SUBARCTIC ARCTICS

Eager as I was to wet a line, the misty slopes across the lake drew my gaze to a row of treeless summits dented with deep, spherical depressions. The Dena’ina people call these hills Vahunqishdghuch’i: the “ones with holes on it.” Some locals call them the Holy Hills. They looked like old Norse giants had been playing bocce on them.

Eventually, my attention returned to what had brought me to Lake Kontrashibuna—and would keep bringing me back over the ensuing years. This fourteen-mile-long glacial-turquoise lake sits about 150 miles southwest of Anchorage, in the midst of Alaska’s Lake Clark National Park and Preserve—a park the size of Connecticut that sees as many visitors in a year as Yellowstone gets on a single July day. This was one of the few spots I’d fished outside of the Arctic where Arctic char could be caught on a fly. The lake also contains a healthy population of lake trout, and both of these coldwater Salvelinus species feed aggressively during their short Alaskan growing season, occasionally even taking dries off the surface.

THANKS TO NUMEROUS BEARS ROAMING THE RIVERS, THE FISH (LIKE ME), WERE EASILY SPOOKED, BUT STILL HUNGRY AND AGGRESSIVE.

I assembled my well-traveled pack rod and tugged on waders and boots that I’d hauled three miles uphill from the Farm Lodge in the village of Port Alsworth—a combo fishingand-wildlife-viewing outpost that served as my base of operations the previous few days for pike, grayling, and a couple of amazing fly-out trips for rainbows and Dolly Varden. While my friend Dave wandered up