Skookumchuk Creek

Last week Mercy and I went fly fishing on Skookumchuk Creek twice. Skookumchuk Creek is maybe the most beautiful river/creek in the Columbia Valley. The water is crystal clear which allows you to see the different coloured rocks and plant life. The sides of the creek are strewn with large boulders that you climb up on and look down into the pools below. In a lot of ways the Skookumchuk reminds me of the Skagit River. The Skagit is a bit bigger though, and the Skookumchuk is more rugged.

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The fishing in the Skookumchuk can be very good. On our first trip out we saw some huge bull trout and cutthroat. They are spawning at this time of year, and they were congregating at the upper end of the creek. The bull trout primarily sit in the deeper pools while the cutthroat are more active. I would guess that the largest bull trout we saw was maybe 12 lbs. Chris Zehnder, who came with us on the first trip, caught a big cutthroat that was maybe 4lbs. Mercy caught two smaller cutthroats. On the last cast of the day, Chris caught a mid-sized cutthroat. While the cutthroat was on his line, a bull trout started attacking the cutthroat. That was pretty cool to watch for a short time. As far as we could tell, there wasn’t any particular fly that performed best. We couldn’t see any hatch, and the bull and cutthroats tend to be quite predatory anyways. Grey and silver streamers worked that day, but probably any number of streamers would have been fine.

1043 1040 The second time we went out was when further restrictions were on the creek. We had to fish below the 38km mark. It was a great day to be on the water, and I got to explore a bit of a canyon. We didn’t see any fish though and didn’t have any bites. I would guess that most of the fish had moved upstream for spawning by that time. For sure we hit some areas that would normally hold fish, but there wasn’t anything hanging around that day. We all had a good time though, it was nice just to be outdoors.