Ralph Wahl of Bellingham, Washington, may have been the first man to cast a fly for Skagit River winter-run steelhead. "There may have been others, but they weren't where I was fishing," Ralph says. Ralph was fishing for summer-run steelhead on the North Fork Stillaguamish whenever he could find time to break away from working at the family store (Wahl's Department Store) in Bellingham. Ralph had been an obsessed fisherman all of his life. When the run of Deer Creek natives would begin to stack up in clear N.F. Stillaguamish pools below the town of Oso, so would Ralph and a host of other dedicated steelhead anglers. Many of them would become life-long friends and, unbeknownst to them at the time, steelhead fishing legends.