Annual Spring Fishing Trip to Wickiup Reservoir and Twin Lakes Resort

Our annual trip to Wickiup has been happening for over 20+ years, with a few interruptions to Wallowa Lake during sparse years. Wickiup is a large reservoir on the east side of the Cascade Mountains in Central Oregon. Long known for it's tremendous Kokanee production, it is very popular the first few weeks of the season. Depending on yearly conditions fish often range up to 20+ inches in length. Sometimes limits are caught within a few hours in the morning, and sometimes not a bite the whole day. Being a reservoir purposed for irrigation supplying all of Central Oregon, weather and snow pack greatly impact the Kokanee population from year to year. 

In the recent past, the levels of the reservoir had been drained to extremely low levels, and the Kokanee populations had suffered because of it. For a few years the catch was basically a campout instead of a catch, thus the trip to Wallowa in eastern Oregon was justified. But amazingly enough the fish are resilient and the last 2 years have made the catch worthwhile and hopefully the trend will continue to improve. As the saying goes: "The fishing was great, the catching on the other hand"...  Fishing with family and friends for a week can't be beat, no matter what the catch yields. But, we are here for specific reason, "Bent Rods"... So our fingers are crossed that the spring of 2026 will produce that fisherman's dream of all 4 rods going off at once, all day long!!!

2026 Spring Fishing Report

Holy cow what a year!!! Spring fishing at Wickiup is always a toss up, but this year there was no tossing, except to throw all those little guys back in the lake!!! For the entire week, you could not fish more than 2 rods really, as there were so many fish biting that by the time you were working on the third rod one of the two that you had just put out was telling you it had a fish on already. GREAT NEWS RIGHT? Well if you are into filleting and smoking these little critters like we are, an average size somewhere between 9-11 inches was all Wickiup had to give this year. So, a great year to practice "no handling" fish release, and not really any "put em in the ice chest" results. This year was the epitome of "GREAT fishing, GREAT catching, LOUSY keeping"...

Weather was on the up side for this time of year, but pretty much normal except the cold mornings were not below freezing except for one morning, and then just barely. The wind on the other hand was a little above normal, so cold hands were the normal until the sun came out and provided some warmth. Hand warmers were useless, because you were so busy getting them little suckers off and re-baiting you had no time to put your hands in your pockets! I know, bitch-whine-sniffle-complain when your catching so many fish, nobody wants to hear about it!!!

Camping on the other hand was great! Great food, campfires, friends, and companionship... The standard fare for opening week of fishing in the high mountain areas of Central Oregon!!! By the way, the resort at South Twin is still offering smoked ribs on Friday evenings, and smoked prime rib on Saturday evenings. If for no other reason to hit the Cascade Lakes Highway, do it for great views and good food and support the great folks that put in so much of their time/life to make these businesses stay alive!!!

On our second to last day we decided to take a side trip to Salt Creek Falls just for the heck of it. This is the second tallest waterfall in Oregon, and it is absolutely beautiful! The only draw back was coming back to camp the truck decided to hit some type of tire grenade on the roadway, which in turn set off the tire pressure alarm, which resulted in a rapid deceleration in speed to a whopping 0 mph. So after 4 hours of battling no cell reception, catching a ride back to camp, getting our fishing buddies to take us back to the truck and help with the uneasy task of changing a tire in challenging circumstances, we were back in camp for the night... Turns out that towing a trailer for 7000 miles is hard on tires, as well as whatever grenade we hit causing such a puncture that is was irreparable, we headed back to Bend early Monday morning and had a fresh set of 4 shoes installed on the truck. We headed back to camp, hitched up the trailer and hit the road.... We were on our way to the coast, and to the California Redwoods!!! See that report by clicking the Redwoods Link in our BLOG above!!!