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Olympic Peninsula August 2025 – Day 4

May 27, 2026
Adventure, Coldwater, Exploring, Fish, Fishing, Fly Fishing, Freshwater, Hiking, Outdoors, Scouting, Travel, Wade Fishing
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For our last day of fishing we opted to gain some elevation and head into the mountains. The target wasn’t going to be coastal cutthroat today, but rather coastal rainbow trout. We were unlikely to run into any big steelhead, but were told there would be resident fish in this stream. I don’t know that I’ve ever caught rainbow trout in their native range, I’ve caught them pretty much everywhere else that I’ve fished for trout, so today was the day.

The river we fished had a trail that ran alongside it which made access pretty easy – we just parked at the trailhead and hiked as far as we were willing and then got in and started fishing. The river was crystal clear and the water was super cold – much colder than the last few days of fishing. It also had more volume than I was expecting, which was actually pretty nice, but made crossing it a little dicey in spots. It was a wide enough stream where Blake could stick to one side and I to another and we could kind of work it together as we moved upstream – really an ideal width.

It didn’t take long to start catching fish and the first fish I caught was not actually a coastal rainbow, but another species entirely. As I’ve learned from Gary Marston, it was a southern subspecies of Dolly Varden. Not what we came for, but a delightful bycatch! My first Dolly and really my first char of any kind from the Pacific. Pretty sweet to find them here as well. I followed it up with a tiny rainbow and then the small one you see photographed above.

The stream had a lot of elevation gain in this section so there was quite a bit of fast water with intermittent pools and long runs. It was very productive water – a lot of fun to fish. The rainbows were gorgeous – and yes, they did remind me of the wild rainbows we have in North Georgia. These rainbows had more black pepper sprinkles on them though.

We fished dry dropper rigs and ended up catching a few more Dolly Varden on nymphs as we made our way upstream, but rainbow trout were definitely the predominate species on both flies. It was a great river to end our trip on – such a beautiful place to fish.

The Olympics were a great destination to go bluelining. I may have to make it back up to do some steelhead or salmon fishing in the future. Not enough time to do it all, and we barely scratched the surface of the Olympic Peninsula. We were able to catch a few different species on our trip and I got to see another part of our great country that I hadn’t before. I’m slowly checking off states and species in the Western Native Trout Challenge. The WNTC has taken me to some awesome places that I likely would not have visited, or at least fished, had it not been a thing. I’m glad we gave the Wyoming Cutt Slam a shot so many year’s ago, it’s been a lot of fun participating in the many other slams and challenges we’ve come across as states and organizations realize how much fun these programs are, and how important they are to the education and conservation of native fish species across the country.

Olympic Peninsula August 2025 – Day 2

May 19, 2026
Adventure, Coldwater, Exploring, Fishing, Fly Fishing, Freshwater, Multimedia, Outdoors, Saltwater, Scouting, Travel, Video, Wade Fishing
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We headed out the next morning to a more remote location in the Olympic National Forest for another shot at coastal cutthroat trout. It was pretty cool to experience an early morning walk through a foggy temperate forest as we made our way upstream to where we wanted to start fishing. The stream was small, not as tight as the one from the day prior, but it still had that North Georgia feel to it. I hate to keep making comparisons of the Olympic peninsula to the southern Appalachians, but there were a lot of similarities to me – at least in the part of the peninsula we had been fishing. Both probably receive a similar amount of annual rainfall.

Throwing a trude style dry fly I was able to pick up a few small trout pretty early on. Much like yesterday, my first couple of fish didn’t really look that different from a lot of wild rainbows I’ve caught in the past. The one you see above was my third and it had a distinctive orange slash under it’s throat – this one I knew was a coastal cutthroat.

The creek we were on was full of timber – which is awesome for native trout. I’ve actually worked on some aerial photography projects for work in the last few years where folks are assessing the amount of timber they have in their rivers from the imagery we are providing them. It was pretty cool to see that in action – albeit in a different watershed entirely, but the same state at least.

The creek was a pretty cool, some spots were too narrow to really fish effectively due to the overgrowth, other spots were wider and we could fish those pretty well. There wasn’t a ton of room for a backcast on any stretch, but a backcast is generally unnecessary on small streams like this. The moss that covered everything was awesome – really gave it that Dagobah feel, lol. There are tons of interesting things you come across when you fish new environments – the little bubble ring that rotated in perpetuity was certainly one of them.

