From Alaska to Michigan — the cross-continent journey of the Chena’s Arctic grayling | Hatch Magazine

A decade ago, I hauled a small camper behind my 2011 Toyota FJ cruiser from Idaho Falls north through Montana, British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska, and eventually took in the view of the Arctic Ocean from the end of the Dalton Highway at Deadhorse. It was my “trip of a lifetime,” and I’d do it again in a heartbeat, even with older bones and hair that’s gone from a solid “salt and pepper” to full on white.

Over the course of about 10 weeks, I slowly pushed my way north, taking time to chase the cutthroats in BC’s Elk and Bull rivers, and meandering through the Canadian Rockies in pursuit of rainbows and burly bull trout. One evening, after crossing the Buckinghorse River north of Fort St. John and parking the little towable abode within a few steps of a fire pit and a few more steps of the tannin-stained river, I wandered to the water with a light-weight fly rod in hand and a size 12 Green Drake tied to the tippet. It had been a really wet summer, and remember following this mayfly hatch — unintentionally — for weeks. As I got to the river, the oversized bugs were everywhere, and fish were rising to them with abandon.

It was here, on my journey to the Arctic, that I caught my first Arctic grayling of the trip. It was a fat 17-inch specimen — absolutely gorgeous — and I spent the rest of the evening, until the northern skies got just a bit too dim and my eyes couldn’t quite make out my tattered fly riding listlessly on the water, catching and releasing sizable fish on nearly every cast. It was one of the best dry-fly fishing sessions I’d ever enjoyed, and remains so to this very day.

The fish of the trip

I didn’t know it at the time, but the Green Drake hatch would continue north, and, as July slipped into August, I would keep following the bugs over the course of that rainy Canadian summer. I pushed into the Yukon, and, as the bugs kept hatching, the grayling kept rising. While I managed to catch lots of different fish over the course of the trip, from rainbows and bull trout in the Pine River near Chetwynd, to accidental pike in a swampy, bug-ridden, series of beaver ponds near Tok, Alaska, the gregarious Arctic grayling turned out to be the fish that defined the trip.

I caught these eager cousins to trout and whitefish on dry flies in the Yukon’s gorgeous Rancheria River, and in just about every creek, riverlet, and pond along the Denali Highway. I caught seriously big grayling in Alaska’s Gulkana River, including my first Arctic grayling that topped 20 inches.

Even as I topped Attigun Pass on the Dalton Highway and dropped down onto the tundra in the Sag River drainage, the grayling remained a constant companion. And the Green Drakes? The hatch that started just after the Fourth of July in Virginia City, Montana, seemingly led my nose all the way north to Fairbanks, where I took a pause and spent a few days on the fabled Chena River.

It was here where the grayling fishing went from quantity to quality, and perhaps that’s because this gorgeous boreal river that slices through the birch and spruce bottoms of central Alaska is fairly close to a significant population center. The Chena is cherished by interior Alaska dry-fly fishers, and, for Alaska, anyway, it sees some pressure. Here, the fishing was much more deliberate. Fly sizes started to matter. The silhouette needed to be spot-on — the half-assed, hastily wrapped flies tied over fluorescent camper lights in the middle of the night stopped working. These were “big boy” grayling, and they behaved a lot more like trout than their reckless brethren in far-flung rivers like the Buckinghorse. The difficulty is relative, of course — as a rule, grayling aren’t terribly finicky. But if there are finicky grayling in North America, most of them swim in the Chena.

Alaska’s Chena River (photo: Chris Hunt).

Oh, and they were big. In three days on the Chena, my catch rate dropped significantly. But the average size of the fish was noticeably bigger. I remember, on my fourth day, I took the afternoon and visited Chena Hot Springs Resort and soaked in its massive hot pool, where hot water is piped in via a single pipe protruding from the rock. I stood under that pipe and let the hot water wash away a month’s worth of grayling-induced tightness in my shoulders and neck.

It was my “grayling summer,” and I’ll never forget it. And the Chena’s grayling will always occupy a special place in my many fishy memories.

From the Chena to Lower Peninsula

By the mid-1930s, the Arctic grayling indigenous to Michigan’s Lower Peninsula were gone, leaving the community of Grayling, Michigan, without a fish to match its name. Logging, mining, and development in the LP had taken a toll on rivers like the Boardman, the Au Sable, and the Manistee. Introduced brown trout from Europe that arrived about 40 years earlier also contributed to the grayling’s decline, doing what brown trout tend to do when they’re plopped into new rivers the world over. The introduction of brook trout from points north and east didn’t help, either. The genetically unique Michigan grayling was gone.

But it was never forgotten. These lacy fish were held in such high regard that efforts to bring them back never really stopped. But they never succeeded, either. Attempts to resuscitate this long-vanished fish continued into the 1980s, but the fish would never take.

But today, thanks to the groundbreaking environmental legislation passed in the 1970s — like the Clean Water Act — the health of the Lower Peninsula’s rivers gradually improved. And, about a decade ago, as I was motoring through the last, best grayling habitat left in the hemisphere, another plan was hatched to bring grayling back to Michigan.

In 2015, the Michigan Arctic Grayling Initiative was born. Taking lessons from a number of past failures in the effort to bring grayling back to the northern Lower Peninsula, this collaborative effort made up of state and federal agencies, conservation groups, volunteers, indigenous tribes, and area municipalities seems dead set on bringing the once-prominent salmonid back to their historic waters. And the brood stock for this ambitious reintroduction effort? Alaska’s Chena River, of course.

A resurrection in the works

In 2019, the first grayling eggs from the Chena arrived in Michigan and were taken to the Marquette State Fish Hatchery, where they would be incubated, hatched, and, hopefully, used as a wellspring for an ambitious resurrection effort. After a year off from COVID-19 in 2020, Michigan Department of Natural Resources fisheries technicians returned to Alaska in 2021 and 2022 to gather more eggs for the effort. Using new rearing techniques, and mimicking some successful reintroduction efforts that have taken place in Montana and in Yellowstone National Park, the Michigan DNR pinned its hopes on science and a little bit of good luck.

The first stocking efforts were largely ceremonial — a handful of ponds were planted with grayling in 2022 and 2023 with the intent of giving recreational anglers in the region the chance to actually fish for grayling in Michigan, something that hasn’t happened in about a century. While the ponds offered something of a hopeful preview, biologists continued their work to increase the grayling brood stock in the hatchery, and, late last summer, grayling were once again swimming in a few select reaches of Lower Peninsula rivers.

Between August and the end of October 2025, Michigan’s indigenous tribes on the LP reintroduced thousands of Chena River grayling into the Boardman-Ottaway River, which followed a summer 2025 release of hatchery-reared grayling in the Manistee and the Maple rivers.

Now, beneath the snow and ice of winter’s annual grip on the Lower Peninsula, the MAGI partners can only wait and hope. Will the best Alaska’s Arctic grayling make it through a rough Michigan winter? Will they grow under the ice and survive an environment that biologists believe is conducive to this once-native fish’s recovery?

Only time will tell. Perhaps, in a year or two, a Boardman river trout angler might latch into a nice, fat Arctic grayling during the magical night-time hex hatch and reel in a lacy fish with a stunning and oversized dorsal fin. Or maybe a kid dunking worms on the Manistee will reel in a fish that doesn’t look very familiar. Either way, that’s the next step on the road to a rebirth that once seemed pretty unlikely.

Here’s to Michigan’s new grayling. With a proper nod to Alaska’s amazing Chena River, of course.