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A big catch on Snowbird Lake. (Photo courtesy of Kasba Lake Lodge.) |
I can't remember when it was that we got the itch to explore more of the Kazan than just that first stretch. Maybe it was on the third or fourth day. That far north the days run together, literally as well as figuratively, with almost none of what you'd call "night" and sunrises and sunsets that would last for hours and almost run together. It was a little dreamlike at the time, and in hindsight it's close to hallucinatory.
Going down the Kazan was not the usual procedure; in fact, no one had ever wanted to do it before, and so there was some discussion about it. Eventually, the camp manager located some waterproof maps in the storeroom, suggested we make this our last beer, and told us we'd be going with a different guide in the morning.
After breakfast the next day we lugged our gear down to the beach and were greeted with, "I am Guy LaRoche, forse class Franch Cunadium feeshing guide; get in zee boat, eh?" The man was young, hard as nails, steely eyed, good on rivers, and all business. Terrific.
We crossed the bottom end of Snowbird, white-knuckled the short rapids in the first stretch of river, and set out across the nameless lake. It was bigger in reality than it looked on the map, was spattered with small islands, and had at least one pair of bald eagles nesting on its banks. We fished the channel at the bottom end and then set out across Obre Lake. Obre, dotted with larger islands, was long and deep enough to land a float plane on, and so it had a camp. We stopped, but it was deserted, and in the middle of the season, too. Obviously the owners had gone under. Running a fly-in wilderness camp is an expensive proposition: I was told that by the time the gasoline for the outboards was barged up to Stony Rapids and then flown into the camp at Snowbird, it ended up costing between seven and eight dollars a gallon. No figures were available for beer.
We spent something like a 20-hour day (most of it riding across lakes at full throttle) in order to fish three stretches of river that, laid end to end, might have been two miles long. I couldn't help thinking of that chapter in Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America in which he describes a hardware store with hundred-yard sections of trout stream stacked out back and of the fact that that book one of the great pieces of modern surrealism has been innocently filed under "Fishing" in the Longmont, Colorado public library.
The second channel down from Snowbird was long and wide with an easily wadable shelf; it was big, slow water that called for some long casts.
The next channel was a fast, deep rip of three or four hundred yards that we located first by cruising the bottom end of the lake until we found the spot where the weeds began to lean in the imperceptible current and then by the sound of the whitewater. It was a treacherous spot full of big grayling. We landed few under two pounds and a fair number pushing three. It was here that Wally took one of the fish that would become a new fly-rod world record, and it was at the bottom of this stretch that we found the remains of what had once been a crude but very serviceable wooden canoe and a hand-carved paddle—a chilling find, especially so because a search was going on at that very moment for a plane that had gone down somewhere in the area. It was never found.
It was also in this stretch of fast water that I got myself into a spot from which I had to be rescued.
© Article copyright John Gierach. All rights reserved.
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