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North Fork of the Stillaguamish

For a Puget Sound angler who is interested in steelhead on the fly there is no more storied river than the North Fork of the Stillaguamish. It's tributary Deer Creek, now closed to fishing, was the site of both Zane Grey's first steelhead as well as Roderick Haig-Brown's first. It was the first river designated fly only in the State of Washington. All of the best fly anglers had a cabin at Oso.
It was a great place for this transported 20 year old to learn to fish for steelhead. By reading books by Enos Bradner, Roderick Haig-Brown, and Clark van Fleet and listening to the tales of other anglers at Patrick's Fly Shop, brother Bill and I were slowly able to piece it together. We started to catch fish.
We were dedicated and put in our time. Summer and Winter, we fished every weekend the river was open. During the summer it was possible to fish after work until dark and still be home before it was impossibly late. No better way to cap a workday Wednesday than to catch a steelhead on the fly.
But the North Fork of the Stilly, is a small, rain-fed tributary whose watershed is easily damaged. In the 1970s it seemed stable but by the 80s landslides at Hazel and logging had its toll. It seemed to be fishable less of the winter season. We started looking for new water and more fish. We found them both nearby: the Sauk.



Here is a nice summer steelhead landed near Oso in the 70s.

Sauk River

The Sauk will never fully replace the NF Stilly as a favorite river as it was glacier-fed. Such a river just can't provide the same summer fly fishing excitement.
The winter was another story. When the river started to clear in October, we found that there were lots of salmon to be caught. Soon we were fishing it during the catch and release season in March and April.
The the cold winter weather has abated some, and a wild steelhad enhancement program by the state was producing a big run of fish late in the season. Somedays these seemed to be no angling competition and the fish were all ours.
You learn alot more about fishing for steelhead when you are actually casting over fish.


A winter afternoon on the Sauk.