Holy crap! Get a look at this: Ray Fairfax sent in this photo of a giant Chinook salmon carcass he ran across earlier this winter while steelhead fishing on the Smith River in Northern California.

“We were fishing the Bailey Riffle and found a salmon carcass of amazing length,” says Fairfax. “All that was left was the jaws and backbone, but what a fish it must have been! I straightened the backbone out the best I could and laid my STR1025C Loomis down next to it. It measured 59 inches…minus, of course, the tail!!”

Fairfax says that the jaws looked almost as if the fish was a female, which is even more mind-blowing!

“If you add a conservative few inches for the tail, how big was this beast?” he asks.

Well, just for comparison’s sake: Les Anderson’s 97.3-pound All Tackle World Record Chinook was 58.5 inches long!! Of course, we’ll never know how big the King of the Smith was in his prime…but let’s just hope he spread a bunch of his genetic material around!

And here’s another one: The 50.7 incher found dead in a tributary of the Sacramento River a couple seasons back: GIANT SALMON CARCASS FOUND