In May the Willow is a brown flood carrying the Cariboo Mountains’ snow, and it can climb from manageable to violent inside a week. By late summer it has dropped back to gravel bars and clear runs, twenty minutes from Prince George, and hardly anyone is standing in it. The river starts in a gold-rush town a long way south and ends at the Fraser, and almost every kilometre between is wild trout water with almost no reputation.
Picture it in three parts. The headwaters rise at a lake on the edge of Wells, in the old Cariboo goldfields. From there a long middle river winds north through forest, crossed now and then by logging roads and finally by Highway 16. Below the highway the lower river runs through a boulder canyon to its mouth on the Fraser, upstream of Prince George.
Start at the highway. Just past the Highway 16 bridge, heading east, a forest road drops to a recreation site on a gravel shore, and a second site with a short loop trail sits on the other bank a little upstream. Walk the bars and read the runs here to learn what the river holds:
rainbow trout and
mountain whitefish, with
bull trout in the system as well. It is the easiest water on the river to find and the best place to learn it.
The middle river is the exploring. Forestry roads reach it in a handful of places between the highway and the headwaters, and each crossing opens a stretch of wild river with little pressure. Its fish are unproven rather than absent, and the only way to know them is to go and look.
The canyon below the highway is the staple whitewater run for Prince George paddlers, with logjams and a narrow gorge that has killed people. Fish the water above and below it, not in it.
From the mouth the Fraser carries the Willow’s water down past Prince George. The Bowron, another of the rivers around Prince George, is the next one to try.
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.
Likely
Older records here, recent stocking, a local guide or fly shop, a guide listing, or recent records on connected water nearby.
Water and habitat
Away from the canyon the Willow is a freestone river of gravel bars, riffles and runs, with timber along the banks and logs brought down by the floods. Rainbows sit where a riffle drops into a run and along the edges of logjams, where current brings food to them and wood gives cover. Whitefish hold deeper in the body of the runs. Bull trout, when you find them, lie in the deepest water and under wood. The banks between access points are thick bush, so you will move by wading the bars rather than walking the shore.
How to fish it
A 4- or 5-weight is plenty. Wade the bars and fish upstream into the riffles and the heads of runs, where the fish can see a fly coming. Start with a high-floating caddis or a stimulator, the dries that work on the region’s other trout rivers. If nothing rises, change to a weighted nymph and fish it dead drift close along the bottom of the same runs. If that fails too, swing a small streamer down and across the tail of a run and along the face of a logjam; that is also the fly for a bull trout. Cover water: if a run doesn’t show a fish in a dozen casts, walk to the next bar.
Access and safety
Heading east from Prince George on Highway 16, take the first right after the bridge, Willow North Forest Service Road, then the first right again down to the river, less than a kilometre off the highway; there is camping on a gravel shore. The newer recreation site is on the opposite bank, two kilometres south of the bridge by a gravel forest road, with a campsite and a loop trail of about two kilometres along the river. Down near the mouth, Upper Fraser Road crosses the river northeast of Prince George.
For the middle river, forestry roads are your way in, among them the Coalmine Road, 2900 Road and 700 Road forest service roads. Carry a backroad map and expect logging traffic. The headwaters are reached from Highway 26 at Wells, near Barkerville.
The canyon is the hazard to respect. It holds a narrow boulder gorge and logs lodged across the current, and in flood the water at the highway bridge is all boils and diagonals. Don’t float it unless you are a whitewater paddler who knows it, and don’t wade near the head of it.