By late summer the upper Parsnip has dropped and cleared, and in the tailouts you can see the stones on the bottom and the grayling sitting over them. They come up for a dry fly as if they’ve been waiting for one. Lower down they’re gone: when the reservoir drowned the bottom of the river, the grayling went with it. The ones left live upstream, on the stretch of the river most people never see.
The river comes in three parts. It rises at a small lake on the continental divide in the Hart Ranges, the pass Alexander Mackenzie crossed on his way to the Pacific in 1793, and runs north-west down the wide floor of the Rocky Mountain Trench, picking up clear rivers out of the Rockies along the way. In its lower third, the Hart Highway crosses it. Below the bridge the river carries on into the Parsnip Reach of Williston Lake and stops being a river.
The upper river, above the place where the Anzac River comes in, is the part to go and find. The Anzac and another tributary a little higher up, the Table, hold grayling through the summer, and the main river between and above them is where you look for fish that take a dry fly without fuss. It’s forest-road country, a long way from pavement, and that’s a big part of why it’s worth the drive.
The middle river at the highway bridge is where most people first meet the Parsnip, and it’s the easiest place to fish it. Bull trout and whitefish are what turn up here, and a streamer swung through the deeper runs is how you find the bull trout.
The lower river, running into the reservoir, is water for a boat. It’s big and slow, and it ends in a lake that rises and falls with the seasons. Bull trout and lake trout cruise the arm, and the river mouth is a good bet for finding them on the feed.
Start on the upper river in August and see how far up the grayling go.
Fish in this water
Each fish is rated by its strongest evidence. A rating says how sure we are a fish is here, not how many there are, whether it is worth fishing for or whether you may keep it.
Confirmed
Recorded on this water in the last 15 years, or named for it by a fishery agency, its fishing rules or a fishing publication.
The river is named for the cow-parsnip that grows along its banks. Above the highway it’s a mountain river on a valley floor, fed from the east by tributaries that run very clear at lower flows in summer and autumn. Grayling spend the summer feeding in that clear water and move about the system to spawn and to spend the winter, so where you find them in August says little about May. Below the bridge the river slows and widens on its way to the reservoir.
Fish and forage
Arctic grayling are the reason to come, and the upper river and its eastern tributaries are where they’ve held on. They feed mostly on insects drifting near the bottom, but they’re aggressive enough to rise for a dry fly, and that makes them easy to catch and easy to overfish. Bull trout range more widely than the grayling and eat a bigger menu, small fish included. Whitefish turn up throughout, and rainbows have been reported in the headwaters. In the small lakes at the very top of the river, a park protects grayling, rainbow and bull trout alongside lake trout and kokanee.
When to fish it
From midsummer through September, once the snowmelt has gone through and the water has dropped and cleared, the upper river is at its best. That’s when the grayling sit in their summer water and look up. Bull trout at the highway bridge and in the lower river are worth a go from July into October, and the cooler autumn days suit a streamer. On the reservoir arm, water levels are lowest just after the ice goes out, so the boat ramps are often out of use until the water comes back up.
How to fish it
For grayling, start with a size 14 or 16 caddis or parachute dry on a light single-handed rod. Grayling hold in even, walking-pace water at the tails of pools and along the soft seam beside a run, rising from near the bottom to take a fly. Come at them from below, cast up and across, and give the fly a drag-free drift over the fish. If they stop rising, cut the dry off and tie on a small beadhead nymph, dead-drifted close to the bottom where they do most of their feeding. If a fish comes up and refuses, go a size smaller before you change the pattern.
For bull trout, fish one sculpin pattern or a dark Woolly Bugger. Swing it deep across the head of a pool, behind the big boulders, and below the mouth of any creek where small fish wash down. If nothing comes, go heavier and slower before you try a different fly. Bull trout sit close to the bottom, and a fly passing over their heads won’t move them.
Access and safety
The Hart Highway crosses the Parsnip just west of Mackenzie Junction, about 30 km south of Mackenzie. That bridge is your easiest way onto the middle river.
For the upper river, a forest road (the Chuchinka-Colbourne) reaches the Parsnip between the mouths of the Anzac and the Table. A resource road from Bear Lake, on the Hart Highway, appears to lead up toward the headwater lakes; ask in Mackenzie or Bear Lake what shape it’s in before you count on it. These are working logging roads with no services, so carry a spare and plenty of fuel. The headwater country is grizzly habitat in spring and autumn.
On the reservoir arm, there’s a single-lane ramp at Alexander Mackenzie’s Landing, open from May 15 to October 15. Six Mile Bay has a gravel launch on the Parsnip West Forest Service Road, about 41 km from Mackenzie. Neither ramp works when the reservoir is very low.
Regulations
The Parsnip has its own entry in the BC regulations. The rules list no closure for any part of the river: it is exempt from the spring closure that shuts most streams in the region from April 1 to June 30. Check for in-season changes before you go. There’s a year-round bait ban, you must use a single barbless hook, and you can fish only one artificial fly on a line. All Arctic grayling and bull trout must be released. The river sits where two parts of the region meet, and their spring rules on keeping fish aren’t the same, so check the regulations before you keep a trout. The tributaries, the Anzac and Table among them, have their own rules, and changes have been proposed for the Anzac. Check the regulations before you fish them.
When you know the Parsnip, the Pack River and the Misinchinka are both close by. The Nation also used to run into the Parsnip, before the reservoir. It now reaches the lake through an arm of its own.