Well uh matt boleen welcome back to the podcast hey jeff thanks for having me so we're late january right now how are you coping with uh with the winter the wi-fi just booted me off so that's oh yeah well that's another joy of alaska during the winter you're gonna lose power every once in a while and do that so uh what were you saying how you getting through the winter Oh, yeah. Yeah, we're just, I keep pretty busy. Hockey is going on this time of year.
And so high school hockey is just kind of, we're getting, we're in the final few weeks here and, you know, my, both my tents play too. So there's a lot of trips to the rink. So yeah, we stayed pretty busy this time of year and it's pretty, pretty grateful, especially since there's no snow really to ski on right now. So pretty thankful to have the arena here and something to do. So what was your history in hockey?
Like, did you grow up playing it and where did you grow up? You were Midwest, right? Yeah. Yeah. I grew up in Minnesota. Yeah. I grew up pretty close to where the Mississippi starts, a little town called Wadena. Actually, I think the slogan for the county is something like where the prairie meets the woodlands. So it's very Lake Wobegon-esque type of a spot.
But yeah, I grew up playing hockey through high school. And, you know, when I moved to Juneau, I didn't realize that the rink had just finished being built, like, within, I think it was like six months before I moved here. I want to say it opened up in January 2004, and I moved here in, or sorry, 2002 or 2003. And, yeah, I moved here, like, in August that same year. So, yeah, it's been a pretty big part of my life, and an even bigger part probably since I came to Juneau. how long did you play.
So I played a little bit after high school. So I want to say I was probably playing for 16 to 17 years of competitive hockey. And then, you know, after moving to Juneau, I continued playing. There's an adult league here. And occasionally we'd go travel to Whitehorse and Watson Lake and Haynes Junction and stuff like that. And go play in some adult tournaments there and for different festivals and whatnot. So yeah, I guess all in all, I've had my skates on for about,
I don't know, close to, geez, 37 years now. Yeah. That's always, if you have the high school sport that you love to play and then you can't play it anymore. And so you want to get involved in some regard. We can't play competitively as far as like on a team. You go to college and play intramurals or something. Then after that, it's coach or play for the city league team.
And that can get a little bit sketchy because you have people who are really trying to hang on to the past or maybe a little bit overly competitive and other people just want to keep playing and enjoying. So it can be quite the experience to play in the adult leagues oh yeah i've been guilty of being that that guy from time to time too so i know i know all about that but.
Yeah anymore i don't play i just uh coach my kids teams and my high school team here nice that's a nice way to get through the winners being you're at practice and you're traveling you got games and stuff going on it makes things go pretty quick it's it's intense and stressful especially with the travel but and then fundraising too i bet you guys have to do a lot of fundraising oh yeah yeah we do a lot of fundraising you know as you know as another southeast i guess
southeast big school we're a little bit bigger than you guys but you know you know all about the travel woes and you know having to fly everywhere ferry everywhere and you know if you want teams to come into town from outside of the region you got to pay them to come in and whatnot so you know juno having the only arena in southeast alaska you know we're we have to fly everybody in so yeah we have a pretty big travel budget and but the kids all work their butts off and and do
whatever they can you know throughout the year i mean just last weekend we were unloading hay bales from shipping containers of one of the local farms and stacking hay bales for a little bit of fundraising dollars so we do it all and and there's a also a fundraising like a silent auction the same weekend so it's uh pretty much around the clock.
Working for it yeah it's wild how many kids do you have on the team uh right this year i've got uh 39 exactly yeah so when you travel do you don't take all 39 do you no you know we do have a jv team too so uh for a varsity roster you can only address 20 players have only got 20 players in your roster for varsity we typically do and then for jv typically around 15 to 16 or 17 team players, we have a dress. So yeah, not everyone travels all the time.
Yeah. Usually there's an illness or an injury here and there, or perhaps somebody's ineligible. So usually it works out. You don't have to, I don't have to make too many tough calls. Yeah. That's like 500 bucks round trip to get to Anchorage per person. So 500 times 20 people plus a couple of coaches.
I mean, that's the, that's the entire athletic department budget for some schools down South Cause all you got to do is, is get some, get some referees to show up and get some buses unless you're taking school buses. But man, that's, it's just wild. You're almost chartering Alaska airline flights just to travel. My buddies down in California had no clue, no concept of, of being gone overnight, let alone for multiple days.
