My grandparents bought a little piece of land on Canyon Creek near Granite Falls in the early 90's so we had somewhere to going camping close to home, I was 12 years old. One day during the summer after working at the property they stopped at our house and my grandpa told me about all these fish that were sitting in a deep hole just downstream. So next time they went up there I went with them. I had an old spinning setup with a few trout spinners and spent all day trying to catch these fish and nothing. I spent the rest of the summer trying to catch them. I would tag along and as soon as we got to their place I grabbed my gear and ran down to the creek crashing through the bushes, to the edge of the creek, scattering the fish everywhere. There must have been 30 of them and I couldn't figure out why they wouldn't bite anything.

Fast forward a couple of years and at age 14 I got a baitcasting setup for Christmas. I practiced in the backyard all week and talked my parents into taking me up there to fish. My parents sat around the fire while I waded across the creek with my dad's old hip boots on and 5" of snow on the ground. I had tried a little bit of everything to catch a steelhead the last 2 years but this day I had on a #4 Blue Fox with chrome blue body and silver blade. Most of my childhood fishing to this point was in the saltwater for salmon and bottomfish so when I felt the grab and set the hook I remember thinking "is this going to be a dogfish"? That was quickly pushed from my mind when a chrome steelhead launched itself out of the water and I screamed "I got one"! My mom came running down the bank first because she thought I had fallen in and was drowning followed quickly by my dad. I proceeded to land and bonk the beautiful 9 pound native hen and bury her in the snow and go right back to fishing. I fished spinners for a couple of years after that and caught quite a few steelhead out the creek before starting fly fishing for steelhead at 16. Almost a year after that I caught my first steelhead on a fly in the same run, about 50 feet downstream. Another beautiful, bright, wild, winter hen that got released this time. I caught a second one a couple weeks later on New Years Day but didn't fish the creek as much after that. I could drive now and the Sauk and Skagit started drawing my attention. My grandparents sold the property in 2003 and without the private access I haven't fished the creek since then. Hopefully there are still some wild steelhead swimming around in there.