Karl Alleger has chased winter steelhead on the North Umpqua for the better part of 40 years. Tall, lean, and with a faraway look to his eyes from spending a lifetime chasing phantoms, Karl is every bit a steelheader. By all accounts of people in the know, he’s quite a legend, too. He doesn’t have a social media footprint. He’s known mostly by word of mouth, chance encounters. He takes authentic, wobbly photos. He’s done a few fly fishing shows, given a few talks. In the end he’d rather be fishing than talking about fish; he’d rather be swinging a fly than explaining the virtues of spey. Like the fish he loves, Karl travels: Iceland for Arctic char, Ireland and Scotland for Atlantic salmon, British Columbia and Alaska for steelhead, coho, and chinook. Come winter, though, he’s here, like he is every winter, fishing for winter steelhead on the North Umpqua, catching what he’s chasing, making it all look easy.

I first came to know of Karl through his show stopping flies—beautiful Atlantic salmon flies tied to entice Oregon steelhead. More than bits of fur, feather, tinsel, and dubbing wrapped with thread on a hook, these functional works of art led me to believe steelheads have an aesthetic sense. My first Karl fly came my way as I combed the bins of steelhead flies at Home Waters Fly Shop looking for something, anything, that would break a two-year drought on winter steelhead. Passing over larger, over-bulked modern options, my eyes drifted to the smaller, sleeker wet flies. The way I figured it, if modern methods were failing me, then I had better put my trust back in the classics. Hidden amongst a tangle of “Winter’s Hope,” I saw something else: an orange, red, and blue-bodied fly wrapped in matching rooster hackle and French tinsel. The fly sported a golden pheasant tail, a wing of red goose shoulder and bronze mallard curved over an under-wing of golden pheasant tippet with a throat of palmered schlappen. The fly was finished with a peacock hurl head. It was the most beautifully tied fly I had ever seen.

Clearly someone had made a mistake. This fly was meant for a shadow box, not the “for sale” bins. Taking the treasure in hand, I asked the owner, Jason, about the fly. He looked over and smiled, “That’s just a Karl fly.” Seeing my confusion, he pulled a sampling of other Karl flies from the display case telling me that finding a Karl fly, while uncommon, was known to happen. “He was in here earlier picking up some feathers. I saw him messing around in the bins. Every now and then he drops one of his flies in with the others to see if someone finds it.” Jason shrugged, “That’s your fly now.”

Over the years, I came to know Karl better. I ran into him a few times at Steamboat Inn, a few more times on the North Umpqua, and once on the McKenzie. We talked about flies and exchanged information about fish the way all steelheaders do, with vagaries and equivocations knowing full well everything we shared was open to interpretation, that every claim had a loose relationship with the truth. Out of respect, I never asked about his spots. That’s private information. Instead, I asked about his flies, where he’d learned to tie them, how I could learn, too. He recommended books—Geo Kilson’s The Salmon Fly, Poul Jorgensen’s Salmon Flies, Their Character, Style, and Dressing, and of course William Blacker’s Blacker’s Art of Fly Making. He gave me a few flies as templates to follow, telling me to fish them as well as copy them. I did. We became friends. He remained elusive,but not distant. He had things to do. Iceland was calling, so were Arctic char. Ireland was calling, and so were Atlantic salmon. The same thing for Scotland, for Washington State. Karl had to make his rounds.

Last year when Home Waters started a casual fly tying night during the winter, Karl became a regular. Like me, a few of the younger tyers gravitated towards him. He was happy to mentor, marveling at whatever they produced saying often, “Oh! That’ll fish!”

Watching Karl tie, listening to his stories, having seen him fish, I decided I wanted to save something of his story. At first, he was hesitant. He insisted he was more interested in learning about others, that he was just a fisherman. With enough pestering, cajoling, and a few libations, he finally agreed. So, on a mundane Friday evening last December when the river was blown and the rain beat time against the windows of Home Waters and it was just a little too early in the season for winter ghosts, I finally got to hear about the origins of Karl Alleger, one of the North Umpqua’s finest.

