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Cowboy Trout
Southwest Alberta offers trout options galore, and those fish play best when green drakes are present.
By Jim McLennan

Two roads encompass the best stream fishing in southwestern Alberta. One - Highway 22 - is a paved road running north/south through the eastern edge of the foothills. Its name as promoted by Alberta’s tourism department is “The Cowboy Trail.” Corny and hoaky, right? It would be if it weren’t so apt. Southwest of Calgary it passes through grand cattle country and the ranch town of Longview, well-named and famous as the home of both Longview Beef Jerky and one of Alberta’s and the world’s finest western songwriters, Ian Tyson (Four Strong Winds, Someday Soon, Navajo Rug). It continues south through the Porcupine Hills and the foothills of the Rockies, terminating where it meets Highway 3, the Crowsnest Pass highway.

The other road is the Forestry Trunk Road, a more-or-less all-weather gravel road lying west of Highway 22 and running north/south a little deeper in the foothills. This one has a direct fly-fishing reputation stemming from Alberta’s Trout Highway, a fly-fishing book written by esteemed Alberta fly fisher, the late Barry Mitchell. The Trunk Road crosses or comes near many of the best streams in southwestern Alberta—the Crowsnest, Oldman, Livingstone, Highwood—plus tributaries and other streams I can’t mention without having to kill you - or myself.

These two roads invite a twisty-oval road-trip, perhaps in the month of July, seeking the big cheese of trout bugs—western green drake mayflies—along with some authentic cowboy history. Your fishing may be tempted by other buggy emergences, like golden stones or pale morning duns, but those are just distractions. Put them out of your mind. For fly fishers in Alberta in July it’s GDOB: Green Drakes OR Bust.

These are small and medium-sized streams with clear water and rocky, gravelly stream beds. The fish are a mix of native westslope cutthroats (even though this is the east slope of the rockies), bull trout and our perennial friend the mountain whitefish. Rainbows are not native to the area but were introduced to the Oldman drainage sometime in the late 1930s or early ‘40s. Routine stocking of trout in Alberta’s flowing water ceased in the 1950s so the rainbows today are wild but not native. As elsewhere they willingly hybridize with the cutthroats, and become more dominant farther downstream in the drainage. Bull trout live throughout the Oldman system, and are most abundant in the upper reaches of the streams. They have been protected with a no-kill limit throughout Alberta for 25 years.

A chunky cutthroat from the Castle River.

Highway 3 runs east/west through the Crowsnest Pass at the south end of our roads. You could start in the Pass, stopping first to consider immensity of the Frank Slide, a rockslide that in April, 1903 buried the town of Frank in a minute and a half. On the south side of Highway 3, making its way through the remnant boulders of the slide, is the Crowsnest River.

The Crow’s fly-fishing reputation is as a rainbow stream, and it still is primarily, although brown trout have been turning up there in recent years. Speculation is that this began with some escapees from a brood-trout station on a tributary of the upper river a few years ago. The Crowsnest has the standard palate of western hatches, including green drakes, but with a twist. It’s the only place I know where the drakes hatch mostly after dark, as if mimicking brown drakes that are rare in this part of the province. Fish an Olive Paradrake or your favorite imitation in size 10 or 12 through the day, searching for fish that “remember” these bugs, even if there aren’t any naturals apparent or many fish rising. But stay out until dark and watch for an increase in surface activity about the same time you can no longer see your fly or the real bugs anymore. The biggest rainbows in this trout-tour are likely in the middle section of the Crowsnest River, between Hillcrest and Lundbreck Falls.

A green drake and a successful impostor—a Green Drake Wulff.

Whirling Disease was found in the Crowsnest River in 2017 and in the last few years anglers have been catching fewer, bigger rainbows in the river. Decent numbers of juvenile rainbows have more recently been reported in the upper Crow, though, and there is justifiable optimism that the recovery from whirling disease that occurred in Montana’s Madison and Missouri Rivers is underway here.

You can stop to make obligatory strolls through two good fly shops in the Pass before turning north on the Trunk Road at the town of Coleman. The Crowsnest Angler is on Highway 3 at the town of Bellevue, and the Crowsnest Cafe and Fly Shop is in Coleman adjacent to the intersection of Highway 3 and the Trunk Road. As you drive north on the Trunk Road, look right towards Grassy Mountain, the epicenter of the fight to prevent expansion of open-pit coal mining in these mountains. Troubling as those thoughts are, they’ll dissipate as you start crossing trout streams, and eventually the Oldman River itself will appear on your right. It’s one of Alberta’s favourite rivers, and this is the heart of green drake country.