Coastal cutthroat were caught – mission accomplished – and the scenery was top notch. We were catching enough fish to keep us fishing, but I wouldn’t say the fishing was light’s out. Eventually we made it to a section of stream where the devil’s club kind of took over and was going to make wading through or walking around quite the adventure, so we opted to head back to the car and break for lunch. We had lunch at a cool little burger joint, Fat Smitty’s, in Discovery Bay – it may have been cash only – I don’t remember exactly, but the burger and shake hit the spot after a morning on the water.

After the burger I felt like we should probably give the sea-run version of coastal cutthroat a try, that’s one thing that makes coastal cutthroat so unique, their ability to occupy multiple habitat types, so we headed towards a beach access. Theoretically, this also put salmon in play for us – which was an exciting thought. This was actually a year where pink salmon were in Puget Sound and the Hood Canal, so there was an outside chance we run into one. Apparently they are only in every other year. I picked a beach where I knew the tide would be moving – it was more of a pass than open water. When we arrived the water was moving alright – it was probably moving a little too fast for us to fish it effectively. There was lots of debris being pulled through the area, especially sea grass, so it wasn’t the easiest place to fish. We gave it the ole college try though and thankfully I was able to avoid the skunk and caught a few a Pacific staghorn sculpin – at least that’s what I think they are, I could be wrong. No luck on the cutthroat or salmon front however.

No luck at this spot and no confidence that we even knew how to pick a good beach, so we called it a day and headed back to camp. I would be remiss if we had not given it a shot, but I also knew that PNW beach fishing wasn’t really what we went up there for. It was cool to give it a try though and I liked being able to make the comparison to the beach fishing we have on the Gulf coast for our version of sea trout. Just like the streams, different, but the same…..if that makes any sense.

Finishing the New Mexico Trout Challenge

May 11, 2026
Adventure, Beer, Coldwater, Exploring, Fish, Fishing, Fly Fishing, Food and Drink, Freshwater, Outdoors, Scouting, Travel, Wade Fishing
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As the title suggests we needed one more trout species to finish the New Mexico Trout Challenge – so that was the plan for the day – catch a rainbow trout in New Mexico. It sounds simple enough, but you never know how the day can go. I know more about native trout species than I do transplants, so the first thing to figure out was where the best place to do that would be – especially somewhat close to where we were in southern Colorado. We figured that may be in the Rio Chama so we drove to Chama and stopped in for breakfast before we started fishing.

We tried to head to some easy public access close to town and got confused when the road leading us there had a gate on it – which turned what I thought was easy, drive-up access into hike-in access. I wasn’t sure this was a good stretch of river and I’d hate to waste time hiking in to crap water, so we opted to head elsewhere. Not finding much in terms of easy public access in town, we decided to stop at a local business which had river frontage and asked them if we could access the water from their property – thankfully they agreed and we were able to start our rainbow quest.

Blake was able to get the monkey off his back early with his first fish being a rainbow. My first fish was a brown, so I had to sweat it out a bit. We were maybe an hour into fishing, but I was able to catch a rainbow as well. He actually took a big Chubby Chernobyl – trout on top are always my favorite kind of trout.

We kept fishing for a bit, wading up from our access. Although the river was surrounded by private land, most of the river frontage was not developed, so you really didn’t get that sense you were in town. It was nice stretch of water so we didn’t feel the need to rush out of there.

We caught a few more browns alongside our lone rainbows. Content with completing the NM trout challenge and the few browns we caught, we opted to head back into southern Colorado and set up camp for the night, closer to where we planned to fish the next morning. After setting up camp we were able to hit another stretch of water near the camp site. It was a recreation area where a stream flowed through a meadow into a lake, a beautiful setting, we figured there’d be trout there too.

Not long into the fishing I stuck a really nice brown. Outside of that brown the fishing was not great. I caught a stocker rainbow towards the lake, but the in the stream itself the fishing was tough. The brown trout certainly made the short evening session worth it, but so did the scenery.

A cold beer, a hot meal, and a campfire sounded like the perfect way to end day 4 so we headed back to camp. The next day would be our last day of fishing. As you’ve probably figured out, I’m a very goals-minded fishermen. I like to have some sort of checklist of things to punch off throughout a day or throughout a trip. With all of those goals I had in mind for this trip accomplished we now had one more day of fun fishing. Of course, it’s all fun fishing, but there was no pressure to catch anything specific heading into tomorrow. I had a river picked out that I had gotten one good report on, but I wasn’t able to get a lot of info on it otherwise. It looked pretty awesome on aerial photography, so it’d be another fun day of exploring on day 5.