Late in summer,
bull trout that live out their year in the Peace turn up the Halfway and keep going, gravel bar after gravel bar, until they reach cold creeks under the northern Rockies. A bull trout you hook here in August may have just swum from the Peace to the foothills in a matter of weeks. By autumn the river can drop low enough to wade across in many places, and those same fish are drifting back down through it.
The Halfway comes in three parts. It rises in the Muskwa Ranges, runs east toward Pink Mountain, then swings south through bush and gravel bars to meet its biggest tributary, the Graham, at a campground you can drive to. Below that it carries on to pass under Highway 29 and end in the Peace, which since the Site C dam is a reservoir at the mouth.
Start in the middle, where the two rivers join. A recreation site called Halfway-Graham sits at the confluence, with camp pads along the river’s edge, and from there you can walk the bars upstream or down. This is the stretch with the easiest road and the widest mix of fish:
Arctic grayling,
rainbow trout,
mountain whitefish, and bull trout moving through on their way up or back.
The upper river is the find. Above the place where a second big tributary, the Chowade, comes in, the Halfway climbs toward Cypress Creek, Fiddes Creek and Turnoff Creek, the cold side waters where bull trout spawn from mid-August into September. Grayling hold in the upper river and its creeks too. It is a long day’s drive from Fort St. John there and back.
The lower river, from the Peace to fishing boundary signs about 5 km upstream, is closed to fishing from 1 March to 30 June, and so is the Peace for about 5 km either side of the mouth. Outside those months the Highway 29 bridge is the quickest way to put your feet in the water, where the river splits into several narrow channels.
Past the confluence the Graham is a river of its own, with grayling and rainbows up toward its falls, and beyond it the Chowade keeps the question of where the biggest bull trout go each autumn.
Water and habitat
This is a freestone river of gravel bars, side channels and cut banks. Bull trout sit where depth and cover meet: the slow inside of a deep run, along a cut bank, under a logjam, or at the head of a pool where food arrives. Grayling like the even water where a riffle settles into a run, usually in loose groups. Whitefish share the same runs and will take the fly you meant for grayling. Read each braid before you fish it; side channels shift from year to year and some go dry by late summer.
How to fish it
For grayling, carry a 4- or 5-weight and start with one big attractor, a size 8 Stimulator, to find out where they are. Once a fish shows, change down: a size 10 or 12 in July, a size 14 or 16 Adams by August and September, when they turn fussy. Cast across and let it drift drag-free through the run. Grayling rise, roll over the fly and take it on the way down, so wait for the line to tighten before you lift. If nothing comes up, fish the next run rather than the same one harder.
For bull trout, step up to a 7-weight with a sink-tip and one weighted streamer in a sculpin or minnow shape. Cast down and across into the deepest water, let it swing slowly along the bottom, and strip it back in short pulls. If the swing comes back clean, add weight or slow it down before you change colour. Walk on: a run that holds a bull trout usually tells you on the first few casts.
Access and safety
Road to the Graham confluence: north from Fort St. John on Highway 97, then west on the Upper Halfway Road for roughly 50 km of gravel. One campsite at the recreation site has been closed after the Graham ate away its bank; check what is open when you arrive. The upper river is reached on resource roads, the Cypress Creek Road among them, where bridges come and go and some stretches are quad-only. This is remote bear country with no services past the highway, so carry a spare tire, tell someone your route, and cross braids only where you can see the bottom.