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Camping

Sequim Bay and a Thank You

July 13, 2026
Adventure, Bucket List, Camping, Coldwater, Conservation, Exploring, Fish, Fishing, Fly Fishing, Outdoors, Scouting, Travel
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I wanted to take a moment to highlight our base of operations for our Washington trip. Sequim Bay State Park was a neat little spot, right off Hwy 101, not far from the city of Sequim. Not the most remote spot we’ve ever stayed at as we typically take advantage of our National Forest system campgrounds, but it was hard to pass on the location here for venturing to points west and southeast. It’s located in the rain shadow on the Olympic peninsula, which is kind of ideal if you don’t like all your stuff getting wet while camping.

When I booked it I was a little worried it would be loud with highway noise since it is right off the road, but it really was not at all – very quiet and peaceful. It was nice to wake up early in the morning and just walk around. The Pacific northwest is so vastly different than the Gulf south so there was a lot to take in. There’s a little trail that runs down to Sequim Bay, which was cool to go check out during low tide periods.

I also wanted to thank and shoutout Gary Marston of Native Trout Fly Fishing. A lot of my interest in seeking out the unique species of native trout stems from two folks primarily. One being Gary, and the other was Dr. Robert J. Behnke, who wrote the definitive book on American trout species, “Trout and Salmon of North America”. If you fly fish in the US and don’t own this book, do yourself a favor and go buy it now. It is a beautiful coffee table style book. It is so wonderfully researched and put together that I wish there was a book like it for other families of fish I care about, like the black basses. It was published in 2002, right as I was coming out of high school and getting interested in fly fishing. I learned a ton from that book and it showed me that there was a whole lot more than just rainbow, brown, and brook trout. It also showed me there was a passionate group of anglers and researchers devoted to our native trout, because I wasn’t alone in being inspired by the book.

Gary’s website for me, picked up where Dr. Behnke’s book left off, and carried that knowledge I gained from the book and pushed it even further, as he was pretty much doing what I had wanted to and was chasing down all the trout found in Dr. Behnke’s book and documenting them. His road trips were the stuff of legend in my eyes and I always looked to reading about them. I love the dedication to documenting these species by drainage and documenting phenotypes of extinct species, like the Alvord trout. It’s fascinating stuff. When I knew we were headed to Washington state, I reached out to Gary, and he was a huge help in the planning of this trip. He gave a lot of tips and advice and pointed us in the right direction when I was putting everything together.

Since I brought it up, I have to add a third influence of mine in terms of my interest in native trout, and this ties back into Dr. Behnke’s book. Joseph Tomelleri’s art work is absolutely essential to the book, and without it, I don’t know that the desire to seek these fish out is triggered in me. His fish jump off the pages, the work is exceptional. His attention to detail is unmatched in my mind. It’s just absolutely stunning artwork. Go check it out for yourself at Americanfishes.com. He does more than just trout and salmon too – he shows love to the bass and sunfish too!

Olympic Peninsula August 2025 – Day 1

May 15, 2026
Adventure, Beer, Camping, Coldwater, Exploring, Fish, Fishing, Fly Fishing, Food and Drink, Freshwater, Outdoors, Scouting, Travel, Wade Fishing, Waterfall
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Blake and I took a trip last August up to the Olympic peninsula in Washington. We weren’t in search of steelhead, or salmon, but rather coastal cutthroat trout. Obviously, a salmon, or steelhead, would have been pretty badass to catch, but I really just wanted to experience fishing a temperate rainforest – or at least on the fringes of one – and catch the oldest form of cutthroat trout. I’m also not interested in taking trips to not catch fish, so steelhead aren’t high on the priority list as of right now.

We got a pretty good look at Mt. Rainier on the flight into Seattle – this was my first time going to Seattle so this was a pretty cool site to see from the plane – a dormant volcano rising above the clouds. We picked up our Turo rental and headed to Gig Harbor – where we had lunch and made a stop at Gig Harbor Fly Shop. The young guy working was nice and as helpful as he could be being that they weren’t located on the Olympic peninsula so he didn’t get that way too often. The big takeaway for us was that he made it sounds like catching resident coastal cutthroat wouldn’t be too hard so long as we were on streams that had them. This is pretty much how it goes with native blueline fish everywhere, which is one reason I like them so much, they’re always hungry and generally not that picky. Lunch was good too and Gig Harbor was a cool little seaside town, but we weren’t staying long as we wanted to set up camp and try and get out and fish before it got dark.

For this trip we decided to set up camp in one spot and just venture out from there. Our home base for the trip was Sequim Bay State Park. I picked that spot because I figured camping in the rainshadow part of the Olympic peninsula was probably a good idea and we weren’t that far from streams on the northern and eastern side of the peninsula. I was a little worried that being so close to the highway we’d hear road noise all night, but that wasn’t an issue at all. It was a beautiful little park, right on Sequim Bay, and ended up being a great spot for the whole trip. After we set up camp we set out for the Olympic NF to get some time on the water that evening.

I’m so used to having to go high in elevation to fish for trout that these Olympic peninsula trout were throwing me off in my planning because that wasn’t the case here. We didn’t need to go high in elevation as they also live in the estuaries – they’re found throughout the entire system. That’s a wild concept to someone from the south, lol. So we drove into the national forest and headed for a creek we were told had them, parked at the first spot I could find, then hiked down to the creek. In hindsight I may have wanted to be a bit more discerning when it came to parking spots, as there was a small RV parked in a spot much further ahead, but I was eager to fish, and wasn’t sure the parking/hike-in situation further up. One would think seeing a burned out car right when you cross the forest service boundary would be a deterrent, but man I was itching to get on the water!