And then just the expense of, then you get up there and then you got hotel or wherever you're staying. And it's, it's pretty wild.
Oh yeah do you guys uh usually go hotel or do you do the airbnb thing that's something that seems like a lot of the teams are going to yeah yeah so we typically do the yeah that's it's usually a better way to go you know typically an airbnb or a vrbo or you know we've we have gotten lucky and and we like i have some folks that we became acquainted with in the valley that we just go straight to them and rent their house and we get you know yeah it saves some money on the hotel and i
also like that it keeps all the kids together you know in a hotel you know you can't you got everybody's in separate rooms maybe it's like two three or four per room you know and just every no one's around each other and you know there's more potential for for kids to be you know doing some you know some naughty stuff maybe or or you know at the very least just not hanging out with their teammates so yeah big house gets everyone together gets eating together
we'll you know we'll go shopping like we'll go up to three bears we spent a lot of time in the matzu valley in the keenat peninsula so a lot of three bears trips and you're getting bulk groceries and feeding kids for a lot less than they'd go out for than any one of these trips so you know yeah there's a lot of good benefits to it and typically the way we do it sometimes you run to trouble where you can't, you're only staying someplace one night.
And a lot of those types of sites don't really like a one night rental. They like two or more. So yeah, every once in a while, we stay in a hotel, but yeah, for the most part, it's rental homes for us. That's nice. You can do meals and cook together. Those sort of experiences are great when people look back at the athletic experience in high school. A lot of kids in Southeast, they just I just remember the trips a lot more than the games.
I remember games, of course, but I remember ferry rides and that camaraderie you build with people on those trips. Pretty special. Totally. And all the Taco Bell that they got to get in the system when they're out of town. Yeah. It's funny. You guys have, wait, do you have a Taco Bell there? We did at one point. Okay. Yeah. But you have Subway, you have McDonald's. We have a McDonald's and a Subway here. But yeah, it's whatever is not available in town is what everybody flocks to.
There was one student who was talking about how stoked he was to go to Anchorage to go to, I think it was Golden Corral. I was like, man, of all the places you're going to Anchorage, there's like really good, legit, good food up there. And you're talking Golden Corral. But I said, hey, you know what? When I was in high school too, you make those sort of decisions where it's about quantity and you don't really know a lot about quality.
But yeah, it's pretty funny to hear the kids, what they're excited about. So another thing about spring, you got to be thinking about fly fishing, right? I mean, it's, I get to this phase right now and I just get this, just this ache because I'm distracted by hunting for so much. And that kind of takes over the life from, from August. And then I wake up in the new year and I just start thinking steelhead and how long it's been since I've tied flies.
I just have this egg to write about it and talk about it and watch it and do it. And, oh man, it's, it's pretty tough. Yeah. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about steelhead lately. I hope they're thinking about me as much as I'm thinking about them. But yeah, I think probably a lot like catch can so far this winter. It hasn't been too cold, haven't had a whole lot of snow.
I think about that a lot in terms of snowpack and being able to flood those streams up so that the steelhead can make their spring migration. And, you know, last year I was in Yakupat in April and yeah, I've never seen the sea tucks so skinny. There's, there's just not much water moving through it. And, and so, yeah, I, hopefully there's the snowpack just stays real deep up high and you know, I, I'd be okay with some April showers, I guess this year.
Yeah. You hate to really invite it too much, but yeah, you kind of need that. It's days like today, we just had the atmospheric river and there's been tons of rain. And so some of the, I'm sure there's some, some fish around, but yeah, you want to have like a nice storm when the weather is a little bit warmer and that spring run is really starting to get going. Water comes up, warms up a little bit and they push up into the river. Like you can have some really, really good days.
Do you like the, to fish the rising water or the falling water or at the peak, or is it just whatever happens to be when you're out on the water? Yeah. You know, if I'm going someplace like Yacta, I usually don't have the luxury of being able to pick what the water's doing. I mean, with the tide, obviously you can, but in terms of the rain, sometimes you just show up. I made one trip there where it was the complete opposite of my experience last year. The water was crazy high.
And, and it, I mean, we couldn't even safely cross the river to fish and it was so blown out that we just couldn't even fish for the first two or three days. And, and then luckily after that, right after it dropped, it was incredible. So, but I've also had, you know, the opposite, catching more fish as the water's coming up. So I think, you know, I guess I'm an opportunist and I just, you know, I go when I can and I'll take a mental note and, you know,
maybe hope for those same situations to happen in my next trip. Yeah. The first two years that I moved up here, I thought I was starting to figure things out, but it turned out that those two years were kind of the exception to the rule. It was really warm late March and we didn't have any of that spring break snow. So I thought, oh, March is this great time to fish for steelhead.
