Panman
Thanks for that little trip down memory lane...

Interestingly, in '62 there were far more questions than answers about char versus dollies. You were surely here in the good old days. I arrived two years after your trip as a kid. My father was a gas-passer for the Air Force. Things I did as a kid still blow me away, like the fish we caught. Right through town and in easy walking distance from the house was a military dump, mostly right in the middle of Ship Creek. Many derelict vehicle bodies were right in the creek.

A deuce and a half lay on its starboard side pointed upstream. The windows were all gone and we could climb out onto it. Several big rainbows hung right inside the cab one day as I slid a tastey morsel in through the windshield. I had to jerk it away fom the greedy silvers several times before one of the rainbows took it. The trouble was the fish had a lot of options for departure gates and I had just the one where I drifted the bait in... The rainbows won far more often than I did, but the stakes were far higher for them.

I cringe to think how many incredible wild trout I rendered to protein in those days.

There are some isolated populations of Dollies in WA and OR, but not many. Those fish would be bull trout, mostly. The Kenai has lots of dollies, and many insist there are arctic char. I am one of them.

Anyway, some interesting facts about dollies:
The fish that dollies were named over was actually a bull trout.
Dollies and arctic char were only divided out a couple decades ago...
The true guru in char terms, Fred DeCicco, thinks there is another species that needs to be broken out...
Fred tagged two dollies in extreme NW AK that were recaptured in Russia, over 1,000 miles away, within 40 days...
Dollies overwinter in lakes that are not associated with their natal streams, and often go to different streams each year, but they usually live in running water.
Arctic char usualy overwinter in streams and live in lakes in the summer.

And there are many more head scratchers about char in general. Fred sat down with me one day and ran me through all of his notes and studies from an amazing career with ADF&G and it was very cool! Fred was also there when the new AK state record grayling was caught a few years back. A serious grayling nut had set out to catch the fish and did...

We have a humpback whitefish here that is an amazing fish. They get large, but they also put almost every other fish to shame the way they fight and jump. They are not your typical whitefish, but we have those, too.

Sorry for the run-on, but I get goofy when hit with the nostalgia stick...
art