Lake Creek

Last week I did a five day, fly in/out, float trip with my friends Justin and Adam to fish for rainbow trout. We had planned to float the Talachulitna River but due to low water on the Tal we ended up floating Lake Creek instead. It was an excellent trip: extraordinary fishing, exciting whitewater, great scenery and all with a couple of great friends.

The trip started out with a three hour weather delay due to low clouds at our put in on Chelatna Lake. The delay did give us time to visit with the characters at the air taxi service (Tiffany - who has a bright future in customer service, Steve - the pilot - who has great people skills and the ability to get multiple F-bombs into all sentences, Buckshot - a well behaved 1 year old German Shorthaired Pointer and Willow - a very old choclate lab with top notch muffin stealing skills). Other than the delay the only bummer about the low clouds was that we would miss the awesome scenery on the upper portion of the creek of Mt McKinley, Mt Foraker and other Alaska Range peaks. Although, as we were soon to find out, the fishing generally left us no time to think about anything else.

Lake Creek is a clear water stream that starts at Chelatna Lake and flows 54 miles to its confluence with the Yetna River. It starts out pretty calm right out of the lake but quickly turns into class II and III with large boulders that we were continously dodging. The whitewater ensured that no one was left out of the fun as we took turns oaring Justin's 16-foot self bailing raft while the other two fellas fished. The creek flows through a canyon section that includes two tricky stretches of Class III+ whitewater. We had planned to scout both sections of trickier water prior to floating through but ended up taking them unscouted, forunately without incident. We had choice campsites at every stop and the weather was perfect save for the first afternoon and a couple hours of showers one evening.

As mentioned earlier the fishing was excellent. We started off catching real nice rainbows in the upper section fishing battle creek and cotton candy flies. Adam landed a good looking silver salmon the first night which made for excellent eating. Lower down in the creek we switched to beads to replicate salmon eggs and had excellent luck as well. We also caught grayling, one sucker and battled with chum, sockeye and pink salmon on our 5-6 weight flyrods. The rainbow fishing slowed a little through the canyon but for the last 6-7 miles it really heated up. We estimated we each landed over 50 trout during the last full day of fishing. What a trip!

Justin and Buckshot waiting for the weather to break

Justin and Adam with the vessel at the put in on Chelatna Lake

The Alaska Range in the background on the upper section

Adam with a nice silver salmon

Silver salmon coming up!

Justin with a nice rainbow

Luke with a rainbow

Luke with a grayling

Luke playing a fish in front of a canyon wall

Where's the line?

Running the rapids


Squeezing the boat under a tree

Steve coming to get us at the F-ing Island