Area-Specific Angling

Literally thousands of books have been written about specific fisheries. We could write at length about many charming, fish-filled lakes and rivers, but we would add little to the total literature. Instead, we want to focus on a few of the "best-of-the-best" lakes and rivers of Western North America.

If you really want a trophy, you need to fish where the trophies swim in the greatest numbers. That is what these web pages and articles are about. These are the rarest of the rare; the waters that consistently produce the trophy fish.

Many of us have different perspectives about what a trophy is. I even have gone so far as to recognize a “Trophy Day,” which is a day on the water that is exceptional in the experience in some way. This can be a great day spent with friends, catching a quantity of fish, seeing something interesting, or catching that big one that most of us pursue on the water and in our dreams. One of the finest salmonid taxidermists I know loves the larger beautiful specimens of a species as well as the largest of their kind. I don't think anyone would feel slighted catching a 35 pound King or Chinook salmon, an 18 pound Coho, or a 15 pound steelhead, though there are larger specimens of their kind to be taken. Taking a large Deschutes River steelhead while fishing for native redband trout is a trophy!

Nevertheless, I choose to fish waters where the large, and the largest of the kind I am after, exist. So on these pages you will find accounts of trophy fish as well as trophy days.