Oldman River rainbow.

You’ll be tempted to stop and fish many places on this part of the drive and you can do exactly that, for you’re in a huge tract of public land that’s one of Alberta’s finest achievements, the Rocky Mountains Forest Reserve. It lies between the continental divide and the prairie and covers nearly 9000 square miles.

The fish here are a mix of seemingly pure cutthroats and cut-bows, and always the lurking bull tout. There are plenty of 12-to 17-inch cutts and cut-bows, with some pushing 20, in the Oldman proper and tributaries like the Livingstone, a few miles upstream or downstream of the Trunk Road.

Thanks partly to COVID, the days of great fishing with no other anglers around are gone. You’ll have some company, so choose a pull-out where no vehicles are parked, or at least where no more than one vehicle is parked. Don’t be afraid to walk a ways and scramble a bit. Run through your green-drake dry-fly routine, perhaps fishing a smaller terrestrial dry or Parachute Adams with it on a short dropper. What about nymphs, you say? Nymphs? NYMPHS? I assume you jest; this is cutthroat country.

Bull trout anyone? Scouring a deep green pool in the Highwood River.

In any of the streams near the Trunk Road, even the smallest ones, you may find a good bull trout, which is to say one between 20- and 30-inches long. You may spot him in a deep pool or see him try to make off with a cutthroat you’ve hooked. So if you must stray from the dry-fly plan, put on a fast sink-tip line and a big grey or gold streamer and have at it, working especially carefully through the deep green pools and slots.

About 60 miles up the Trunk Road from the Crowsnest Pass you’ll cross the Highwood River at Highwood Junction. Turn east there and head towards Longview. The Highwood is not part of the Oldman system, but thinks it is. It’s a major spawning and rearing tributary of the Bow River that also carries a population of- rainbows, cutts and bulls. While you’re gawking at the river you’ll pass through some serious Alberta ranch history: the Buffalo Head Ranch, once owned by celebrated writer and explorer of the Canadian northwest, R.M. Patterson; the Stampede Ranch, owned by Guy Weadick, friend of Charlie Russell and founder of the Calgary Stampede; the EP, once owned by the Prince of Wales. Nearby is the adopted territory of revered rancher and cowboy John Ware, who moved to Alberta in 1882 after time as a slave in the southern US.

Working cowboys are alive and well along the Clearwater River and throughout the foothills of southwestern Alberta.

For a full dose of Alberta cowboy history turn south on Highway 22 in Longview and take a short detour to wander around the Bar U Ranch, a National Historic Site preserving one of the largest and oldest ranches in Alberta. At its peak the Bar U covered 160,000 acres and carried 30,000 cattle and 1000 Percheron draft horses. The ranch also attracted a number of high-profile western characters in its day. Famed cowboy painter Charlie Russell created a series of works there, and among the cowboys employed at the Bar U in 1891 was a fellow named Harry Longabaugh, later and better known as the Sundance Kid.

Here on the eastern edge of the foothills the trout streams are a little bigger - rivers now, more wide-open and windswept, and there’s more rainbow blood mixed with the westslope cutts’. You’ll still find green drakes and other bugs around, and you can fish the lower reaches of the Oldman River, including the tailwater section north of the town of Pincher Creek, or perhaps slide a bit farther south into the Castle River system. This is a major Oldman tributary that enters from the south, with more of the same type of fishing but with somewhat more difficult access.

Good maps of all these southern Alberta roads and their “tributaries” can be found in Backroads Map Books.

When you make this circuit you’ll see and fish some first-class trout country and roll through some genuine cowboy country. Trout Highway? You bet. Cowboy Trail? Yes ma'am.

Today the great streams and the great fishing are apparent and available. But what about the cowboys? If you think they and their ways are long gone, think again. Songwriter Chris LeDoux:

“He’s still out there riding fences,

Still makes his living with his rope.

As long as there’s a sunset he’ll keep riding for the brand.

You just can’t see him from the road.”


Kind of like green drakes.

Jim McLennan

Jim McLennan was one of the first fly-fishing guides on Alberta’s Bow River, and is a well-known outdoor writer and speaker. He lives with his Lynda live in southern Alberta, where he fly fishes, teaches fly fishing, writes and plays music. He has written five books on fly fishing, most recently Trout Tracks (Rocky Mountain Books) mclennanflyfishing.com