Fishing and Dancing

Day 23-26 September 5-10

We are currently at a very remote fishing lodge on Chelatna Lake inside the Denali Preserve. It’s so remote that everything has to be flown in. We were treated to pictures of an ATV strapped to the struts of a float plane! Our very young pilot assured us that it’s not unheard of to pick up hunters and strap 1000’s of pounds of moose to the planes struts.

So why fishing and dancing? I am realizing both take an awareness of body kinesiology of which I have none! As hard as I try to cast to just that perfect spot, my fly barely misses my jacket and has often taken my baseball cap instead. Thankfully, there are fish in the waters that have taken pity on me and actually taken my small, short offerings. We are doubly challenged here with a some rain, intermittent at times, non stop at others. Optimistically we fish on. I am realizing I much prefer to throw a fly in to a moving stream than trying to cast out into a still lake. The salmon are very active spawning and dying with all the glorious colors and strange body morphology that happens during the spawning.

Over the last two days we’ve caught numerous greylings, male and female salmon, rainbows and one lake trout. We also managed to knock off our 99th body of water! Lake Chelaten! We jumped on paddle boards the minute the rain and wind stopped, got a two mile paddle into make sure it counted as a body of water – much to our guides distress as he had not been on a paddle board and was expecting us to just stick around in front of the lodge!

Have spent the next two days dodging rain and WIND. Crazy to wake up to our first blue sky day but the wind was howling and the lake had whitecaps so we had to sit out fishing for a few hours. Our guide David decided we should learn how to tie flies that are favored both at Chelatnah Lake and the Lake Creek River. I’ve never tied a fly so took a lot of focus. He also taught us how to tie a salmon egg, complete with the little blood spot! Ron was fascinated, I was just confused 😉

When the wind finally died down enough (thankful we were not flying out today!) we jumped on our boat and headed up Lake Creek to try out our new flies! Within the first minute I had a nice greyling who kindly liked my first ever effort tying a fly. Not less than 30 seconds later, Ron had a 15” rainbow on his egg. Fun.

Tried a few more holes with our eggs and our woolly buggers (so disappointed to learn they aren’t called woolly boogers). Didn’t have a lot of success on the wooly buggers so back to eggs. Lots of little rainbows were biting but nothing big. Did see the grand dam of Rainbows but after 45 minutes of offering many types of flies, different approaches and techniques we had to give up. Besides, I was up to my waist in very cold flowing waters and I was done! She won!

Took a lovely hike/fish along the river to see the views and did get a shadowy glimpse of Denali…so if we now have seen it 2 times does that make us 15% percenters? Pretty fall colors are painting the hillsides but the fishing season is winding down and we are currently the last 2 of 4 total guests at the lodge. The guides are slowly leaving and the remaining team is starting to shut down the cabins as each guest leaves. Very quiet and peaceful here now but we are ready to move on to our next Alaska adventure….paddling on a glacier…..