Editor’s Note: Our adventurous Flyfisher Foundation Treasurer, Felton Jenkins, takes us east to rugged Owyhee country.
In late April, I went on a 5-day, 4-night float trip on the Owyhee, led by Mia and Marty Sheppard of Little Creek Outfitters. It wasn’t a fishing focused trip, but a few of us fished and caught smallmouth bass & channel catfish. The focus was floating a great wilderness river, camping with very good food, hiking and searching for petroglyphs & hot spring pools, and having a good time. There were 8 guests/clients including yours truly, and two other good folks working for LCO, guide Dan-O Chambers & Taylor Stinnett.
The Owyhee begins in northern Nevada, flows through Idaho and into southeastern Oregon. It runs 280 miles to the north into the Snake River. One hundred twenty of those miles are designated as a free-flowing Wild and Scenic River. The float we did started in Rome, OR and ended about 50 miles later at the Birch Creek take-out. There are other white-water trips upriver, but this is the most popular route. There is a limited time window in the spring that affords the best water levels for floating, as it is too high (& too cold?) earlier in the year and usually gets too low by early summer. I think the best flows are 1,000 cfs (ft^3/second) to say 3,000 cfs. We had around 1,400 cfs.
As far as camping, it’s a bit like the Deschutes in that you’re not sure if the next camp you want downstream is available, so you have to be strategic. We stayed in the following nice campsites: Weeping Wall, Ryegrass, Morcum & Upper Greeley. It really helped to have Marty & Taylor take off early each morning in the biggest raft with most of the gear to secure the next camp. There were a number of private groups that floated by our camps later in the day, and they were somewhat bummed out that we had that prime site they were hoping for.
Fishing wise, Marty told me ahead of time to not expect much fishing action as the river is usually so turbid from runoff that there is essentially no visibility. But he advised that bait fishing for channel catfish can be good, not so much for flyfishing. So I brought my BassMaster style baitcaster setup, and at our first camp Weeping Wall, I quickly started catching smallmouth bass. They were indeed relatively small but fun to catch. The Sheppards allowed that they had never seen the river with even the 2 to 3 feet of visibility that we had on our trip. I will back up a bit and say that I have enjoyed several steelhead day trips with Marty & Mia and a multi-day John Day float. On my 1st trip with Marty, spey casting on the Sandy River in about April 2009, I caught 3 wild steelhead in one run. Winter steelheading doesn’t get much better than that.
Another thing I can share, it is kind of nice to be on a relaxed (but still an adventure) float trip where everyone is not an obsessed angler. I’ve been on plenty of flyfishing group trips (kind of) all around, which is great, but everyone wants to fish all day every day. And the trip usually isn’t explicitly competitive, but there’s always some competition or self-aggrandizement. So when you have 8 clients and only 1-2 care about fishing an hour or three each day, that makes it easier to enjoy the fishing without expectations. The other 6 are somewhat enthralled by flycasting and seeing a few fish caught. And they might want to try some casting with a little coaching. So that’s fun and maybe one of them gets the fishing bug.
The next afternoon at Ryegrass, Marty went over to visit a nearby camp. As luck would have it, Tim Rajeff was in that rafting group. Tim is the founder of the Echo fly rod company and a World Fly Casting Champion, like his brother Steve. He was kind enough to come over to our camp with an Echo rod & reel & some flies for me to use that afternoon & evening. So, in short order I was catching more of the smallies on a regular beadhead woolly bugger. It goes to show, always take at least one 4-piece flyrod and some woolly buggers wherever you go that might have water.
In addition to the unexpected fishing success, we had rafted through plenty of wet & cold Class 3 & 4 whitewater. We did some hiking in different places to find a number of petroglyphs. We saw quite a few raptors including Peregrine falcons, and we saw a couple of bighorn sheep. I caught some lizards but was disappointed not to find any snakes. But there were chukar partridge all over the place; it would be great to come back with my English setter Beck in fall hunting season.
Former Spey-casting World Champion, Mia Shepard, is also a master of camp cooking with a Dutch-oven. We ate very well. Meals included (but not limited to) French toast, egg & bacon breakfast casserole, lasagna, chicken enchiladas, beef & tater-tot bake, and apple pie. In fact. she is currently writing a book on Dutch-oven cooking in the great outdoors.
A lot of people know about the Owyhee and want to float it, but a lot of those folks haven’t been yet. There’s a limited time window of good river flows, conditions can quickly change, and can be “crowded.” And there’s plenty of work: Logistics & planning & food & gear, et cetera. Rome, Oregon is also about 400 miles from Portland. As such, I was glad to hire the experts at Little Creek Outfitters, and I look forward to floating with them again in the future.
Felton Jenkins