I'm catching them. And I look back at the photos and in the background, there's already green shoots on the salmon berries. It's already starting to turn and the water is up. It was just perfect. And so I had a buddy from California said, dude, come up, man. Last weekend of March is going to be awesome. So he came up and it was back to normal and it was lower water, colder temperatures, cold water. So a few fish were around.
It was a little bit of a rain right before he showed up, but then it just really kind of bottomed out and got cold. And he caught one in the four days he was here. I caught two and it was, you know, I guess kind of the, the fish of a thousand casts type situation, but you know, you don't want to get greedy, but if the water is good, you should be hoping to catch, you know, multiple fish, or I don't want to say expecting to catch multiple fish.
Cause that sounds greedy, but you can really have some good days on these, on these rivers up here. Cause they're pretty small and you can kind of learn the pockets. You can learn the areas, but man, that weather and you know, a week or two can make a massive amount of difference. And then of course, water temperature and water levels make a huge difference too. I'm still here, but I can't hear you too great.
Hmm so uh is there much around juno fishing wise for steelhead or is it mostly spring run, oh okay yeah you lost you there for a second but i think i caught you yeah it's so yeah typically in northern north most northern southeast streams are are just a spring run but there are several that have both you know they tend to be some of those bigger systems like the sea pack and stuff like that but yeah typically spring run that run you know as you go like south to north you know.
You know typically it it goes a little bit later so yeah just kind of every year is a little bit differently but different though the snow packs you know in the in the winter weather can make a big difference yeah i've i've wanted to look at some and explore some of these smaller river rivers that have steelhead and they can like move up when the water's up, do the business and get out. They're not in there for weeks or even months at a time.
And some of those smaller rivers hold fish. You'd think, man, this is crazy, but there are some legitimate runs of a couple dozen fish on some of these rivers in Southeast, which really makes you wonder about how precious and how, you know, fragile some of these ecosystems are. Like it's supernatural.
It's, it's largely untouched but when you're talking 40 steelhead as the entire run in the river that that can go south pretty quick oh yeah for sure yeah and if you're not there on one of those days one of those short window you would never know there's any fish in there at all which kind of you know thinking back to last summer and and doing our fish mapping you know and thinking about surveying for steelheads to give you know to classify a river as a steelhead stream
and whatnot you know if a biologist isn't there on one of those handful of days during that small window you know the stream goes completely undocumented and no one will ever know there's steelhead there which could might.
Not be such a bad thing in some respects but but when it comes to forest policy and and that kind of thing and regulations you know that's where it helps to know what's what's in that stream yeah do you like fishing those smaller rivers it seems i don't know kind of tough the sight fishing form i kind of like doing that for trout maybe with the dry fly or hopper down south i picture like a meadow stream and it's you can hop across it but
there's something big holding underneath the bank for steelhead it just doesn't have that same appeal it seems almost impossible to figure out a way to get something to to hit they just seem smarter and more tight-lipped and i kind of prefer a medium sized river to to the smaller ones yeah yeah yeah i you know i i really do i like catching in small streams.
Definitely it's you know it's a puzzle you know like i i thinking back to one particular fish last spring on the tall walk and tall walk creek and and yeah i must have made five or six drifts from there and i could see that i could see what i was swinging through there really clearly i could tell exactly how far away it was or if i needed to get a little bit down further and it just took just that that you know swung it once through and okay it needs to be a few inches down and a few
inches over did it one more time like nope okay the current made me go a different way i need to go this you know it took it's probably like on the eighth cast i hooked that fish and that's just so rewarding you know like those people that and you know what i lost that fish about eight seconds later because that's what happens in a small stream when you got log jams and that kind of thing but you know the i just yeah i just love that that puzzle and like that feeling for
that eight seconds was and proud it was worth it do you like change of like small water tactics or flies or do you go with what works kind of across the board as some people pair you go larger flies and large rivers or medium-sized yeah i think you know i tend to stick with a pretty similar routine all the time. You know I like swinging you know streamers and you know leeches and things like that that's a lot of fun you know egg patterns always.
