Thursday July 1

The goal over the next few days was to catch some salmon. A major accomplishment for me would be to catch a king salmon on the fly rod. A king salmon is no joke, it's the biggest of the salmon and can weight as much as 80 pounds. Most weight around 20 to 30 pounds.

The kings were running now so I decided to temporarily bypass Denali National Park and head for an area known to have kings in it. Between finding the exact river you need to be in and dealing with the myriad of rules set forth by the Alaska F&G, things get complicated. Just when I thought I had it all sorted out......they come out with this last minute "Emergency Fishing Ban" on king salmon. No kings were to be caught within the entire area that I was in. What's worse is that looking off a bridge into the water at one stop, all I could see were these massive, massive, fish. It was making me nutty and frustrated.

What I needed to do was drive back down the road and enter another "zone" and hit the one river that wasn't closed to fishing yet. The problem this time? You couldn't get to the new river on foot. I figured that this was my best opportunity.....and the price was right, so I took the chance and hired a guide and a ride on a jet boat up to the spot for the following day. We'll see what happens...

The rest of the day was spent in a little tourist town called Talkeetna. Talkeetna is a stop on the Princess Cruise Ship company's itinerary and is a model little Alaskan village. It was a pretty cool place. Lots of little art shops and outfitters pushing airplane flights up and around Mt McKinley. Talked politics with a guy named Stephen Jacobsen. His motto was "Enough is Enough" and was greasing palms while running for House of Reps in Alaska. He seemed pretty cool. He was pissed that there is a 40% dropout rate in Alaskan schools and was putting a lot of the responsibility on the teachers....fair enough.

On some tips from a fly shop I decided to head out later in the day to try my luck for trout in a place called Montana Creek. It looked like a great little trout stream and as the 4th of July weekend was developing, it's banks were becoming inhabited with people camping and four wheeling. I managed one small rainbow before I caught a monster. I'd seen this fish rising and it looked big. I'd tried a few different flies before I went to the big egg sucking leech fly. It was the ticket. The trout crashed after it and lept in the air about 5 times before I netted it. It was about 18 inches of fury and probably the second or third best rainbow I'd ever caught. Now that's why I came to Alaska.

Walking back I saw a fox and spoke with a guy and his two sons who were fishing. He had a massive pistol strapped to his wading belt...not the first time I'd seen this in Alaska. At home, this just wouldn't fly.....but in Alaska? No problem.

Slept right down town in Talkeetna for the night.