Man oh man! What I'd give to fish in a place like that! Oh wait, I just returned home from the Dean yesterday to spend all afternoon and evening washing 8 day-old camping and fishing clothes and putting gear away. Good thing Coley G's photos are second to none, as I took pics of many of the same bits of scenery on my $99 camera that gave up the ghost as we were flying out of the valley Wednesday afternoon. I haven't checked yet to see if the photos on the memory card are still OK.

My old BC friend Jerry Wintle didn't fish every steelhead river in the world, but he fished most from California's Klamath to B.C.'s storied and unnamed rivers. Of them all, he remarked that the best summer steelhead river in the world is the Dean. Of those who have sampled many, I've known of no one to argue the point. I'm not about to.

We flew in Aug. 6, four days after CG, AP, and Stam to Giant's, the usual upper-most drop in spot. It's a great camp site, with a plywood counter and shelf for camp kitchen duty - the only one like it we found. Unfortunately, while at Giant's, you fish only Giant's. As our fearless explorers reported, with long rapids upstream and down, it's a long wader shredding hike to any other fishable water, and you come to Eagle run easy enough when you float down to it. Moose Pool was hard on gear for me. It seems like I was trying to chop wood the way I kept hitting over-hanging alder branches with my rod tip. I pulled snake guides right out of the wraps on two different rods. Now I have some rod mending to do, but fortunately didn't break any rod sections.

Although the water was over a foot higher than normal for the season, the river was nonetheless imminently fishable. And a good thing too, as I fished the same pool over and over and over, which is decidedly not my usual style. The biggest hassle was being limited to a relatively small amount of water to fish each day, unless we wanted to make only a 2 or 3 day float trip of it. Of course, not much about this river fit my usual style, but really, I'm not complaining.

The upper river was running at 60* F and was very conducive to dry fly fishing. But it was more conducive to wet flies, as my partners caught fish while I stuck it out waking dries most of the time. I caught 3 on top, including 1 on an upstream dead drift presentation. Later I switched to sunk flies, purely for scientific reasons to acquire a larger catch sample.

The Sakumthat was running 54* F and cooled the Dean noticably. The next little glacial stream cooled it even more, as the mainstem Dean was a nice 52* F downstream of it, good for the fish, but chilly when bathing in the shade.

Now for the scientific analysis: Do Dean River steelhead really back off and charge downstream 20 yards to nail a fly? No; in fact they don't. It just feels like it. My lifetime experience is that about 20% of summer steelhead are screamers (no, not as opposed to moaners), meaning line and backing-ripping runs with lots of jumps. Our collective sample of Dean River fish showed almost the inverse, with about 75% or more being of the screamer variety. I caught one hen that jumped 9 times, with up to 30 yds of backing out along with the 120' fly line. While the Dean is not a small river, neither is it a particularly large one, flowing about 4 kcfs in the upper reach and 5 kcfs downstream of the Sakumtha. Dean fish are also a bit girthier forward of the dorsal and around the caudal than say, their Skamania summer run counter-parts.

About 90% of Dean steelhead are 2-salt fish. The majority of our catch were 28-30", with a single 26 and 27 and 3 at 32". There may have been a couple of 31s. The funny optical illusion is that a fish being landed that you swear is going to tape 34" only taped at 30". This happened a couple times. Sure, 20 pound steelhead are caught in the Dean, but they are very uncommon.

I recognize the rainbow photo as the place we camped on our last night. Thanks for making the nice level tent site guys. However, that was our most unproductive camp water of the trip. Probably just an anomoly, as the fish seemed to occur in pulses.

How the heck did you possibly make 1100 pounds and still include 5 cases of beer? I need some packing lessons from you guys. We couldn't make the weight with beer, so we limited ourselves to 3 bottles of Scotch (one was actually Irish Jamison's) and a 4-liter box of red wine. That hot weather left me begging for a beer, but I toughed it out . . . until the wine and whisky was gone before crumbling. We showed up with 1136 pounds and got it down to 1126, and they allowed us with that. How much did your raft and frame weigh? Our 3 Watermasters totaled 120#, which I expected to be significantly less than a 13 or 14' raft with rowing frame, even stripped down as Stam described.

Was the Dean trip epic? I don't know. I read about "epic" fishing experiences 2 or 3 times a week on the internet, suggesting that the quality of being epic is rapidly falling. The combination of the scenery or setting, the river, and the fish make this one unsurpassed for me.

I'll check my camera and see what the status of my pictures is.

Sg