The BIGGEST Summer STEELHEAD In The USA! (Idaho Steelhead Fishing)

It was a cold winter morning as I started my adventure in search of Idaho steelhead. The adversity that these fish face is what makes them the iconic creatures that they are. Three to five years in the ocean evading birds sea lions and sharks and fishermen to crossing the Columbia Bar and traveling over 600 miles over eight dams and through toxic water temperatures through countless gill nets just to reach the home waters in which they were born. The trip that took us over seven hours takes these fish up to six months and once they reach the riffles and pools of some of the most beautiful rivers in the world is where we are lucky enough to encounter and shake hands with these miracles of mother nature and once you've had that chance to enjoy a moment with these fish you'll understand what it's like to be truly addicted. This is Idaho Steel. Welcome to Idaho. 15-20 minutes away from where we're meeting Josh our awesome guide Josh Butter who you guys are about to meet in just a second uh invited us out to come fish with him so we're hitting this river today we're gonna go back to town stay in town tonight and then we're gonna go hit a different river in the morning and then we're coming back to this river but about four hours up river and it's gonna be a different vibe the whole time but we finally saw our first piece of fishy water. I'm having a hard time not just pulling over and fishing though honestly I look at that that hole right there wants to spoon in it so bad we're almost there. Well seven hour drive but we still made it in time to make a few passes. Fishiest situation I've seen this side of the Columbia. Let's hop on the boat here meet our wonderful host for the next couple days. World, Josh, Butters, what's going on Josh, World thank you for having us man. Awesome to have you guys. We get to go play around out here in God's country for the next couple days with you. Heck yeah I'm looking forward to it. I couldn't be more excited. Hell yeah man. Let's go do it. All right. I'm just gonna throw a head on there just gonna keep a nice low profile give it a little stink it's using a little millennial Cooney head here. So Josh was just saying at this time of year because of the water temperature probably these fish are more lethargic because most of the time this far east there's it's nothing for it to be below zero half of the winter correct yeah it's midnight and stuff. They hole up get real lethargic and just tend to stick to those deeper pools sit down there and sulk wait for the big spring push and water to run back you know continue on up the stream it's gone. All right our first first stink finger here. Oh look at him go. Oh yeah perfect hookup. Got some live action out here everybody. What's going on? Darn it. Okay guys we're getting good. I'm gonna go with a little bit of eggs. Look how nice those look. You guys want to see how I cured these up? Go down click into that YouTube channel. Those are perfect little steelhead eggs. Click into those how to's on the Addicted YouTube channel here and you can see exactly how I made these ones right here. See how they turned out. So check that out. Go catch more fish. All right buddy we'll see you in the morning. Well what an absolutely gorgeous night. No steelhead got a couple whitefish definitely missed a couple steelhead but the water was on the rise some weird things going on but man it was just such a blessing to be in this kind of setting especially on a travel day. I just feel like you know kind of brings to mind how blessed we are to live in a place like this where we can wake up at five in the morning drive seven hours and be fishing the same day in one of the most beautiful places there is to fish in the world. So it's too cold to camp this time of year so we're gonna go get a hotel order us some pizza pig out and then pass out and then we're gonna wake up in the morning tomorrow and go fish for some of the biggest summer and steelhead in the world. So I can't wait. It's gonna be hard to sleep tonight. Comment below with what you guys think of this day so far. See you in the morning. So night number one we made our about an hour and a half trip back to town and went and got probably the slummiest hotel that I could probably find. So kick back that night Cody started heading to us from southern Idaho that that evening and left at like six o'clock so it took him over six hours to get there so it was about one in the morning he comes storming his big biking ass in through the door and the dogs almost ate him up and he jumped on the floor with a pillow and fell asleep and we woke up the next morning and and to a beautiful drive into the setting that I really really wasn't even expecting. Well we made it to paradise and we got the whole damn crew now. Cody? The whole crew. Introduce yourself this is our other guest Cody here. How you doing buddy? Good good. Glad to be here. Back out here with Josh. Cody we're actually going with tomorrow on a different river but he did the treacherous drive that we're about to endure last night got to