Our team at Alaska West wears a lot of high-tech outerwear. You can’t throw a rock around our camp without hitting some Gore-Tex or a chunk of new-school soft shell. But the folks on our camp staff – the crew that works really, really hard to give our guests a great home for the week…
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Alaska West
This Guy Loves Trout
Valentine’s Day is still a few months away, but this shot from the last week of our season at Alaska West just couldn’t wait that long. When Kevin says he loves trout fishing, he means it. More on Rainbow Trout When to Go Trout Fishing in Alaska Mr. Hankey 5 Reasons We Love Arolik Rainbows
Man and Silver
Send a bunch of cameras out every day with a bunch of guides on a river that’s loaded with fish, and you’re bound to get some pictures that are beautiful, some pictures that are heroic, some pictures that are artistic, and some pictures that are just, well, kind of strange. Garrett Sullivan and his friend…
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Spey Casting – Snap T / Circle Spey Basics
It’s spey casting video time. Whitney Gould makes an appearance today to walk us through the basic steps involved in making one of the most useful spey casts out there – the Snap T a.k.a. Circle Spey a.k.a. C-Spey a.k.a. Circle Cast. It’s a great cast that just happens to have a lot of names….
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Bear Highway
We actually don’t see that many bears at Alaska West. Seriously, our camp is located 6 miles from the mouth of a 90-mile river. The best fishing for the bears is further upriver on the spawning beds, where they’ve got easy access to an easy meal. But…there are some side channels and smaller pieces of…
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Photos Galore
We get lots of nice comments from our readers about the pictures on our blog. Thanks! We’re really lucky to work with an incredible group of photographers. Did you know that we’ve got dedicated photo gallery pages on our web site for each of our fisheries? Bring on the eye candy… Bahamas Photo Gallery Chile…
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Top 5 Mistakes Fighting Big Fish
At Alaska West and BC West we see a lot of big fish fought by our guests – we’re talking steelhead and king salmon here. Sometimes our anglers do a great job fighting the big ones. Other times…not so much. Fight hard, fight smart, and get it over fast! Top 5 Mistakes Made Fighting Big…
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Get It Down!
We’ve been beating the drum lately about the fact that flies that imitate salmon parts work really well when targeting rainbow trout in Western Alaska. We’ve also mentioned that dead drifts aren’t that important, but getting your fly down is. In the process of going through the 1,273,489 pictures from our summer season at Alaska…
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Getting In and Out of a Jet Boat
It seems pretty simple, but bad things can happen when people get in and out of boats carelessly! What’s the most common cause of broken rods at Alaska West? Anglers losing their balance on the way into a boat, resulting in errant boots impacting rods. By far. What’s the most common cause of (thankfully minor)…
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Tents? Cabins? Tent Cabins!
Pictured above is an ‘angler house’ at Alaska West. This is where our guests stay when they spend a week fishing with us. Is it a tent? Is it a cabin? We don’t know, so we call them ‘tent cabins’. Here are some things to like about our tent cabins. Daily housekeeping – they’re really…
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