A Roswell kid on the river

Chris grew up in Roswell, within walking distance of the Chattahoochee. He and his brother John spent their free time hunting, fishing and trapping the river and the creeks that feed it, and he has fly fished since he was a boy.

Before he was a fly fisherman, he set bug catchers in the river to collect bait. Checking them, he noticed some insect hatches fading away and new ones turning up. That habit of watching the river’s bugs never left him.

He later earned a history degree from Elon College in North Carolina.

The trip that started it all

In 1991 Chris took his first drift-boat trip, on the Snake River in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Out West, fly fishing guides were a thriving industry, and he came home wanting to build the same thing on the Hooch.

He told the owner of The Fish Hawk, an Atlanta fly shop, that he wanted to start a guide service on the river. He was hired to work in the shop instead, and started learning the business from behind the counter.

River Through Atlanta

Chris started River Through Atlanta in 1994, guiding drift-boat trips under a National Park Service permit in the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area. A year later, Georgia’s DNR dropped the closed trout season on the river below Buford Dam. With a mild climate and a late trout spawn, the Hooch became a river you could fish every month of the year.

For years it was a one-man show. Chris worked landscaping and remodeling jobs in the winter to make ends meet. By 1998, weekends were busy enough that he hired his first guide and bought a second drift boat.

Taking the river’s pulse

The same year, Chris started a nonprofit, now the Chattahoochee Coldwater Fishery Foundation, to keep watch on the tailwater. By 1999 it had five sampling stations along the 30 miles from Buford Dam to Peachtree Creek. Every quarter, volunteers, most of them fly fishermen, collect and sort the river’s insects so changes in the water show up early.

“The bugs in the river are like canaries in the coal mine.”

Chris Scalley, Georgia Outdoor News, 2005

He has also pushed anglers to release the river’s holdover trout, the fish that have proven they can survive in the Hooch. “Do you want to catch fish or eat fish?” he asked in 1999.

Growing the outfit

• 2000Earned a Kentucky commercial guide’s license and began leading float trips on the Cumberland River tailwater.
• 2003River Through Atlanta became an Orvis-Endorsed guide service.
• 2005Added duck hunts in Georgia and on the Tennessee River flyway in Alabama. Georgia Outdoor News reported he was spending more than 200 days a year on the river.
• 2007Named a finalist for Field & Stream’s Heroes of Conservation awards for his work protecting the Chattahoochee’s trout fishery.
• 2008Game & Fish magazine called him “perhaps the Chattahoochee River’s greatest angling advocate.”

The rivers he measures it against

Chris has fly fished the freestone rivers of New Zealand’s South Island, Ireland’s loughs, Austria’s Gmundner Traun, the Rocky Mountain West and Pennsylvania’s limestone spring creeks. He and many of his clients still think the Hooch compares favorably with all of them.

Still on the water

River Through Atlanta now has upwards of 18 guides for fishing and hunting trips, and runs seven days a week, all year. Chris’s goal hasn’t changed since the early days: to see the Chattahoochee reach its full potential as a trout fishery.

And he still answers questions himself. If you’re planning a fishing trip anywhere in Georgia or the Southeast, ask him below.