Dave’s camps are, in a way, a throwback to the 1940’s, when folks heading to Alaska for adventure fishing looked for nothing more than a dry tent and fishing that was right outside the door. The outfitters who accomodated them adopted a style of simple, comfortable, on-river camps that were easy to set up and maintain in super remote regions, and offered immediate boat or foot access to the river.

Lodge fishing in Alaska has since moved away from this rustic “camp” style, as fly-out lodges, with their ammenities and indulgences have set a new standard of sorts. But it’s good to know guys like Dave are still out there, in the middle of nowhere, offering hardcore fishing, complete solitude...and plenty of creature comforts.

Each week a load of choice meats, fresh veggies, and pounds of basics like flour, sugar, coffee and bacon arrive into camp by float-plane. The cooks use their scratch ingredients and spice racks to produce the best homestyle meals in the Alaskan bush. Think cowboy-cook meets cafe gourmet.

“Weatherport” tent-cabins are a staple in remote wilderness living. With wooden floors, comfortable beds and weather-tight walls and roofs, they’re incredibly simple and provide everything a die-hard fisherman needs to stay warm and dry.

Other amenities in camp include sauna, generator powered electricity, hot showers, outhouse bathroom facilities, and woodburning stoves for drying gear and warming hands on crisp September days.

“What I like about Egdorf’s is that you’d be hard-pressed to find more rainbows in a river anywhere, ever. Combine that with 100 miles of jet boatable river, possibly the best camp pools in Alaska, and the endlessly fishable midnight sun of a Nushagak summer, and very good things happen!”

--Mike Mercer,The Fly Shop, Alaska Travel Director

June and early July
The “guide’s choice” season. The salmon have not yet arrived. It’s just you and a whole bunch of supper aggressive rainbows gorging themselves on mice, sculpins, salmon smolt and caddis. Imagine a log protruding from the cut-bank opposite you. It’s laying half submerged in a slow moving, glassy current. There’s a two-foot trout under there. Watch now as your cast puts a deer-hair mouse tight to the far bank. It makes a plop when it hits the water. You carefully manage the line, bringing the fly out from the bank to trace the leading edge of the log. The fly skitters, the trout tracking it with every instinctual sense firing. You do the same. The fly moves about a foot. Then all hell breaks loose.

Late July and August
The heart of the season. King, chum and sockeye salmon have been trickling to their upper Nushagak and King Salmon River spawning grounds now for a couple weeks. By mid-July they are turning up by the thousands every day, and the spawning starts. Rainbows, char and graying are wise to what’s going on as they frantically gang to the redds like college kids to a “free beer!” add. Single egg patterns and flesh flies dupe everything that sees them. They seem like cheating somtimes. You might fish a half dozen spots each day, moving more to change the scenery than because the bite’s gone off.

September
Fall comes early to the upper Nushagak. Colors show on the trees and tundra from the last week of August, the mosquitos disapear and crisp weather reminds you of your northerly global position. When the salmon finish spawning in late August, they die. It’s one of the mysterious, fascinating phenomena of Nature. The beat goes on for anglers though, as the resident fish of the Nushagak feast on the smorgasbord that the decomposing flesh of their sea-run bretheren provide. Flesh flies and streamer patterns, swung on a tight line, trick fish maniaclly bulking up for winter.

Deposit: A 50 percent deposit is due to secure a reservation.

Comments and questions are welcome. Please contact me at mercer@theflyshop.com or call 800-669-3474