A Boundary County Experience

Imagine this. It's early morning. A pale gray-blue sky shows through the branches of cedar and fir from the small netting window of your camp tent. You are eager to rise; you want to be on the water when the sun chases the mist off the shoreline. You're expecting a good day, no clouds. For early May, it could get quite warm. Temperatures in the upper 60s maybe mid-70s are possible. At Robinson Lake where you are camped, you're little more than five miles from the Canadian border in Idaho's forest abundant Panhandle, for it to be that warm this time of year. You can't see the lake from where you're camped. There's a natural berm that protects the view from the lake, keeps you from seeing campsites, too, and cars and trucks while you're fishing from the lake.

You unzip the tent door and crawl out. You're the first one up. The others are still snoring, lazy bones, all of them. But you're happy about it and go immediately to prepare a small campfire from the limbs and twigs you gathered the day before. You brought your own firewood, too, pre-split into small already dried pieces not much bigger than your forearm. They're for cooking and for talking while you sit around at night well after dusk, telling stories and stopping to marvel at the coyotes yipping, hoping you'll hear a wolf howl, because they are here too.

The boat launch, not far, is almost a mile drive because you go back out to the highway and around to another forest service road to get to it. That's fine. You'll be there at the right time, you think as you place your coffee pot on the iron grill, which will soon be hot enough to boil a brew of dark coffee, better than Starbuck’s. Maybe it's the air, maybe it's the early morning or maybe it's true that coffee over a campfire, being stronger, is just better than you’ve ever had anywhere else. You smile. It'll be ready soon, so you break open a couple of eggs and drop them in your cast iron pan, settling it in the corner right on hot coals you scooped there for just that purpose.

Soon the eggs are sunny side up, just like your enthusiasm. Today is a day for brook trout. Though this lake has plenty of stocked rainbow and cutthroat, you are after a childhood memory of a big brookie you once saw here. Two or three pounds, hard to say. In memory, it's probably larger than it was in reality, but to your 15-year-old eyes at the time, it was an unbelievably fine fish and you wanted it to come back. You spent the rest of that youthful day wanting it, hoping for it, fishing. You'd cast a small red and white Mepps Spinner and brought it in just to where you could see the blade turning quietly in the off-color dark water when that big fish came up to it, mouth open ready to strike. And he hit it too, but shyly, and you jerk too soon hoping to set the hook, surprised by it. Then it was gone, but it left its imprint indelibly in your mind, colors and all.

I love the taste of fresh brook trout. They have more flavor than the hatchery-bred stock of rainbow and cutthroat. Seems strange that regulations allow the harvest 25 brook trout per person a day in the Panhandle, compared to only six of the other trout species. Most brookies are small though. If you're fishing a stream, like Gillon Creek which flows out of Robinson, most of what you'll catch will be 7 to 10 inches, very palatable, very tasty, but they'll get up to three even four pounds in a good body of water like Robinson Lake.

There's a technique along with a good bit of luck in catching the larger ones. Here's the grand secret, now exposed. It's how I fish for brook trout from a boat. Using a fly rod, with wet line, I troll a small set of spinning blades five or six feet off the end of my fly line. On the end of a light tip, two feet from the spinners, I drag a black nymph size 8 or 10 or sometimes a woolly worm (a type of wet fly). Even in dark water, trout will see a dark-colored fly. But the spinners, which look and sound like feeding minnows, attract the attention of a cruising trout. Believe it or not, this combination (now you are sworn to secrecy) is almost a guarantee that you'll be eating pan-size trout for dinner.

Eating fresh trout is one of the best reasons to go fishing, aside from the escape to quiet contemplation and the reprieve from work stress and routines of ordinary life. Fresh caught trout cooked over an open fire in a cast iron pan (brookies are best in my book) – well, there’s nothing like it.

I won't argue about catch and release. I do plenty of that. But in the case of brookies and food on the plate, that's what I'm talking about here. If you haven't enjoyed that yet, then you are simply missing out on something really fine, and when you catch it yourself, the whole experience from the evening fire to the sound sleep, the early-morning rise in cold air, the camp coffee, the mist steaming of the lake as the sun hits the water: all that, my friend, is one very good reason to put fish on the table. It beats the heck out of paying top dollar for fish-farm-raised fish of any kind. You earn it, you know you did and you had a great deal of fun getting there, being there and thinking about it all over again. Can't be beat.

How to Get There

Robinson Lake is about 25 miles north of Bonners Ferry, just off Highway 95 enroute to East Port as you head into Canada. It’s exactly 8.7 miles past the Highway 1 junction that takes you over to the alternative border crossing at Port Hill. You’ll see two signs, about a quarter-mile apart on the highway, for Robinson Lake. One is for the campsite, the other for the boat launch. They are on your left.

Best thing you can do is get yourself there somehow. Even if it’s a nature walk on the forest trails they provide. Robinson Lake is a pristine, whole nature experience. Something you need to do with a friend or family members. Some of those trails are wheelchair-friendly and so is the campsite outhouse. So now you have no excuse. It’s one of the best examples, but only one, of Boundary County’s bounty and abundance in rich outdoor experience.

Dwayne Parsons is a Realtor with Century 21 Beutler & Associates of Coeur d’Alene operating primarily in Boundary County. He can be reached at dparsons@21goldchoice.com.

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