Silver Hilton Steelhead Lodge
The following lodge history is provided by Lani Waller of Silver Hilton Lodge.
Silver Hilton Steelhead Lodge began in 1981 when B.C. residents Bob and Jerrie Lou Wickwire sold their upriver camp and moved to the current location. We have two locations about six miles apart. One location, called The Main Camp, takes eight guests per week and the other, further upstream, called “Triple Header,” takes four guests per week. We are open for nine weeks and our clientele comes from all over the world, including BC.
The lodge is owned by an American named Steve Myers and all activities are carried out through a corporate structure. I am the Executive Vice President of that corporation and the booking agent in charge of marketing, reservations and sales.
Our staff are all BC residents; our on site operations are supported through local channels, vendors and suppliers. We spend considerable time, money and energy supporting the local community and we see ourselves as guests, visitors, and members of the local community.
When I was a boy, I dreamed of steelhead. In those days the rivers of northern California ran thick with them. And then it all began to change. By the mid sixties northern California seemed irreversibly laminated to a riparian nightmare of colossal dams and logging practices which pumped out the short term dollars and left the rest to waste. The steelhead began to leave, one fish, one run, one river at a time, year after year until it did seem as if it had only been a dream all along. I pulled out.
Heading north to British Columbia where time still seemed suspended, I fell in love with a place called the Babine. There were others along the way and some tugged mightily on my boots but none could match this one.
I didn’t even know what the name meant but I knew what I was looking at. I was looking at the best: the very best. Not because there were more steelhead there than anywhere else. There weren’t and today all these years later this is still true. It was something else. It was a different kind of dream, one that British Columbia angler and author Roderick Haig-Brown wrote about and I can’t remember what he called it now, but I always think of it as the dream you have down in the bottom of your soul, the one which at the end of the day defines the best of what you love about the sport.
The Babine was wild, it was clean and unspoiled; you could smell the trees and the only tracks were those of grizzly, moose and now and then the cupped paw of a wolf. I had never seen steelhead so perfect, so free and at times so large. By this time it was 1978 and Bob and Jerrie Lou Wickwire owned the lodge where I fished. Just upriver and around the bend was Joy and Ejnar Madsen’s place – below us, only the river. Little cutting had been done at that time. The stands of evergreen were like an army of sentinels; ancient and untouched, silent and as straight as an arrow. They were beautiful. Some of them still remain.
In 1981 the Wickwire family sold their lodge. They moved down river to a new location hardly touched except for the memory and trails of the Gitxsan and the animals who prowled the forests and shoreline and who watched silently from a canopy of cottonwood, spruce and hemlock.
The Wickwires had a dream, too. They wanted to build another lodge; one called Silver Hilton. The Main Lodge came first; hand sewn cotton curtains combined with stainless steel riverboats. Hand carved timbers and perfectly mortised window panes surrounded you at night and patterns of the northern lights danced in the window like electrical moths. They opened the lodge in 1981.
In 1984 a second location was added, called Triple Header, named for the three trophy steelhead a friend and I caught in a pool of cold water where few, if any white men, had fished. The Wickwires ran the place like a dream; everything was as perfect as they could make it and slowly the word began to spread. By the late 80’s, the Babine and Silver Hilton, along with the two lodges up river were making a name for themselves.
In 1998 the Wickwires decided to retire and sold Silver Hilton to a guy named Steve Myers. It took some time, but not long after I met Steve I realized he had the fever as badly as I did and it wasn’t long before he began putting the final touches on his dream of the perfect fishing lodge.
I suppose such things are subjective but I am not one to argue. The place is, to say the least, beautiful, as well as efficient and environmentally compatible. We feel the Lodge fits the Babine, that it compliments the quality and status of the river and the staff do all they can to make sure our guests have the best possible opportunity to catch the steelhead of their life and their dreams. Steve is proud of it; we all are. He has done a great job of finishing the dream.
During our season, beginning in early September and going through the first week of November, some times it is cold; sometimes it is rainy; sometimes the fishing is good and sometimes, to be perfectly honest, it is not as good as we wish it could be. The food always is; the fireplace is always warm, the boats are always ready to go and the Babine always rolls on like thunder down to the sea.
And through it all we remain dedicated to the Babine, the watershed that supports it, to the wild steelhead, the salmon, bear and moose. I have never seen one of us shrink from this responsibility and perspective. In truth our attachment to Silver Hilton is not financial; it is an affair of the heart. No one is getting rich; and in the fullest sense of the word, no one really owns it. We all feel that for whatever time we have, we are stewards of something quite special and unique. There is only one Babine and we are in the heart of it, taking care of the river, the watershed and the steelhead. That’s why we are there. That’s why we will stay and that’s why we will fight for its survival and protection.
And last but not least, we are one third of the organization pledged to do just that- The Babine River Foundation. We welcome all anglers from all walks of life and points on the globe to come and fish the Babine, to enjoy it, to protect it and to ensure that what we love goes on forever – to our children, to our children’s children and to those anglers in the distant future who will, we hope, always be able to come here and see this wild river, these great fish and the land which shall always sustain them.