Story and Photography by Harvey Thommasen and Al Elsey
The Dean River is now famous as perhaps the world’s greatest fly fishing river for steelhead. But it once was just another unknown river on the British Columbia coast. It’s discovery, and eventualy transformation into an elite river, started with a dead grizzly bear and an American hunter with some time to kill.
 In early September of 1954, Bob Hendron from Boise, Idaho, booked a grizzly bear hunt with Al Elsey (pictured right), a now long-retired hunting and fishing guide who worked out of Bella Coola, on B.C.’s rugged Central Coast.
Bob was only Al's third or fourth customer, and he worked hard to make sure he got a good bear. Maybe he worked too hard. After only a day or so of hunting, they got a "real nice grizzly over 500 lbs.,” Al recalled in a conversation with me a few years ago. That was great - except that Bob had booked a 14-day hunt and wasn't ready to go home yet. It was fall, and the salmon were running, so Al suggested they try some fishing on the area’s rivers. First they went up the nearby Atnarko River, and then Al suggested they head North, up the coast to visit a remote watershed he wanted to learn more about: the Dean River.
Al knew 'Doc' Gildersleve, who had recently started a logging camp at the mouth of the Dean River. When they arrived, 'Doc' was friendly and hospitable; his son Frank offered to go with the two men and show them a trail to a canyon that lay upstream. Traveling through wild terrain, they went up and over some bluffs, hiking about one-and-a-half hours until they could see the canyon, and, in the distance above, some gravel bars that suggested there would be braded channels, riffles and runs. If there was holding water for salmon, it would be up there.
"Boy, ya know, it looked pretty steelheady to me!" said Al, whose fishing instincts told him something special lay ahead. He had no way of knowing just how incredible it was going to be. They continued hiking until they were about half a mile above the canyon, and then started looking for a suitable place to fish. The river was a light milky-green. They had come out of the bush on a gravel bar, across from a log jam, with a 70 - 80 foot stretch of river in front of them. They had spinning gear and some Golf-T spoons with them. Just as they were wondering if it was worthwhile casting, Al saw a dorsal fin break the surface by a log on the far side of the river. Then another came up: a dark back cleaving the water.
"Put your gear on,” Al said to his client, pointing out towards where the fish were rolling. On the first or second cast a big fish struck Bob’s lure.
"Bang, crash, a coho!" Frank said in delight. "Let's get some to pack back to the camp."
They caught four or five silver coho, one right after another. Al, who’d been watching the show, decided to join the two fishermen and immediately caught a large, silver-bright, sea-run cutthroat, weighing about four pounds. It was a beautiful trout, 23 inches long and it made Al think that there might be steelhead in the river too. If they were lucky.
Al let the others cast again, so they could catch the aggresively striking school of coho. When the fishing died down, he decided to toss his lure out again, to search some of the unfished water. Within moments, a fish took his spoon solidly, tugged a bit reluctantly, then began to fight hard, peeling line off his reel. The fish never jumped and it put up a stronger fight that the coho, suggesting it was either a much bigger salmon - or something else. They saw its tail show on the surface a few times, but couldn’t tell what it was. When Al finally got the fish close to shore it rolled in the silty water and he saw what it was instantly - a fresh run steelhead, silver and green and white. It turned out to be a 16 pound doe! A stunning fish.
The three fishermen went back to the same spot over the next few days and hooked 28 coho and nine steelhead in a relatively short stretch of water. They kept a few fish to take home, released a few, and gave a bunch to the Gilderselves. Al, an avid angler, was convinced they had discovered a fabulous new steelhead fishery. Even in the 1950’s steelhead streams were considered rare treasures, and he didn't tell anyone locally - "not a soul."
Al returned to the Dean with his best clients August and September of 1955, '56, and '57. They ahd the river - and the steelhead - to themselves.
“We got a lot of steelhead every year," he said.
In those days, when runs were large and fishing pressure was light, there wasn’t much concern about killing fish. Al set up rock pits for barbecuing fresh fish, and a smokehouse to treat some for packing out. He had a rough campsite at the first spot they had caught steelhead, just above the canyon.
"It was neat, you never saw another human, or signs of humans. No human footprints ever, just ours, grizzly tracks, moose tracks, and a few deer tracks!" he said of the river which now attracts thousands of anglers a year.
In the fall of 1957, Al took some friends, Dick Blewett and Bob Stewart, to the Dean. The fishermen were skeptical of his stories of the great steelhead fishing on the obscure Dean River. But when they got there, it didn’t take long for them to see what Al was on to. He made a cast - and immediately hooked a16 pound female steelhead, a carbon copy of the first one he had caught on his first trip. The Dean was everything he’d said it was - an incredible steelhead river.
There's no way you can keep great fishing like that a secret for long and gradually word got out that hidden in the wilderness of British Columbia, was a stupendous steelhead river. Eventually the whole fishing world knew. Now the remote Dean is on every steelhead fly fisherman’s list, as a place to visit.
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