Racehorse to Oldman

Wednesday we awoke and went straight to fishing.

There was a little pool about 30 feet from our campsite that I could see a bunch of fish in it. There were little guys, 6", 8", 10" and two bigger guys in it so tried casting some flies to them without any of them rising. After the length of time since hooking a fish I figured it would be good to catch something and boost our confidence so switched over from flies to nymphs, and sure enough it worked. I caught an 8" cutthroat followed by Mike catching a 10" one.

We tries some of the water around the bridge and didn't get anything so went back to the pool where I caught a 5" cutthroat and Mike hooked a little 4" guy that jumped off the hook.

As much as we wanted to head back downstream to try the pool we saw the fish rising in last night, it was time to head off and continue up the road. We were driving back out on Racehorse Creek Road and saw a little buck deer. A little further on we saw what I think was a golden eagle. Further up we saw a doe deer with a fawn, and when we were almost up to the Trunk Road we turned the corner and saw two wolves who quickly skittered into the woods.

We got up to the Racehorse Creek provincial campground and took a look around before driving off the other side of the Trunk Road to the Oldman Gap. There were many, many fishermen working that stretch of road so we turned around and headed back to the Trunk Road. We continued up to the Dutch Creek campground and used the picnic area there for lunch. We drove up the Dutch Creek Road looking for fishing opportunities but didn't see much until we got to the current end of the road at km9 . There was a bridge washed our.

We looked around a found a good spot to fish on the edge of a cliff. It was sunny out but the cliff provided engine shade that the fish we saw rising wouldn't got for any of our terrestrials, and we couldn't see exactly what it was eating.

It looked like it was clouding up and we wanted to make sure we had a camp set up prior to it raining, so we headed back down to the Trunk Road. We again looked at the Oldman where it borders the road, but there were many people already fishing it so continued to the Oldman River Road. We took a look through the provincial campground then headed upstream looking for good camping or fishing opportunities. We were trying to go up to the end of the road which is at km29. Just after we passed the Oldman River Falls and got into he Beehive Natural Area there was a washout at km20 or so, which ended our hopes of that. However there were some great views of Beehive Mountain and Tornado Mountain.

We came back down the road  and found a pretty good random camping site around a kilometer below the falls. We set up the tent and scouted out the immediate area to see what was worthwhile. Being too early for dinner but too short of a time to get real fishing done, we took a break and make a little fire before having an early supper.

As evening arose, we worked a but downriver from our site. There was a nice hole where the rock had a great curve to it. There were a couple log jams, then in the last corner I could get to (Mike couldn't without waders) there was a big hole with a  22+" bull trout crusing under the logs. I tried a few things throwing towards him, but the fish was having none of it.

We walked along the river back to site then along the road to get upstream. The next access we had was right at the Oldman Falls. We looked around a bit before deciding it was late enough and about to get dark, so Walked back to site for a fire to warm up and dry out before bed. We got into the tent and things felt so cold from the high humidity, and we had a very, very cold night.