The North Umpqua, or simply the North as most anglers call it, runs for about 106 miles from the high Cascades through the Umpqua National Forest. It receives the famed Steamboat Creek near the historic Steamboat Inn and Camp Water runs. From there, it courses down to the aptly named colliding rivers confluence with the Little River in Glide. Finally, the North joins with the South Umpqua near Roseburg forming the Umpqua proper and makes its run to the Pacific. As rivers go, the North has cut through steep canyons and ancient basalt beds leaving miles of rough and tumble rapids as evidence of its strength. Its emerald green waters, a hue derived from snow melt filtered through pumice and volcanic soil, are celebrated for their beauty, white water, and the wild runs of anadromous fish returning from long ocean journeys to their spawning grounds every year. While salmon certainly call to anglers of various stripes, it is the North’s famed steelhead runs that are the true headliner.

Steelhead. Steelies. Unicorns. Gray ghosts. The fish of a thousand casts. Call them what you want, no fish is more quintessentially Oregonian. Strong, selective, temperamental, elusive, resilient, wild. They’re addictive, maddening, bad for marriages, and even worse for your bank account. To catch one is to bask in a glory that sustains you for years. To miss one is to understand tragedy, to know how fickle life can be on this hurtling space rock. In short, steelhead are fish of legends, and the North is where you go to try and tail a legend in the dead of winter.

Karl’s journey to the North covers about as much range as the wandering steelhead he loves. Born in Newport Beach, but with family ties from British Columbia to Washington to Oregon and on south from there, he started fishing at a young age. According to Karl, fishing was the thing to do in his family. He started tying flies when he was nine years old and caught his first, “by-God steelhead” on the Eel River in California. “After that, I was ruined.” He laughs, “Isn’t that awful? I’ll tell you though, I knew I was done after that. The whole world was made right all of a sudden. That was a good fish.”

After that first steelhead, Karl kept at it and kept living. Like others of his generation, he was drafted, fought a war, came home, got married, started a business, sold a business, moved to Oregon, got another job, and kept fishing. Sometime in the 1970s, his sister bought a ranch on the Elk River in Oregon. He visited often, targeting salmon and steelhead, getting right with the world again. These were the years he started fishing the North Umpqua with intention. By his reckoning, Karl started tying and fishing his flies—the classics as he calls them—in his 30s. “I saw my first Atlantic salmon flies in Outdoor Life and wanted to give them a shot. I thought to myself, ‘geez, I bet those’ll catch fish out here.’” While the flies fished well, “much better than simpler flies, you know, the bucktail and chenille flies like comets and skunks,” the North Umpqua presented its own set of challenges Karl’s new take on classic flies alone couldn’t address. It boiled down to a matter of reach.

“The North Umpqua is hard to fish. All those basalt channels, ledges, fast currents, rapids. You gotta be careful when wading. That river will send you swimming in a hurry! No one wants to swim in February…well, at least I don’t.”

Karl stared off in wonder as he recalled those early days, “Then, if you solved the problem of wading and figured where the fish were, there was still the problem of getting to them! Most times those damn fish are on the other side of the river, holding on the outside seam or something. Fishing with a single hand fly rod was hard work! You had to be able to wade to one spot and stay there, cast across the river, usually across three or four different currents, mend that fly line like your life depended on it, and hope that your fly got down fast enough. On top of that, the river was in trouble. Clear cutting was taking its toll on the fish runs. Fish counts were way down. Too many people were keeping too many fish. Poachers were coming out and snagging fish with treble hooks, using dynamite. A lot of things were going on. I wanted to fish, but I wanted to help, too.”