the hotel about 1am it's like 12 40. Okay close enough all I remember was the dogs trying to eat him and me saying come on man sleep on the floor but uh we're out here man it's cold what are we doing? We're doing a little uh back trolling uh gonna throw some bobbers and jigs try and target these deep pools the fish are kind of holed up water's cold and we got some ice flowing in it they're going to be a little lethargic holding up in the deep holes so we're going to be back trolling some plugs and throwing some bobbers and jigs. I can't sink it series. Hold on I already got the staple on my guides keep freezing up really bad and my line keeps freezing so it's not sliding through my little clear drift bobber here some people use like paraffin wax or like petroleum jelly or something but sometimes I'm having a hard time I'll just take some of this bait wax by Pro-Cure if you already got it on you got it on you you put just a little bit on that line like that it'll start to make that water just bead right off of it and you won't get that frozen line problem so it's a good another good reason to have some Pro-Cure in your bag all the time and you can do it to your guides too plus you're adding some scent all the way down the line well spot number one froze our butts off but we just had to get a start really this time of year I feel like it happens all the time where you really kind of have to kill time until you get sunlight then you get that short little window that bite but that's really all we'll need today everything we catch should be pretty big so they're all banker's hours so yeah exactly sleep in enjoy your coffee because it's going to be a bit more warm yeah so that morning started off super slow which was really expected uh no steelhead or any kind of salmon species I find like super cold water with those icebergs floating down it was a wild jet boat ride as we were going up and down the river because we're hitting these giant if you see in the b-roll those giant chunks of ice as we're going up and just gunk gunk gunk gunk every little rapid you feel like you're hitting rocks but we made our way up fished really hard that morning as much as we could bear luckily josh had some heaters and some big you know bunsen burners in the uh in the boat there and so it kept us warm and kept us going and we just started making our way down river slowly into some areas where there was warm water inlets coming into the river and then our luck really forgot my propane for my little crack stove so we're resorting to uh little engineering it's actually working a lot I can already see the bubbles starting a couple nudes are you on we got a jumper look at him jump holy moly that was a fry we'll call that a d run hatchery fish too yep fish on okay yep there's some weight to that finally guys uh you know what the funny thing is too i was just thinking to myself man it feels a little warmer out you know what i mean yeah now the back of my neck's all warm i'm only using 10 pound test because this water's so darn clear but same jig that we did really well on last time we fished kind of further east this pinkish peachy that thing is huge telling these guys i've never caught a b-run steelhead these things are fabled for this area because they're so big just historically and we catch them down towards the mouth of the river like down the columbia way down towards that story all the time but i personally have never got to put my hands on one so let's see if we can change that i'm gonna check in here i'm gonna check him all right oh look at that nice what a fish dude he does have a fin doesn't it unclipped that's a beautiful fish it's like your jig oh perfect look at it guys old pinky got it done awesome dude give me some nice job man congratulations thank you so much persistence pays off again god right when we quit trying too oh wow guys look at that little get out of here look at that fish it was such a relief to finally hook into a fish we worked really hard all morning it was like two o'clock in the afternoon and we finally found one and i was super proud of my first b-run being a wild fish for sure all right guys we're gonna get this beautiful little girl back in the water here what a special fish wow thanks for sharing that with me everybody josh give me some dude that was epic worth all the miles the cold fingers frozen toes we did it first fish in the boat well we made a pit stop we got dash dog on board now for good luck it's a fishy situation and i'd say i mean i'm i'm like at least physically enjoying myself a little more it warmed up a lot yeah which we kind of figured you know we figured that it's supposed today was actually kind of a rare warm day and warmer than it's been in quite a while so but we got one fish in the boat as you saw i couldn't be more tickled oh my god things are happening but the day's turned around we're gonna keep plugging away probably right till dark it's getting dark at about four o'clock 4 30 right now and then we got a long treacherous drive ahead of us what do you think's gonna happen tonight we're gonna do the best we can the key is keep the