Think backcountry fishing mean an endless drive? Think again. This fly-in adventure was just hours from the city

Five hours to nowhere

We spent the night in Azilda before our flight, which made the morning almost comically easy by fly-in standards. The floatplane dock is right there, so there was no pre-dawn marathon from some distant motel and no wondering whether we’d have enough time to make the flight.

We loaded our gear, climbed aboard and took off.

There were four of us: my son Sam Gardner, on his first outpost trip in a decade after years spent mostly rolling 20-sided dice playing D&D instead of casting lines; my old friend Wes Nelson, a veteran of enough of these trips to know exactly what he’s doing; and Mark Ventresca, a botanist and geographer who’d barely held a rod before last year’s outpost, where he stepped in as a last-minute sub—and got hooked.

Once we took to the air, the landscape changed quickly, with roads and houses giving way to nothing below us but Canadian Shield and boreal forest. By mid-morning, the four of us were at camp, unloading tackle and getting organized.

I’ve spent plenty of time driving 10, 12 or 18 hours to reach a floatplane base. There is something very satisfying about doing the same transition in a few hours.