Years ago, I met Fredy Riehl, who co-owns Ammoland Shooting Sports News, at a Professional Outdoor Media Association convention. Ammoland is the best outdoor website in the country, so of course we hit it off. Fredy came out last year to backpack and fly fish, and this year his business partner Brian Johnson wanted to come as well.

Instead of backpacking, this year Fredy voted to hire a bush pilot to drop us off deep in the wilderness. Sounded good to me. Fredy hustled and got the arrangements lined out and they were soon flying to Boise.

I picked them up at the airport and we ran to the local Cabela’s to stock up on gear. We then met my wife, Katy, and Ron and Betsy Spomer of Ron Spomer Outdoors for dinner. We had a good time eating steaks, catching up on gossip and talking business.

The next morning we met Tor, who flies for McCall Air. Then we loaded our gear and took off over the mountains. Wow, I loved it. I finally got an aerial view of all the areas that I had been hiking and hunting for years.

We also got an aerial view of all the devastation caused by fires under the mismanagement of the Forest Service. It is puzzling to me why it is sacred to let a lightning fire burn and waste a natural resource and yet it’s an abomination to log? I haven’t figured that one out yet.

We cut cross country, and in an hour we were circling into position for our backcountry runway. It would normally take me five hours to drive to this location, and then it’d be a hard 30-mile hike on top of the drive to this spot.

We were flying into the legendary Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area and landing on Soldier Bar airstrip, which is a semi flat spot 1,000 feet above the river. To land, you have to fly up the river canyon and then bank a hard right and touch down on the uphill grassy field. It has a few bumps but we made it down safely.

There’s a lot of history here. It’s the sight of the last Indian war in America, and there’s a small rock monument to a soldier that lost his life there.

Here’s something to remember when you fly into the backcountry — don’t think just because you’re flying in that you don’t have to backpack to a flat camping spot with water. Looking at the map, a lot of the airstrips are 2 to 3 miles from the river. We probably weren’t but about 1/4 of a mile, but due to the 1,000-foot drop-off, we had to hike a mile down the trail to get to a flat spot where we could camp by the river.

We quickly slapped up camp and then headed downstream. This river was high and hard to cross with all of the tributaries feeding into it and with the enormous snowpack we had last winter.

We were camped on the steep side of the river and had to cross to hit the trail, so we could go up and down the river. It turns out that we were able to wade across, although every morning and night I wasn’t real sure that one of us wouldn’t get swept away.

There’s a good hole a couple hundred yards downstream, so we hit it first and had a few bites. I was hoping to get some big bull trout on this trip, so I brought my Rise Fishing Co. Level Series 7-weight rod on this trip.

We then headed further downstream. Wow, we found some petroglyphs on our side of the river in a slight concave area of the rock wall. On the other side, there was a better one. That was cool. I’ve never seen one of those out in the wilderness.

That night we drug back to camp dead tired. Because of the fire bans, we had to cook our Mountain House meals on our backpacking stoves. Wow, I love those meals.

For a tent, I brought a PahaQue Rendezvous.

I guess it’s a little big for the normal backpacker, but since we were going to be in there for a while, that’s what I brought. It’s a nice tent.

For hiking socks, we used Browning socks, which worked great. I wanted to cut weight so I just wore my wading boots to cross the river and left the waders in camp. The socks dried out fine during the day and were comfortable.

The next day we hiked upstream a good ways. Lot of nice holes. I’d ordered a lot of flies from flydealflies.com, which is my go-to fly shop. We weren’t catching any big bulls so I switched from a Wooly Bugger to a Caddis and we got into the cutthroats, a few nice ones.

There were some nice holes and mostly calm waters on this stretch of the river although there was a steep gorge a half mile downstream from camp. We were having a great time fishing. I mean how could we not? It’s the biggest wilderness area in the Lower 48 and we’d flown into the furthest spot in it. It was awesome.

It was 1 1/2 weeks before season, but we were seeing quite a few grouse. At one hole, a few came down to the river right upstream of me and then fed down the bank. I flipped a big black Woolly Bugger on a flat rock right in front of one and it pecked on the fly for a bit. I figured it might turn into an aerial dive bombing disaster if I accidentally ended up hooking it, so I pulled my fly away.

Fredy and Brian decided to fish downstream, but I thought I’d seen one or two good ones feeding so I held tight. I finally netted a couple of nice cutthroats out of the hole. Even on my Rise Fishing Co. 7-weight rod, it bent the tip pretty good and took a few minutes to net.

I lose track of what happened on which day, but one day I had waded in semi-deep against a sheer rock wall. I was fishing with a Caddis fly and a small one hit, it was about 4 to 6 inches long. I had him reeled in but the rock wall behind me jutted out over my head, so I couldn’t hold my rod tip back behind me to be able to net him. He was dangling right in front of me splashing on the surface.

I awkwardly tried 2 to 4 times to grab him but couldn’t quite reach him. After a few seconds, a big cutthroat jumped into the middle of the fray. He was right in front of me attacking the fingerling like a frenzied shark. I’ve never seen a trout feeding that aggressively.

He hit it hard once and then twirled around and slammed it so hard that he ripped it off my fly. Wow, that was wild. I’ve never had a trout do that literally right at my fingertips. That was something to see.

We threw our tents right off the river so we’d have easy access to drinking water. After filling our water bottles, Fredy noticed that a bear had done what a bear does in the woods right where we pumped our water, not 20 yards from our tents.

One day while Fredy and Brian were fishing down the river, they’d run right up on top of a bear. And then while in camp one day, Brian told me that I might want to grab my camera right fast. Across the river was a bear standing on his hind legs eating berries out of a bush.

It dropped down on all fours and strolled down the bank until it got even with us and then it started across the river. I was getting some good pictures but Fredy decided he was close enough and waved his arms and spooked him off. I’d liked to see how well he did crossing the river, which we struggled with while crossing. He didn’t seem too worried.

Well, departure day finally arrived and we each had two loads to pack up the 1,000-foot incline. By the time we got out, my lungs were burned from sucking down all the smoke. There was a big fire to the south and north of us. Much worse and the pilot couldn’t have seen the runway enough to be able to drop down and pick us up. But once again, the Forest Service wasn’t even making an attempt to fight them.

I’m not a frequent flier on bush planes, so the take-off seemed a little iffy to me. We taxied to the top of the hill and turned around and punched it. After building up a little speed, we hit a hump and bounced a good foot high. Not much further we hit another hump and bounced a good 2 feet high and then another one.

I thought on the third one when we came down we’d bounce over upside down, but we we were airborne. We shot out into the canyon and took a hard right, our right wing barely clearing the canyon wall by 50 feet.

Wow, what a trip.

Tom Claycomb lives in Idaho and has outdoors columns in newspapers in Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Louisiana. He also writes for various outdoors magazines and teaches outdoors seminars at stores like Cabela’s, Sportsman’s Warehouse and Bass Pro Shop.