodge 17 miles up the Salmon River from its mouth in 1991 and still operate it today. I can honestly say that I still get that same excited feeling when a salmon or steelhead gets on the line as when my dad first showed me spawning steelhead in White Bird Creek.