BlakeHerrington
Steelhead
As a teen I was obsessed with fly fishing, and I even built rods and tied flies to sell at the small craft store in Stehekin where I worked in the summers. I mostly quit fly fishing for the past 20 years, but with my own kids now and a home in Leavenworth, I've found a renewed passion for the sport and it's a great reason to explore WA mountains. For Christmas I was gifted an ultralight ~3lb pack raft (also luckily the cheapest model) and with our oldest child now 6 and able to do some hikes, we've found it to be a good family activity as well. I stumbled across this forum which feels like a time machine to the pre-social media internet, and it's great! I'd love to get out on the water with some of you all.
In the past 10 weeks or so, I've visited 12 alpine lakes (2 of them twice) and fished them all, with lots of success and 2 skunkings.
Our alpine lakes season is drawing to a close, but if anyone is interested in getting into some of these spots next year, please send me a message. With the change in seasons I'm eager to keep doing some fishing during the winter and spring when there's snow in the high country, so if anyone wants to get out to their favorite Columbia Basin or Central WA lake/stream with me this winter, I'll be more than happy to take them up in the high country next summer and/or loan them a pack raft to use.
Here's a smattering of photos from this August through last Friday, when I probably hit my final alpine lake of the year. I caught overall more Cutts than Rainbows, but Rainbows were in 3 or 4 lakes I visted and one of the 2 lakes where I was skunked was (supposedly) a Golden Trout lake. My biggest fish was 18" and hooked in the nostril on a streamer, so it fought even harder. I had just lost an even bigger fish than that after it had taken a hopper pattern and sent my reel screaming as it shot out into the middle of this lake.
My 6yr old catching the biggest fish of the day (14") amid larchest at a lake we had all to ourselves 2 Saturday ago.
My wife and I lounging and swimming at mid day at our favorite lake until a 15" rainbow took shelter under her in the raft, so I of course had to catch it.
I took family/friends on a 4-lakes-in-a-day Larch tour last Sunday and this was the best fish, a really healthy Rainbow from 7,000 in a lake we'd all jumped into despite the traces of fresh snow on the bank.
P.S. I love the informal social norm on this forum to not name your locations or give away too many details. It will probably drive me insane this winter when I want to go to some of those secret Columbia Basin lakes that @Starman77 seems to catch all these once in a lifetime trout from, but I definitely hate the Instagram/TikTok/mobbing caused by the internet, so I tried to keep all these locations harder to ID, even if some are fairly well known. There were only 3 days at which I saw another person fishing at one of these lakes.
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