Are a good option too you know sometimes I prefer you know these little tiny creeks where you know it's not like you're floating out or walking you know like shuttling with vehicles so you gotta walk up the stream you gotta walk back down the stream so I like to change the My tactics going up versus down. And, uh, you know, like I tend to get a better drift when I'm swinging a leech as I'm going downstream and I tend to do better with an egg going upstream.
So, you know, I form those little routines and keep from guessing. Yeah. I, I have, I try to pare it down. So I just have one box just so I'm not carrying a whole bunch of stuff and it ends up confusing me. But this, the more I pare it down, the more I'm like, oh man, I wish I had this in purple.
So it's hard to to get my fly box totally dialed in because it seems like a change from year to year and you hear about another fly and you use it and it's and it works and then you want in a couple different sizes and a couple different colors but then you think wait what about the one that was my favorite all those other previous years so it can I think more so than any other fish I I look at the style steelhead flies and I look at the ones I don't have and I think man I i needed
to constantly fix or change or tweak my box yep or you know or some one of those days where your body catches that steelhead that you just couldn't catch and you think it couldn't have been just luck it has to be that fly yeah and then you got to go get or pry them up yeah it's funny how people can they can swear by what they do and it's different than what you do either by size, weight. Color, and then what works for you was totally different.
And you're like, I could not fish like that, but it's just that fishing with confidence. You're going to fish better. You're going to fish harder. You're going to be more meticulous about it. And that's probably the real thing that matters more is if I've had it where I feel like I'm not going to catch a fish because I lost my last good fly. And now I have to do the second rate junior varsity fly and it's not going to work.
And I think I, the fish can sense that I'm pouty and I never catch a fish. It seems like. So tell me a little bit about the, you made a couple of posts about some work that was done on KU. You tell me a little bit about that. Yeah. So do you, the. Start with the start big. So you got the, you got pretty extensive road network on QU. There's, you know, about around a hundred miles of mainline road and, and a bunch of spur roads off of that.
You know, those, those logging roads, they, you know, they come with culverts and fish blockage issues. You know, this particular project was in an area that was, you know, it's been prioritized and has some other projects going on through the, the organized village of cake.
So they, you know, they kind of got together at the forest service and, you know, prioritized areas that they, you know, that they found that were important to them for whatever, any number of reasons, whether it's, you know, cultural use or subsistence use, or, you know, maybe it could be any number of things.
And then the forest service also does, you know, these fish surveys and, and rate gives us all these, different fish crockings that are blocking or red anyway it has different grading criteria to them so we were able to screw the priorities of the of ovk and and the fish the potential for fish habitat improvement we found these culverts that we decided to replace and had a bid out for it and they got done last summer so it started off as a project to replace four culverts.
And due to a variety of reasons you know started off with a delay in construction the manufacturing of the culvert one of the culverts was delayed back in pennsylvania so the crew was already there We'd already done one culvert, ready to move on to the next ones, but now we don't have a culvert to put in because it wasn't manufactured in time and it didn't meet the right schedule of trucks and barges and whatnot to get all the way up to Juneau and then to Petersburg and then to QU.
So we had this crew out there not much to do and and so you know we found some more work to do and did a handful of you know really small just road surface you know repairs you know where you know might not be a one of the fish passages culverts that we were working on but other you know erosion issues on the road or blocked culverts so anyway put a lot of fill on some roads and pulled out some other blocked culverts.
There's a handful of culverts that could be removed and replaced with drivable boards so that you can, you know, you can still drive a truck down that road and across that crossing and on the other side safely and it doesn't. Block any fish passage. So in that little window of our manufacturing delay, we're able to pull out 56 ditch relief culverts that were blocking water from flowing and not allowing the watershed to function properly to the way it should.
So 56 ditch relief culverts removed, we found and replaced one more culvert with one that happened to be on site and then pulled out four culverts to replace them with drivable fords or water bars depending on what the need was so and then all the culverts showed up and so all in all we were able to pull out nine fish blocking culverts five of those were replaced and then it was 56 literally culverts restored we.
Were able to store you know several miles of high-risk road and reconnect habitat for about two miles of of stream of or naturalness you know fish bearing streams. Of you know for spawning arena habitat so it was.
