Two Weeks Chasing Trout & Car Camping Across Remote Parts of Idaho

This was how a 14-day trip hunting trout across south-central Idaho while living out of my truck started. I built the itinerary around a loop that included some rivers I’d been wanting to fish and returning to a couple of favorites, hoping to track down cutthroat trout in addition to the browns and rainbows I’m used to catching near home. I’d spent months researching places to camp and fish on YouTube, obscure blogs, Reddit threads, and various maps, compiling them all in a dense CalTopo map full of potential spots. I'd also been accumulating new gear to integrate into my newly configured truck camping setup. I spent the better part of the past year putting it together, but hadn't yet taken out for more than a couple of nights at a time.

I'd originally planned this adventure for early July, but due to unforeseen circumstances, everything was pushed to mid-August. This brought with it some difficulties—the water in the places I had built the itinerary around would be much skinnier, especially with the West’s low snowpack last winter. The late summer heat would bake midday water temperatures far above 68 degrees, making fishing both irresponsible and impossible. So my goal shifted from simply catching fish to finding water—water that was deep enough to contain suitable structure, as well as temperatures that would actually be amenable to fishing. Living out of four wheels would be instrumental in these efforts, as I would be able to reach further into the wilderness and set up base camps to explore from. Much more convenient than huffing it back and forth between hotels and Airbnbs, which are few and far between in this part of the country anyway.

I didn't spend too long at that first spot. After getting on the board with a few fish and losing plenty more, I headed towards higher ground into a desert basin to track down cutthroat trout in a freestone river and its tributaries.

On my way, I stopped in a town of barely 500 people and loaded a week's worth of groceries (and plenty of cold beverages) into my 1999 Toyota Land Cruiser. I have a special relationship with this truck. I'd previously owned a couple of 3rd gen 2WD 4Runners, but I wanted to upgrade to something more off-road capable and more amenable to longer trips out. After searching for months on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace (on top of years of fantasizing about owning one), I found a decent one in Colorado, and quickly flew out from New York to buy it. It’s the truck of my dreams, with 4WD, center and rear differential locks, and a set of beefy all-terrain tires. It’s taken me over rocky coulees, through deep mud and sand, and across snowy trails with no issue.

Journeying to higher ground, I followed a dirt road around a reservoir and up to the river that feeds it, where I found a campsite on a ridge overlooking the river. After assembling my sleeping platform and mattress and connecting my solar panels to charge, I scrambled down to the water to see if I could connect with some fish, successfully hooking my first few cutthroat of the trip. Back at camp, I cooked a luxurious dinner of frozen burgers on the tailgate, then crawled into the back. From here I watched the sun set over the mountains through the open tailgate before closing myself in for the night and flipping on The Long Goodbye.

The next morning, I packed up the Land Cruiser and took the dirt road up another thousand feet, where it spit me out into a wide high desert basin flush with sagebrush and pinned by rust-colored mountains on all sides. Noting a few other anglers camped on the fork of the river I was planning to fish, I decided to focus my efforts on trekking up the small freestone tributaries where the fish might face less pressure. I set up a basecamp on the banks of a gin-clear stream barely wider than the two-track road that led me to it, and from there began my explorations.

At first look, the water seemed too skinny—only a few inches deep. Certainly there were no fish here. As I pushed farther upstream, the picture began to change. The flat channel of shallow water began to bend and deepen, creating pools, undercut banks, and pocketwater where I was certain fish were holding. I tied on a small pink and tan hopper resembling the jumping insects I had noticed in the area, and I cast into a tiny pocket of water behind a boulder. Almost immediately, a cutthroat rose up and took it without hesitation. It sharked the hopper and immediately took off downstream, forcing me to chase it, trying to avoid breaking off my light tippet before finally netting it. It was a beefy fish, about 16 inches—much bigger than I could ever have expected to find in such small water. Its golden color and iconic bright orange slash beneath the lower jaw glowed in the warm afternoon light.

I spent the next few days in the area trudging through pristine creeks, picking cutthroat and brook trout out of small pocket water, eating bagel sandwiches and granola bars on the banks, and repeatedly enjoying one of the finest pleasures in all of fishing—watching sizable fish eat a dry fly, all without another angler on the stream.

I arrived in Stanley, a town in central Idaho framed by the jagged Sawtooth Mountains and known for its stunning scenery, cold temperatures, and position along the main stem of the Salmon River. I resupplied at the local mercantile and drove out to the edge of town, where I set up camp in the foothills to wait out some weather. There were storms rolling through, and the burn-scarred area I was headed to was prone to flash flooding. Once the skies cleared, I was on my way again.

The trip's next leg proved less productive. I found myself on a remote tributary of one of the forks of the Salmon River, assuming that the fish here would be seeking refuge in the colder water high up in the mountains. But after 10 miles of hiking and eight stream crossings, I had only netted a single, modest mountain whitefish. The water was warming up too quickly, and the trout were likely holding deeper in the main stem of the river rather than these creeks. Sometimes, despite your intuition and research, nature hits you with unpredictable idiosyncrasies. The upside is that situations like these are inhabited by valuable lessons that are useful in planning future trips. Plus, one fish always beats getting skunked.

Disappointed but not discouraged, I decided to alter the trip's itinerary. Sometimes you have to let the fish decide where you'll go next. Rather than spend a full week there, I backtracked to water I’d passed and added one unplanned river, a tailwater known for trophy-sized rainbow trout. The river is fed from the bottom of a deep reservoir, maintaining water temperatures in the 50s even as the air temperature climbed towards 90 degrees. Near camp, another angler told me the evening hatch was flavs—medium-sized green mayflies akin to green drakes that hatch for a short period every evening. I didn't have anything in my fly box to match this. As we were discussing the nuances of this brief hatch and the man's years of experience fishing this fork of the river, he kindly offered me two of his own flies.

At dusk, I tied one on and stepped into the river. Three casts in, with the taillights of my new friend's truck disappearing into the distance, I hooked into a slab of a fish, roughly 18 inches, and wrangled him into the net right as the last glow of daylight disappeared behind the mountains.