“Relax in unspoiled wilderness areas. No telephones to annoy you. Crystal clear waters are everywhere… surrounded by towering trees reminiscent of days long past. You snake a lure out over the quiet water. Start to retrieve. Then bam! And your fun begins.”
Following on to our 1951 Northwest fishing brochure, here’s a North Central gem from 1978, listing packages in Western Ontario and Manitoba. Nearly all of the options included some bush flying out of International Falls, MN / Fort Frances, ON to remote lodges or even floating houseboat accommodations.
From the 1960s into the early 1980s, fishing trips into the remote Canadian wilderness were an affordable middle-class adventure, especially for folks in the Upper Midwest who would usually vacation in Minnesota, Wisconsin, or northern Michigan in the summer.
As higher-paying union jobs (with well-defined vacation benefits) declined in the 1980s, so too did multi-week family vacations to the Northland. Rising costs of fuel, interest, and insurance also made it more expensive to fly small aircraft in Canada, and these trends combined to make fly-in sport fishing a hobby only for the wealthy by the late 1980s.
North Central and Republic had been able to fly DC-9s into Hibbing/Chisholm as well as International Falls with decent loads of passengers destined for fishing trips into the wilderness, but as that type of tourism faded, those stations could only support Republic Express Saabs and Jetstreams by the mid-80s.
