Record high temps, record streamflows, and steelhead season is over!

Good Morning from Stanley!

view from the lodge

In the past couple of nights we have broken some streamflow records for the Salmon River that have stood for decades! Last night the Salmon below the Yankee Fork broke a 1956 record when it topped out at 3400 cfs. The night before a 1945 record went by the wayside and gave way to the new record for that day........2450 cfs. Tonight the 1936 record of 3450 cfs will surely fall as we are looking at temps in the 70's with t-storms!

beautiful wild steelhead caught blind casting

What does all of this mean? First of all, for us this means, our steelhead season has come to a sudden screeching halt! We have canceled all of our remaining trips and will be moving out of the Stanley Steelhead Lodge early :-(. It has been a fabulous season, however, with many nice fish and lots of smiling faces! We thank all of our clients for making this yet another enjoyable time, and we will surely see many of you next year!
I thank all of you, our blog readers, for being patient about the long silence from Stanley! You have to understand that Scott and I have our hands full up here during the month of April. It is a huge effort on our part to not only guide but also cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner, make beds, and clean toilets in our spare time. This does not leave much time for anything else, except the once weekly journey to Ketchum and making sure that our  trusty shop crew has the purchase orders they need to get all the summer merchandise out......you get the picture!

Not the target species, but a nice cuttie!

But back to record high temps and Salmon River streamflows..........The river should be somewhere around 1000cfs right now and rising slowly every day. Temps should be mid 40s-mid 50s. The water should be mostly clear even below the Yankee Fork. In the past 5 years we have been able to wade across even at Torrey's. This season streamflows have been consistently 900cfs above average. We have not been wading across Torrey's all season. The fishing has been great, but the river 'blew out' or got too dark to fish on April 1st for a day. Then there were 2 more higher water events when the temps rose into to 50s or even low 60s. Then on Friday afternoon something significant happened up Valley Creek, like an avalanche or mud slide. Within an hour's time, Valley Creek over doubled in size, dumping dark colored water into the Salmon. I was guiding below Yankee Fork and was completely unaware of what was coming our way. On the way back up at about 7:00PM, I decided to pull over and take a look at the water clarity...........it was flowing dark chocolate colored water with 0 visibility! My client and his son were spending the night at the lodge to fish with us the next day, so I took a scouting trip up above Valley Creek, the water up there was clear. Valley Creek was dumping in all the mud!
Well, the next day was a little better but not much. I guess folks were catching fish up high, but we don't like to harass fish on their redds, so we headed down stream. We caught a couple of cut-throats and hooked one steelie, took a trip up to the Yankee Fork Dredge, fished down at Torrey's for a while and made a fun day of it, but we knew that our steelhead days were done for this season.
Now the river is running mud even up close to the hatchery. The fish are heaving one collective sigh of relief!
The season has come to an end. Maybe if the season gets extended past its regular closing time of April 30th and it freezes hard for a few days in a row, maybe if there is another push of fish( this can happen late in the season), just maybe there could be a few more days. I wouldn't count on it, however!
We are rolling it up! We will spend the next couple of days packing up all the stuff we bring up here to be able to cook the way we like to, we'll pack up all the plant babies I have started while we were here.....it's time to turn our attention to the stillwater fishing or the tailwaters that are open year-round. Time to till the soil and get the garden ready.
Sawtooth Mountains, I will miss waking up to you! I'll miss the honking of the geese and the eerie sound of the sand hill cranes............till next year! Our 10th year of running a lodge up here has come to an end. The decades of guiding Spring steelhead in Stanley have another year added to their history!
See you out there somewhere casting or maybe even hooked up! Spring has sprung, run-off has begun early, maybe this will mean early fishing on the Wood!