A pretty awesome project and yeah we're pretty stoked to see it through was there a lot of volunteer people with shovels or is it more construction company that handled a lot of that stuff with some volunteer like what how much of that was done by volunteers or people like that because i know there's also some like red tape and whatnot people always talk about wanting to help out with a lot of the trails but unfortunately you're not able to help the forest
service unless you are officially certified through them for liability issues since it's a federal entity you know you can't have random person in california you know using a chainsaw to help out with trails trails you wouldn't want that whereas in alaska a lot more kids and people probably know how to use chainsaws so what was it like for or what's the opportunity for local people to to help out in these sort of projects yeah so you know the qu which i know you're you're probably
somewhat familiar with you know we didn't have any we do have projects we do in different areas but this one was a contract project so we we hired we put out a bid and we ended up hiring uh the reed brothers construction out of petersburg and they were they were awesome they were really excellent you know really you know i i was i was able to be on the ground up on the project for about a week or so and you know i i saw their their level of professionalism You know.
They're easy to work with nice guys from the area, you know, I mean, Petersburg's a little bit further away. But it's not too far and they do go over there and do some deer hunting and fishing time to time from Petersburg too. So it felt good to have local folks out there. And then this is a partnership project with the forest service. So they had their interdiscriminatory team from the Petersburg station down there.
And yeah, it was, and then we had a handful of, you know, our TU stuff on site as well. Nice. Yeah. Those projects are huge. which I don't even know what, if you wanted to volunteer, like what you could do if you brought your pickaxe and a shovel and a lunch pail. But, you know, because some of that stuff is like, that's some heavy equipment to be using. But that's cool to see that the money is going to real things.
Sometimes you donate money to organizations and it seems like it just goes to, well, who knows what, like people's salaries or whatnot. So this is something you can look at. So in addition to federal funds made available, but your dues tend to go to things of real purpose, which is nice. Yeah, yeah. No, it's, yeah, it felt, it does, it's pretty cool to see that, see the money go to work. And, you know, it's really cool to see, you know, money spent on a really awesome project.
You know, all these little baby co-hosts will be thanking us in two, three years when we come back. Yeah, for sure. This spring, is there, what events are going on in Juneau? Is there going to be another fly fishing film tour event and raffle tickets that I can buy and not win anything? Yeah, yeah. We are, well, the local chapter, the Tongass chapter, they're kicking off their winter bar flies series. So the first one is January 30th here in Juneau. I believe it's at the Imperial downtown.
They try to move them around a little bit. So there's typically one Bar Flies event per month for January, February, March. And then April is typically the film event, you know, the fly fishing film series. And then May, we have the community casting night out at Twin Lakes. And, you know, the summer gets going and people are pretty much on the water after that. So it's a pretty fun time of year. For that barflies, do you just bring your own vise and tie your own stuff?
Or is there like a fly of the night? Is there material there? Like how would one or what would one need if they were going to show up to a barflies? Yeah. So we've got about 15 or so vices with the chapter.
And you know this first time i am not leading i can't recall who's leading it this time but they typically pick a fairly easy or you know more of a beginner pattern the first time where you'll have somebody leading and going step by step and keep showing everybody what to do and then we tend to have other board members kind of around the table behind folks that are tying to give them pointers so we don't you don't need to have your own materials or tools or vices or anything
but a lot of people do bring their own vices and that's fine too you know i think our first event man a couple years ago our first event for the winter i mean there's like standing room only at the imperial is pretty crazy i've never seen so many people excited about fly fishing and fly tying so you never know what you're gonna do that's awesome and then it looks like the March 21st is the Juno Fly Fishing Film Tour showing. Yeah, it is.
Nice it worked out perfectly with spring break last year so i don't i don't know if i'll be able to make it this year we have the spring week the week before so we'll see i don't know yeah and yeah and maybe not a not quite the skiing weather this year either well who knows you know over the last couple years we seems like we get most of the most of it in in february and march but yeah It would probably be nice if there was a base up there. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, man, what else can people do to get involved if they want to sign up or if they want to become a member of Trout Unlimited? Where can they go? How can they sign up? Yeah. You can check out tu.org and put in where you're at, and they'll direct you towards the nearest local chapter for registration. And you'll start getting some emails and some stuff in the mail.
This time here tends to be the renewal time, so your free calendars and offers for whatever, all your options for renewal will come in the mail. But yeah, tu.org is the place to go. The local Tongass chapter is also pretty visible on social media, So it's still Tongastu on Instagram and Facebook. Awesome. Well, thanks, Matt. Got to go help out mom with a baby. She's been a little fussy today. The baby, not my wife.
Thanks again, man. Talk to you later. Sounds good. Thanks, Jeff. All right. See ya.