01-18-2011, 06:00 AM
I just got back from a pretty interesting steelhead trip. We went down the canyon from the North Fork (Salmon), on Sunday morning. On the way in we passed some small snow slides that had stopped on the road, and one that left only enough room to sneak a truck around. We kind of joked about how it would be great if a big one came down and blocked the road. After fishing on Sunday we went back to Panther Creek and ran into a couple of guys who were trying to get out that said there was a large slide that was 4-5 feet thick that was covering around 100 yards of the main road and 4 smaller slides blocking the road that they could see. All were impassable, and they were going to wait until today to try to get out. Figures!
Wake up this morning and there had been another slide that had doubled the thickness of the large slide, now it was around 8 feet thick and had large trees in the slide. We decided rather than fish today and hope for a quick digout we would try the Panther Creek road first thing. There ended up being four trucks in our group and it took us around five hours to get over the top. Thankfully no one slid off or got stuck going out, and hopefully the other guys down the canyon tried to get out before dark.
Sorry, but I don't have any pictures of the slides or the fish we caught. Our group ended up landing five fish on Sunday, and we battled lots of slush,, and very wet conditions to get those. Today (Monday) was a much better day and the few holes we fished around Salmon were not flowing any slush. Maybe next time we will luck out and get the good day to fish our favorite spots.
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Wake up this morning and there had been another slide that had doubled the thickness of the large slide, now it was around 8 feet thick and had large trees in the slide. We decided rather than fish today and hope for a quick digout we would try the Panther Creek road first thing. There ended up being four trucks in our group and it took us around five hours to get over the top. Thankfully no one slid off or got stuck going out, and hopefully the other guys down the canyon tried to get out before dark.
Sorry, but I don't have any pictures of the slides or the fish we caught. Our group ended up landing five fish on Sunday, and we battled lots of slush,, and very wet conditions to get those. Today (Monday) was a much better day and the few holes we fished around Salmon were not flowing any slush. Maybe next time we will luck out and get the good day to fish our favorite spots.
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]! I know it would have been a great excuse to have to fish for a week and miss work but can you imagine having to drink river water and eat fish (pending you were catching them) to survive?[laugh] I've seen some nasty slides up there - large enough to take you and all your vehicles to the bottom of the river-so again, glad you made it out and thanks for the report!