High on the Spatsizi Plateau the Stikine slips out of a chain of small mountain lakes as clear water over cobble, with caribou country on both banks and grayling in the eddies. Then the Spatsizi River comes in, the colour goes, and the river that reaches the sea has run through a canyon up to 300 metres deep and past glaciers that come down to the valley floor.
So take it as four rivers. The headwaters, from the lakes down to the Highway 37 bridge, are a clear wilderness float. Below the bridge a canyon takes the river out of reach. From the village of Telegraph Creek down it runs broad, silty and fast, and the fishing moves to wherever clear water comes in from the side. The last stretch cuts through the Coast Mountains into Alaska.
The headwaters are the reason to come. You fly in to one of the source lakes and paddle out, with Arctic grayling and Dolly Varden the common fish and rainbow trout among them. Look hard at lake outlets: where the river leaves a lake called Laslui it pours over a rock slab into a short, churning chute, and the eddy at the bottom is where a big char waits for grayling to wash past. Most of the float to the highway is canoeable, with one hard gorge partway down.
The Grand Canyon of the Stikine is for looking at. The river drops hard for around 80 km to Telegraph Creek between walls of loose, broken rock, and no boat runs it. The road to Telegraph Creek follows the rim.
Below the canyon the river is big and coloured, and the fish come to the clear water: tributary mouths, side channels, the seams where a creek’s plume meets the main flow. Chinook and steelhead move through in late summer and fall. Start where the road ends at the old gold-rush town of Glenora and work the side water from there.
The lower river is the part almost nobody sees from the BC side. Below the Iskut it braids out between icefields, crosses into Alaska and spreads into a delta near Wrangell, and its clear sloughs hold cutthroat trout and Dolly Varden. Upstream, the Tahltan and the Iskut each carry their own salmon, and below Glenora the clear creeks coming into brown water are still mostly yours to find.
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.
Above the Spatsizi confluence the river is clear enough to sight-fish. Grayling sit in riffle tails and along current seams; char hold deeper, at the heads of pools and below lake outlets where food is funnelled to them. Below the confluence, and especially below the canyon, glacial silt takes visibility away. Fish there feed along the edges, travelling the line where clear creek water meets silt and holding on its clear side. In Alaska the river spreads across gravel braids and tidal flats.
Fish and forage
All five Pacific salmon run the river, and steelhead too. Most chinook are bound for the Tahltan, Iskut and Chutine, the sockeye mainly for Tahltan Lake, the coho mostly for the Iskut; pinks and chum spawn in the main river below the Tahltan. The canyon’s rapids stop them, so above it the river belongs to resident grayling, rainbows, Dolly Varden and mountain whitefish, with lake trout and burbot in the plateau lakes. Below the canyon the rainbows and Dolly Varden follow the spawners and eat drifting eggs, so your fly should change with the salmon.
When to fish it
The headwater float is a July and August proposition, and even then cold rain and snow are common on the plateau. Below the canyon, chinook run from May into July and sockeye follow in midsummer. August is the egg-drop month, when pinks and chum spawn and the char move in behind them; coho come in September and October. The Alaskan sloughs fish for cutthroat and Dolly Varden from June to October.
How to fish it
For headwater grayling, dead-drift a small dark dry fly down a seam and let it swing out at the end. If they rise and refuse, go a size smaller before you change pattern; if nothing rises, change to a small beadhead nymph. For the char below lake outlets, swing a dark streamer deep through the eddy line.
Below the canyon, stand in the clear water, cast across into the plume line and let the fly swing back along it. Once salmon are spawning, dead-drift a single egg fly below them; before that, a sculpin streamer. If a creek mouth gives you nothing in twenty minutes, move to the next. For chinook, bring an 8- or 9-weight and a big pink-and-purple rabbit-strip fly, swung slow and deep to fish resting off the main current.
Access and safety
Highway 37 crosses the river once, just above the canyon. The Telegraph Creek Road runs about 110 km from Dease Lake: gravel, with grades up to 20 per cent and narrow rim sections without guardrails. Leave any trailer in Dease Lake. Telegraph Creek has a café, store and lodge in the old Hudson’s Bay building, and there are campsites at Glenora, Winter Creek and Dodjatin Creek. Where the Tahltan River meets the Stikine is a Tahltan fishing site; don’t cross reserve land without permission.
The headwaters are reached by floatplane with a permitted charter; the Cold Fish Lake airstrip is unmaintained and the old rail-grade trail is washed out. Grizzlies are abundant, so carry bear spray and a satellite device. Buy your licence before you leave home, since there are few places to get one along Highway 37. Paddlers carrying on into Alaska clear US customs in Wrangell, and the tidal flats need a big tide to cross.
Regulations
The Stikine has no rules of its own in BC’s Skeena Region tables, so the regional and provincial rules govern it; check in-season changes at gov.bc.ca/FishingRegulations. You fish one fly on a single barbless hook. Release all Dolly Varden and bull trout taken from streams. You may keep one trout a day from streams between 1 July and 31 October, if it is 30 cm or over, inside a trout and char quota of 5 with no more than one over 50 cm; release trout of any size from 1 November to 30 June. The grayling quota is 3, whitefish 15 (all species combined). Release all wild steelhead, and buy a Steelhead Conservation Surcharge Stamp to fish for them; rivers and streams in the region close to steelhead fishing from 15 May to 15 June, with the Stikine’s main river exempt but not its side creeks. Fisheries and Oceans Canada sets the salmon rules. In Spatsizi Plateau and Stikine River parks the Park Act applies too, and below the border Alaska’s regulations replace BC’s.