The Kanektok — 'the Chosen River' — is the one a lot of well-travelled anglers name as their favourite float in Alaska: a clear, lake-headed river running off the Ahklun Mountains down to the Bering Sea coast at Quinhagak, holding leopard-spotted wild rainbows, sea-run Dolly Varden and all five Pacific salmon. You float it over a week, camping on the gravel, swinging and stripping for rainbows and char and chrome silvers, with the famous leopard rainbows the headline trout. It's clearer and a touch smaller-feeling than the big Bristol Bay rivers, which makes for wonderful sight and surface fishing — mouse patterns for the rainbows are a genuine thing here. Remote and bear-rich, fished out of fly-out camps; the lower river goes tidal as it nears the village. Fish the smolt and egg/flesh windows for the trout, treat the salmon as the runs that drive it, and check the orders.
The Kanektok runs off the Ahklun Mountains across the tundra of southwest Alaska to Kuskokwim Bay, and they call it the Chosen River for good reason — it carries all five Pacific salmon, plus wild leopard rainbows, Dolly Varden, grayling and the sea-bright chrome of fresh-run silvers, in water clear enough to sight-fish the lot. It's a braided, gravel-bottomed wilderness river with no roads and no towns, only the float from the mountains to the sea, the channels splitting and rejoining through gravel bars and sweepers under a huge tundra sky. The flow is rain-and-snowmelt fed, the water cold and clear, the bed clean rounded gravel. Wading the braids and bars is some of the kindest in Alaska — firm footing, readable water — which is part of why it's so beloved. This is fly fishing as expedition, a week on the water for fish that have likely never seen a fly.
Wading: Cold water, remote braids and sweepers
- Mixed
- Unconfined
- Pool riffle
