Aggipah River Trips is featured in the January 2009 issue of Boat Magazine. Click on the pages below to read the article. PDF files will open in new windows to make it easy to read the whole article.
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Fast-Water
Fly Fishing
By Ryck Lydecker
The Middle Fork of Idaho’s Salmon River winds through
the largest federal wilderness area outside Alaska—
Fly angler Chuck Sundby “lost count” of the trout he caught and released in six days of Middle Fork drift boat fishing.
Until last June, the prospect of drift boat fishing had conjured up
images of meandering down a placid river on a lazy current, casting
a dry fly to quiet pools. But that’s hardly the sight that appeared
under my four-seater Cessna 120 as it came in for a washboard landing
at tiny Thomas Creek airstrip.
This is the heart of Idaho’s Frank Church-River of No Return
Wilderness Area and there was nothing calm about the white water
twisting around the campsite below and building strength for the
rapids a mile or so downstream.
Among the big rubber rafts hauled out on the gravel bar, I caught a glimpse of what I came for, a McKenzie River drift boat, my ticket to sample fast-water fly fishing for native cutthroat trout on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River as it flows through one of the deepest gorges in North America. Its un-dammed waters wind northwest for 106 miles,dropping 3,000 feet before joining the Main Salmon River and its connections to the Snake, the Columbia and ultimately the Pacific Ocean.
My guide was the tall, lanky Bill Bernt, wearing his trademark Stetson. Shaking Bernt’s hand was like grabbing the crook in an oak branch as a strong gust moves the boughs. Here’s what four decades at the oars of a river raft or drift boat can do.
This was Bernt’s 31st year operating Aggipah River Trips. The name, he explained, comes from the Shoshone Indian name for the river, roughly translated “Big Fish Water” or “Salmon Water.”
As the hired boatmen and passengers cleaned up from breakfast and broke camp, I grabbed one of the last Dutch oven-baked cinnamon rolls and headed for the gravel bar where the boats were launched. Bernt grabbed Chuck Sundby, a Boise civil engineer and recent convert to fly fishing, who’d reserved the drift boat for this six-day river run.
“My wife and I have been talking about buying a drift boat,” Chuck said as we boarded the 16-footer and Bernt pushed it into the current. “So we thought, let’s take a river trip with somebody who knows how to handle one and see what it’s all about.”
This was Chuck and Gloria’s third day on the river, and Gloria was ready to try the “paddle boat.” She’d offered me her seat in the bow of the drift boat alongside Chuck, and she’d be passing us later aboard an eight-person inflatable raft on which everyone paddles to the river guide’s commands. But Chuck and I were here to fish. Bill took the drift boat’s forward-facing oars and started looking for a promising deep pool or current line as the boat glided through the S-turns the river made as it headed for Jackass Rapid a few miles downstream.
A Drift Boat Runs Through It
“The drift boat had its origins on the whitewater rivers of Oregon,” Bernt explained. “Back in the ’50s a family of guides from the McKenzie River country came out here with the boats they’d perfected for fast-water fly fishing. Their basic design is still used today.”
While you could certainly fly fish from one of the big “oar boats,” as they call the big Hypalon rubber rafts here, Bernt said that those aren’t nearly as easy to control in strong current, making fly fishing difficult.
In the rafts, passengers ride as a guide mans the two long oars amidships, not so much to row as to control the raft’s rapid descent through standing waves of white water, while dodging boulders, navigating rock gardens and, most of all, staying upright until the next stretch of calm water — by no means a dry experience.
A McKenzie River-style drift boat looks much like a New England fishing dory, with a sharp entry at the bow, fairly wide flair to the sides, and a transom stern. But these boats carry extreme “rocker,” a curve to the flat bottom that puts both bow and stern out of the water, making the boat very responsive to the oars. The traditional building material for drift boats is wood, and some are fiberglass, but the more functional boats for this kind of fast water, like Bernt’s, are heavy-gauge aluminum.
There’s not a great deal of difference between running a river like the Middle Fork in a drift boat and running it in one of the rafts. “But it has to be done right,” says Bernt as he lined up about 45 degrees to the current above the rock ledge and the abrupt drop-off he knows defines Jackass Rapid 50 yards ahead. Once positioned in the current, Bernt turned the boat dead downstream, working the oars to keep it in line. The boat gained speed and — whoosh, splash, bump, sploosh — we sluiced through my first Middle Fork rapid.
Bernt guided the boat into an eddy and Chuck and I stood up to start casting. “These boats are not very forgiving,” he added. “They bend, they break, they can sink.” The advantage of the drift boat is that you can position your passengers for fish, Bernt explained as he moved the boat into the slack water near shore. “Put your fly right in that line of froth. There should be a fish there.” I do. There is. I land my first beautiful cutthroat trout, with its speckled silver-gold body and characteristic red streak in the skin fold below the jaw.
Paddling Through A Postcard
Three hours and at least 20 fish later — Chuck and I lost count, as this is catch-and-release country — we gathered for lunch at Whitie Cox Camp. We were a party of 30, the total allowed under the Aggipah River Trips permit from the U.S. Forest Service, including eight licensed guides, Bernt, and his 26-year-old daughter Stephanie, a licensed river guide for nine years. The 22 passengers ranged in age from 7 to 72.
Over the next two-and-a-half days I sampled the various ways Bernt has perfected to float this river — on the paddleboat, where I discovered how shockingly cold the river can be, and on the oar boats where I got to know some of the professional guides. One morning I rode ahead on the sweep boat, laden with all the camp gear, with Stephanie at the two long fore- and-aft steering oars. She worked the sweeps from a standing position to guide the raft along on the current, and told me she’d been on the river since age 4, and had been running boats herself since she was 15.
That afternoon, our last on the river, Chuck and I worked to perfect our fast-water fly fishing technique on the drift boat, making our way down to Cliffside Camp, at Mile 90 in Impassible Canyon. The ominous-sounding name comes from canyon walls so steep that there are no trails leading in or out. We passed through rapids with names like Devil’s Tooth, House of Rocks, and Jump Off, then joined the main Salmon River, history’s real “River of No Return.” We shot through the last Class IV rapid, Cramer Creek, which the guidebook describes as a “Grand Canyon-sized rapid, significantly larger than anything on the Middle Fork.” Nonetheless, the boats shoot through, one after another, in textbook fashion, without mishap. The flotilla fetches up at Cache Bar Boat Ramp to meet the bus that will haul us back to Salmon, Idaho, two hours away.
While we sorted our gear, Bernt’s crew deflated the rafts, loaded everything that made this expedition work so well on waiting trucks and trailers. They had just two days to get everything ready and back upriver to Boundary Creek to meet the next party — and then, they would do it all again.
I would too, in a heartbeat.
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