rubber side down on the shiny side that's no guarantee though oh god well i got full coverage so maybe it'll make for some good tv you guys are gonna have to stick around to find out josh i got something coming in i don't know what so cody's bobber drops way down in the back of the tail out and we switched this warm water inlet to the river and his bobber goes down and he sets hook and starts reeling in and we all thought he had a stick but what i think had happened is this fish had come up out of the out of the really cold water current in the main river down below and it moved up and it just touched that warm water so it hadn't acclimated yet it wasn't warm and it gets up next to the boat and all hell breaks loose let's do it yep it is yeah i feel it now oh it's a good one where's the net it's like a keeper too ready ready yeah buddy he's clipped yep bring him in nice and that's a big fish sweet dude give me some you we came in in the clutch it took a little work took a little bit what a fish dude look at his nose he's been sitting there slamming into the hatchery you see that that i see that a lot look at that well instead of a dam he ran into a to a damn cody nice dude had the right damn bait up in our end it's all damn jokes push on this one's a little funky which way is the beach this way yep well that was cool i like how we've been kind of fishing multiple methods at the same time all day and it's not really hindering any other than you know any method at one time yeah when it's slow yeah i mean i love it sweet man we're getting them they turned around for sure i'm stoked well we made it back we made the executive decision to get the heck out of dodge we had a few fish it was an awesome day such a blessing today too wild couple hatchery we really kind of pulled it out it was a tough day we were kind of getting discouraged at the end but as soon as it got warm the fish warmed up to us a little bit more too but we're gonna get out of here we got about a four hour theoretically a four hour drive but with the road conditions it should take about six you guys heard the conversation earlier that we had um so anybody's guess what's going to happen now just point it in the right direction i hope it gets there let's go do it the night continues starting to get treacherous finally we had a pretty nice drive so far it's been about four hours total this trip i think when we're finally pulling it all together it's gonna be like probably 13 1400 miles so we're really following the path of the steelhead i think that's probably the most iconic part of this trip for me and what will stick with me is we've we've seen how hard it is even with modern day equipment and vehicles to get to these areas and how far these fish travel and the adversities they overcome to get to the areas that we get to go you know come one-to-one with them and get to meet these fish so we got about two hours left to go we haven't hit the gnarly road yet but we finally got freezing temperatures so we got josh already beating us down into the canyon because we were stuck back in town trying to get wi-fi for sean to upload some videos but we're on the road a couple hours left wish us luck so we closed up shop we decided to quit fishing a little bit early right as we started getting on fish because we knew we had so far to go and that the weather was supposed to be terrible but as is life on the road with an addicted crew sean had some videos to upload so we spent the next three hours in bfe idaho trying to find somebody that would give us wi-fi to try to send off this this footage to marlin uh back in town and little little did we know it would take us till about eight o'clock so we ended up getting all the way down into the canyon uh stopped for some antics along the way roll we're almost there this is the treacherous part well this is uh this is our main office here in cambridge uh i actually don't come here very often but our wonderful office manager brandy runs the operation out of here so yeah we made it to cambridge uh now we've got our treacherous descent down into the canyon um they don't take care of these roads going in the canyon at all so we're uh the ice the rocks the deer it's gonna be uh it'll be interesting it's about what 23 22 degrees here yeah it's in the mid 20s early 20s feels good i actually get hot yeah i was i kept rolling the windows down yeah i already pulled a layer off i'm getting too excited i'm great no i got really excited riding the waves all right all right man you did great i'm gonna send it full send all right let's do this end so we winded our way down into hell's canyon and i was blown away i couldn't the roads were a little bit better than we thought as you could kind of tell and as we winded down the gradient i couldn't believe how steep the the road was pointing downhill and i was just so grateful and and that it wasn't snowing or that it wasn't terrible uh going down in there because it would have been totally gnarly there were some spots that you really could have sent it off some cliffs fish on fish on stuck that jig in front of him he couldn't help it nice