Over the years, I have spent a fair amount of time on Last Mountain Lake north of Regina. This natural lake stretches more than 70 miles and is also known as Long Lake for this reason. It is the largest naturally occurring body of water in southern Saskatchewan, although Lake Diefenbaker (created by damming) is larger. The lake was named for a Plains Cree legend about the Great Spirit shovelling dirt from the valley the lake now occupies and forming Last Mountain Hills east of Duval. It was early June when I made the trek there this year, heading north from Regina past Craven on Highway 20 past Bulyea, Strasburg and finally Govan.
Between these two communities is the highest point of land in the area for which the lake got its name. While I have fished the southern and central part of the lake this was my first visit to the far north end. For years friends of mine from Regina have been fishing this section for the first three weeks of the open water angling season. This year I was invited along for the ride and deluxe accommodation at Last Mountain Regional Park in a borrowed trailer. Last Mountain Regional Park is a very functional park located on the shores of the north end. It has an outdoor swimming pool and plenty of spots to camp. It even has a nine hole golf course with sand greens. For us, there was no golf time because the walleye were biting.
We started by checking out all the back of the bays, then worked our way out to find the larger schools of fish. By the end of the two and half days on the water, we had them fine tuned and our last evening produced non stop action along with some of the bigger fish of the trip. Presentation was simple, just a spinner rig tipped with night crawlers and weighted with split shot. The deepest we caught fish was six feet so a couple of shots was all that was needed.
There was a bit of emerging weed growth but nothing to worry about.