Our favorite Alaskan lodge includes awesome fishing

Rainbow River Lodge in Alaska is an amazing place, with nice cabins, a beautiful lodge, and great food. But the biggest attraction is fishing.

I took my wife Linda there once. Each day, we were flown out to various rivers to catch rainbow trout or salmon. I took Linda in August because I especially love silver salmon which are in the rivers at that time. They generally weigh between 10 and 12 pounds.

On the salmon river, I have a photo of Linda, taken from behind after she has just cast, and 10 yards in front of her, in the river, a huge bear is looking at her. Bears were all around us in that river. Fortunately, they were catching fish and showing little interest in us, but our guides (who carried guns) told us not to play our fish, but to reel them in quickly and release them so as not to get the interest of a bear.

It did take a bit of time to get comfortable fishing with those bears! One early afternoon on that river, Linda got so tired of hauling in those hefty salmon that our guide boated us upriver where we caught Dolly Varden trout up to 5 pounds.

On the days we fished other rivers, we caught Rainbow trout up to 10 pounds. You could see the Rainbows lying in the river, select one, and cast to it. Fun!

Check out their website here: https://www.rainbowriverlodge.com/

You can also read their latest newsletter, and see an awesome video, here:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/162b6b6fad8447f8

George Smith

About George Smith

George stepped down at the end of 2010 after 18 years as the executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine to write full time. He writes a weekly editorial page column in the Kennebec Journal and Waterville Morning Sentinel, a weekly travel column in those same newspapers (with his wife Linda), monthly columns in The Maine Sportsman magazine, two outdoor news blogs (one on his website, georgesmithmaine.com, and one on the website of the Bangor Daily News), and special columns for many publications and newsletters. Islandport Press published a book of George's favorite columns, "A Life Lived Outdoors" in 2014. In 2014, George also won a Maine Press Association award for writing the state's bet sports blog. In 2016, Down East Books published George's book, Maine Sporting Camps, and Islandport Press published George and his wife Linda's travel book, Take It From ME, about their favorite Maine inns and restaurants.