He started playing around with spey rods to solve the fishing problems. Whereas most fly rods are used with one hand and are about 9’ long, spey rods run anywhere from 11’6” all the way up to 15’. The angler uses two hands to cast. Karl built his first spey rod in 1988. It was a “15 foot monster. I called it the Skagit Blaster. That thing was insane!” He could cast it over 100 yards and get a good drift on the bigger rivers. However, the Skagit Blaster was too much rod for the more technical waters on the North Umpqua. To help there, he bought four Sage spey rod blanks that were 12.5’ long. These were a new rod design that had just come out. He bought four because, “I thought this spey fishing might not stick and I didn’t want to need something no one made any more. Nuts, right!” He paid $70 per blank, used Hopkins and Holloway line guides from England, Strobel reel seats he bought from an Oregon company down in Sutherlin, and of course, Hardy reels. His line of choice was a 10 weight Wulf Triangle taper line with an 85’ head. “I used those reel seats and Hardy reels because North Umpqua fish aren’t minnows. I went with the big line so I could get my flies deep. And I used those bigger guides because when you’re casting a phone line you want big guides!”

The way Karl tells it, he was one of the first to use a spey rod on the North. “It solved a lot of problems. I could get where other people couldn’t. But those rods started a lot of problems, too!” In terms of flies, he had to change hook styles because casting bigger rods tore up smaller salmon flies. He went with heavier wire options and started modifying his hooks, bending them to his liking in a vise, filing down the barbs to save the fish. “It’s funny. I just kept at it and pretty soon I started catching more fish. The flies and rods were working but all those old timers were giving me a bunch of crap because of my rod and flies. They said I was breaking tradition. I was using traditional style flies and a spey rod! Doesn’t get more traditional than that. Now look. Almost everybody uses a spey rod down there and you guys are all tying these flies.” As he always does, he laughed at the circumstances, “I think they were jealous! Isn’t that just awful?”

While innovating with rods and flies and techniques, Karl helped with the fishery challenges the North faced. He joined the Steamboaters early on. According to their mission statement, this North Umpqua advocacy group was founded to “preserve, promote, and restore the natural production of wild fish populations, especially steelhead, the habitat which sustains them, and the unique aesthetic values of the North Umpqua River for present and future generations.” Karl worked alongside other well-known advocates like the late Frank Moore and Lee Spencer to save the steelhead runs and habitat. He volunteered his time for watershed cleanups, advocated at the state level for better management of fisheries, and still stands as an angler who put their heart into conservation just as much as fishing. When asked about his advocacy, Karl becomes even more humble, as always relying on understatement and humor.

“Oh, there were other guys that did a lot more than me. I just wrote a few letters, made a few phone calls.

“You know, I did send the governor a few of my flies when we were trying to get the North to have a fly fishing only section reinstated. I sent him a letter and some flies, and wouldn’t you know it, the fly fishing only sections returned!”

At this point I tried to call his bluff. He just smiled and the next week dropped off a copy of a letter from Governor John A. Kitzhaber, complete with the Oregon State Seal, addressed to Mr. Karl Alleger. The final line of the letter reading, “Thank you for your enthusiastic support of Oregon’s wild fish populations, and thank you for the steelhead flies. I hope to put them to use this summer.” Turns out some fish stories are worth believing, and some flies catch more than just fish.

As the interview began to slow and the rain started to abate, I asked Karl what he thought of the river now, how it’d changed since he’d started fishing it. His faraway look came back to his eyes, sincerity swam with his words. He talked about the North being a proving ground for steelheaders saying, “If you can catch a winter fish there, you can catch one anywhere.” He talked about the North’s struggles with “that damn Winchester dam,” its fish-killing legacy, and how it needs to go. He talked about how the river has gone from “the pride of Oregon’s summer and winter steelhead runs” to a “river on the mend.” In typical Karl fashion, though, he didn’t dwell on the downside. Looking around the room, he saw everyone was listening now. He does that sometimes—holds the room out of quiet authenticity, out of sheer honesty.

“That river’s a special place. I have faith it’ll come back. There is a whole new group, the ‘not Karl’ group jumping in, standing up for the river that are gonna save it. They have the knowledge, drive, and scientific background. They’re the future of the river.” He sips his beer, smiles, and says “isn’t that just awful?”

Karl Alleger: The North Umpqua’s Finest

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