When we made it down to the creek it was pretty clear this was going to be some tight, technical fishing. The water was pretty low and clear as well. This seems like pretty typical late summer conditions in any mountain range. Honestly the creek didn’t seem that different than those you fish in North Georgia, so I really didn’t feel too out of place here. The forest felt different though – the plants were certainly different than what you’d see down south. The forest floor was porous too – bushwhacking in meant stepping through the ground in places – that’s how much organic material was on the ground, kinda wild stuff.

I caught a little trout pretty early on, that I think was a coastal cuttroat, then followed it up with a slightly bigger fish, but I honestly couldn’t tell you if it was a pure coastal cutt, or if there was some rainbow trout genetics here. I followed that up with another small salmonid that I honestly don’t know what it was – I’m just realizing this now as I’m looking back at the pictures, lol. There were lots of little fish here, but catching something is always better than catching nothing, so I was pretty happy about fish rising to take dries.

The stream elevation started to increase and with that the waterfall/pool complexes did as well, but we made it to a section of the creek that just really weirded us out. We started noticing a bunch of homemade shelters on the side of the hill and there were some obviously well worn paths around this part of the creek. I even found a stash of supplies. I was guessing we had made it below where the RV was parked. Seeing as how it was getting late anyway and we weren’t really interested in making new friends with anyone who may call this spot home, we decided to hike out. The easiest route out would take us right up to where the RV was parked, which in hindsight probably wasn’t very smart on our part, but thankfully no one was outside. As we passed Blake pointed out the Narcan packaging sitting out on their camp table ready to be put to use! It really did feel a lot like North Georgia up here after all, lol.

We caught some fish and made it back to the campsite without issue – so first day was a success. Tomorrow we’d try to catch some “no doubter” resident coastal cutts, hopefully a little bit farther away from civilization.

Rio Grande Cutthroat Country – Day 2

October 18, 2023
Adventure, Beer, Camping, Coldwater, Exploring, Fish, Fishing, Fly Fishing, Food and Drink, Freshwater, Hiking, Outdoors, Scouting, Travel, Wade Fishing
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On day two we continued fishing our way through the New Mexico Trout Challenge. We packed up camp and headed to a nearby lake that held both Rio Grande cutthroat and brook trout, at least according to my prior research. We both needed a brook trout and Blake still needed an RGCT before we could move on and try our luck for anything else. The stream we would pass on our way out supposedly held all four species of fish, so the idea was to knock out brook trout and RGCTs at the lake and rainbow trout in the stream and finish out the Challenge before we left for southern Colorado that afternoon.

We hiked around to the far end of the lake, away from the parking lot, looking for where the feeder stream entered the lake hoping to target fish there. In my limited experience with trout in lakes, the inlets and outlets of those systems tend to hold fish. That area of the lake was a little difficult to access, but after some bushwhacking we made it through. Sure enough, Blake caught a gorgeous brook trout behind me to start things off and after a bit of probing, I settled down in a spot where I could see fish moving about.

I caught a few Rio Grande cutthroat in that spot before I caught my first brook trout. I had found a pocket of cutts tucked up under some bushes and was teasing them out by swimming a nymph through the area they were holding in. After catching those I motioned to Blake to come over and give it a shot, which took a bit longer than expected, but he did manage to get on the board with an RGCT of his own.

The lake was a success and we accomplished what we needed to there, but curiosity got the better of us and we had to follow the stream on up and see if we couldn’t find any more cutts above the lake. It was a tight stream and finding good places to actually fish the stream was challenging; when we did find good holes they were occupied by brook trout. After catching a few of those we decided to head back to the truck for lunch and then make our way back down the mountain.

After a cold beer and a sandwich we went to fish the stream that paralleled the road we came in on and see if it did indeed have rainbow trout. It was small stream of it’s own, but it held plenty of trout, they just weren’t the kind we were after. We caught several gorgeous little browns. Brown trout, we learned, are very common in northern New Mexico.

It was at this point we decided to make a move upstream and head for some potential cutthroat water. I didn’t know of much more public water downstream, which is probably where the rainbows were, and I’d rather be catching native fish anyway, so we made our way back to the truck to keep following the stream up the road. When we got back to the truck Blake realized he didn’t have his phone……..this could be a problem. So we backtracked. Both of us searching anywhere we thought he had walked, fished, stopped to change flies; wherever. We learned that we covered a fair amount of stream in a short amount of time. Nothing was turning up. We surmised that should it have fallen in the water there would be no way we’d find it, it’s in a black case. Maybe for this very reason I shouldn’t have my phone in a black case. I was getting nervous. I know Blake was already nervous, but I had played it cool. Finally, with a gigantic sigh of relief, he found it! It was next to a laydown that he had to step over and it had slipped right out of his shirt pocket.

Something to keep in mind fishing shirt designers – we need cavernous chest pockets with legitimate closures – phones just keep getting bigger, that’s what we use to take pictures. Pants pockets get wet when you wet wade so storing my phone in the chest pocket makes sense. I’m not storing it in my waistpack – that takes too long to access. Figure it out. I have one or two fishing shirts that are adequately designed, too many are not.

After the successful scavenger hunt we did indeed make the move upstream and the I caught a beauty of a Rio out of the first hole I walked up on. The stream opened up a bit more in this stretch, the canopy wasn’t so tight, it felt like cutthroat water, but we caught a variety of different trout – still no rainbows though.

After a little while we made another move, this time to Southern Colorado, onto our next campsite. The rainbow trout would have to wait until another day. On day three we would target native Rio Grande cutthroat in Colorado in a watershed that was kind of the whole reason for this trip in the first place. I had seen pictures from a few different folks of the fish and the stream we would be headed to next and I had high hopes for this place; which is not something I ever want to do, because anything can happen. I always try to downplay everything, but this place looked badass and I was really excited to see if it was or was not.