We embarked for Alaska the day before my 34th birthday, only days after leaving my corporate editing job and hours away from asking my partner for her hand in marriage. For these reasons, not to mention the pursuit of the challenging species that lay ahead, I was unprecedentedly nervous and equally excited. 

I headed to Juneau, in southeast Alaska to meet Mark Hieronymus and pursue coastal cutthroat trout and Dolly Varden, the first two of six total native trout and char species of Alaska I was targeting for the Western Native Trout Challenge.

Hieronymus is well known in commercial and recreational circles having owned a seafood processing company before becoming a fulltime fly-fishing guide for Bear Creek Outfitters in Juneau.

After arriving in Juneau I was deflated as Hieronymus informed me a dismal weather forecast and a broken water gauge made him skeptical of our success if we ventured off into the wilds. 

There went my chance to make Alaska fishing history. It didn’t seem fair. 

 Hieronymus asked where I was staying. I told him I was staying at a bed and breakfast just north of downtown Juneau. 

“Ha!” he laughed, as I continued to try to mask my now spiraling disappointment. “Tell you what, there’s a fantastic cutthroat creek not far from your place and I know of a Dolly beach that can be nuclear on the outgoing tide if you want to do that. We can still try to fly out, but it could be really expensive and I can’t guarantee success. Want to just stick around town?”

Staring down a four-month project on a fixed income, that was a risk I couldn’t take. 

The next morning, on my birthday,  Hieronymus met me at the bed and breakfast and we ventured, as he mentioned, no more than 500 yards to a small creek outlet where he hoped to “knock out a few cutthroat before we head to the beach.” 

“How was your flight?,” he asked. 

“Shockingly smooth,” I said honestly. “Hard to believe you can get to the ‘Last Frontier’ before breakfast.” 

After an unsuccessful hour or so trying to get cutthroat at the confluence of the inlet creek — he had mentioned that coastal cutthroat trout are famously more active in the early and late low-light hours —  Hieronymus assured me we should head out to make sure we hit the tide. 

“Should be good. We have a big tide today. A 3-foot low to a 16- or 17-foot-high tide today,” he said. “The tide pushes those salmon fry and smolt out of the river and off the beach and the Dollies just cruise the pockets and feast.” 

As a lifelong waterman — I was pretty heavy in the surfing scene for a while — this was a tidal event first for me. 

“Mark, it seems Dolly Varden get a lot of bad press. That they eat all the precious salmon eggs, they out populate and take food from more favorable sportfish. Is that true?” I asked as we walked the path from the road to the beach. 

“I call Dolly Varden ‘the people’s fish,’” he said, smirking. “They have a wide range, are super adaptive, have multiple life forms and never get any credit.” 

After a multi-mile hike through dense hemlock and spruce along a glacial river, we arrived at a sandy beach where we were delighted to see Dolly Varden exploding from the surface of the water. 

‘Charrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!”  Hieronymus exclaimed in his best pirate imitation. Fully bearded and shielded head-to-toe from the occasional rain and constant wind, I never saw him any other way. 

When Hieronymus says that habitat isn’t just the superhighways, I ask what he means. 

“When we think about people, and the ‘habitat’ people utilize, we don’t just look at the superhighways where they can easily be seen traveling,” he said. “People don’t live on the freeways, people don’t ‘spawn’ on the freeways or on their commute.” 

The next day, we continued a bit further toward the “End of the Road,” and got into fewer, but larger, Dolly Varden on another beautiful creek that runs into the sea. One deep bend after another, I found myself distracted by what  Hieronymus had said the day before. Instead of the prime lies and pristine logjam pools and deep bends, I found myself paying a bit more attention to the small side-tributaries or the stream side meadow that reinforced the almost vertical banks of some of the pools. 

I found myself thinking about what might affect where the trout live, wondering where they spawn, where they travel and feed. Where does their food find food? I wondered what the world would look like and what sort of misguided decisions we’d make as a society if we just observed our own human culture from the nightly news traffic helicopter. 

Our initial highlight reel plan of flying out and documenting never before recognized streams is something I hope one day to have the ability, know-how and means to do, but while there is great value in  Hieronymus’ pursuit of recording history in order to preserve it, I was happy that my journey led me down another path. 

True discovery, for me, and understanding of a bit more of the blue collar char, “the people’s fish” was right down the road. It was right under my nose the whole time. 

Returning from our pursuit of Dolly Varden late in the afternoon, I rejoined my soon to be financé, thanking her upon my arrival for finding such a wonderful place to stay. She had no idea that the next day, deep in a remote forest in southeastern Alaska, she would agree to be my partner forever. 

Before I did that, under the still-waning midnight sun Alaska offers in June, I geared up and took a little walk after she had fallen asleep. Emerging from the brush at nearly 11 p.m., onto the small island where  Hieronymus had assured me fish would be waiting for the fry to be pushed out of the creek, I proceeded to catch coast cutthroat trout, 11 casts in a row.