The Columbia

Like blood pumping from a giant heart, the year’s last pulses of steelhead and salmon are spreading from the Columbia River and into tributaries. The fish are running in every direction, and so are the anglers.

The game of catching this bounty making its way inland from the ocean can be made even more fun, if not more exhausting, by trying to outrun the competition – which brings more than a few anglers, such as Carmen Macdonald, to Washington’s Klickitat River.

Macdonald is a Portland advertising agency associate who manages accounts for Lamiglas Rods and other fishing product companies because he prefers to keep the gap between work and fishing as narrow as possible.

He handles fishing gear like a pro and he can catch steelhead anywhere they are willing to be caught, and probably in a lot of places where the fish are not willing.

When catching fish isn’t challenging enough, Macdonald is one of those guys who’ll ante up and take a gamble on the Klick in mid-September.

“It’s just far enough away from cities like Portland and Seattle to where a lot of fishermen don’t like to take chances with the water conditions,” he said. “But anybody who’s fished here much knows that if you hit it right, the fishing can be very good.”

As it was recently.

The Klickitat free-flows roughly 100 miles from its source in the glaciers of Mount Adams to the Columbia near the town of Lyle. For most of the year, the river provides no attraction to anglers. The steelhead are gone and the season is closed during winter. When the season opens June 1, the weather gods barely have to sneeze on the volcano’s snowy slopes to turn the river off-color.

Yet June is considered one of the prime months to fish for fresh summer steelhead heading into the river.

You simply have to take your chances on the rain.

Hot weather is the angler’s nemesis in July and into September, when the sun bears down on the mountain’s ice and fills the Klickitat with glacial flour.

But sometime in September, the river will gradually become more accommodating, just about the time chinook salmon are joining the steelhead en route to spawning grounds.

Macdonald came to the river this month ready for anything. He had steelhead rods rigged to drift salmon eggs and others rigged to fish pink jigs under slip bobbers, plus some stouter rods rigged for plugging in the deeper, swifter holes that hold salmon.

“We never got around to salmon the other day,” he said. “We hooked eight steelhead and landed seven, all on jigs.”

And one was a hot 16-pounder that was enough to hang his hat on for the week.

The next day was a bust, nothing out of the ordinary for a steelheader.

The third day, his party of two had caught and released two wild steelhead by 1 p.m.

“But look at this,” he said on a pleasant September afternoon. “We’re practically the only ones here. That’s worth something.”

The Klickitat has several personalities as it tumbles from Mount Adams, and most of them are downright scary to drift boat anglers.

The lower river narrows into a gorge of basalt walls. Tough anglers backpack their gear into the gorge and find some good fishing. Only a nut case would go in a boat in most conditions.

The upper Klickitat from Summit Creek to “The Slide” – a boat launch that’s almost a vertical drop from the highway just upstream from the town of Klickitat – has numerous good fishing runs. Crowd-shy anglers might consider the minefields of boulders and the occasional logjam to be a bonus, considering that they scare away anyone with weak skills at the oars.

“There’s no road access to most of the upper, so there aren’t as many anglers,” Macdonald said.

But when the river came into a good mood at midweek in mid-September, even the midsection of river along State Highway 142 north and south of Klickitat was virtually angler-free.

“When the river’s right in October and November, the fly fishers come out in force and it won’t be nearly so lonely up here,” he said.