Days 66-72, July 25-31, Jackson Hole to Yellowstone to Dillon MT

That's not a self-portrait above.  It's a young bull moose lazing away a sunny afternoon north of Jackson Hole, Wyoming.  Just want to make sure you're not confused since you haven’t heard from me for a while. I spent five days last week in Jackson Hole and Grand Teton National Park with Trish, happily focused on her. The past few days I roamed around Yellowstone Park and southwest Montana.  Most of the time I've been without an internet connection. In fact, I still don’t have a connection as I write this, but I hope to find one tomorrow and post this blog.

In Jackson Trish and I stayed in a resort perched high on a ridge with mountain and valley vistas in every direction, including a view of the Grand Teton to the northwest. We dined at fancy (by Jackson standards) restaurants, in particular the Snake River Grill, which I highly recommend for dinner if you're in the area. One evening we attended a concert in Teton Village, which has a beautiful music hall right at the base of the ski runs.  Sarah Jarosz, a 20-year-old progressive bluegrass artist from Austin, performed an excellent show.

I joked with Trish that with her I was living high on the hog compared to how I’ve usually been living this summer - decidedly low-rent. Those days in Jackson could easily have spoiled me, but I’m back in Camelot now, again enjoying the simple life except that I miss Trish's presence. One of the elements of my life I’ve been pleased with is that it has covered a broad spectrum - geographically, vocationally and avocationally, upscale and downscale.  Reflecting on our 31 years of marriage while in Jackson, Trish and I agreed that we prefer to use our monetary resources to buy experiences rather than things. In one of my early blog posts I posited that life is a collection of experiences. If you buy that, you may agree that our approach makes sense. In any case, it was great to spend those days relaxing with Trish. I didn’t even fly fish.  I had planned to fish in the Snake River, but it remains high and off-color, which was fine under the circumstances.

When Trish left Jackson on Friday I aimed Excalibur at Yellowstone Park, and specifically to the Madison Campground, which is situated above the confluence of the Gibbon River and the Firehole River.  The joining of those two rivers gives birth to the Madison River, which is much-revered in fly-fishing circles. The scenery was outstanding and the fishing was pretty good. Here’s a panorama of the upper Madison River Valley taken from a spot on the south bank of the river just below the Gibbon/Firehole confluence (this would be a good time for you to double-click on the picture to blow it up and get the full effect):






As you can see, the river is broad, but fortunately it's only about thigh-deep in most places so I had an easy time wading it. I had heard that the Madison was crowded and the trout difficult to catch but neither of those rumors turned out to be entirely true. Caddis imitations - both dries and nymphs - were effective at catching a dozen or so rainbow and brown trout in a few hours of fishing on Friday afternoon and again, downstream a few miles, on Saturday morning. I had no problem finding room to fish. The other fishermen I saw didn’t appear to have much expertise and I didn’t see them catching anything.  The trout seemed to be concentrated in certain locations.  Finding them and being willing to move around were the keys.  My only disappointment was that the trout weren’t very large, as you can see from the two photos below of an average-size rainbow and a similar brown:

I hooked one fairly large fish on the Madison, but he came unbuttoned quickly after teaching me a small lesson. Conventional fly-fishing wisdom says that dries and nymphs must generally be fished with as natural of a drift as possible. But I hooked the big one while lifting a caddis nymph from the water in preparation for the next cast, inadvertently deploying a technique called the "Leisenring Lift."  Caddis were hatching in large numbers. When caddis hatch, they start from the rocks on the bottom of the river, create an air bubble that’s attached to their body, and swim/float to the surface as quickly as possible to avoid being eaten on the way. But the tactic doesn’t always work, and trout are happy to gulp the escaping caddis nymphs if they can. The lesson I learned (not for the first time) was that I shouldn’t get too fixated on the conventional methods of fishing. The biggest fish tend to be caught by fly fishers who do things a little differently.



Driving through the gorgeous Madison River Valley in Montana Saturday afternoon, I was tempted to stop and fish at any number of good-looking spots along the road to Ennis, but I decided I’d had my fill of the Madison, and drove on toward Dillon, passing through Virginia City and Twin Bridges. Virginia City has preserved its old western gold-mining town façade quite nicely. Driving through it, I was reminded of a time when I was a boy and my family visited there to watch my brother, Dave, race his mid-60s vintage Austin Healey Sprite, or perhaps it was his MGB - I can't remember which car he owned at the time. He and my sister-in-law, Glenda, used to race sports cars frequently back then. My brother was always competitive and he had box-loads of trophies to show for it. Later he raced catamarans and won more often than not, and even now, in his sixties, he’s still racing. This time it’s bicycles, which is probably better for his health. Driving through Twin Bridges, I passed the R.L. Winston headquarters. Winston is a prominent maker of fly rods, and their particular rods are reputed to have a certain unique “feel.” I can attest to that. I own a couple of Winstons that I really love. The sight of the HQ prompted me to pull out my Winston 9’ 5-weight IMX for my next adventure.

In Dillon I stopped by a fly shop to see if I could hire a guide and boat to float the Beaverhead River Sunday or Monday.  There weren’t any guides available so I decided to set up Camelot in a campground south of town on the river and try fishing from the bank. I was a little pooped and went to bed early that night. The next morning, refreshed and full of Italian breakfast sausage and French toast, I tackled the Beaverhead for an hour or so. The Beaverhead holds a lot of big fish, but the problem is that it’s predominantly narrow and deep, which makes wading difficult. Nevertheless, I stalked one of the banks near the end of the campground, which is also a park.  I managed to land a 14-inch brown trout on a tiny pheasant tail nymph, so it was worth the effort for a short time. A church group moved into a group picnic area near me after about an hour and started an outdoor service. When the singer-guitarist began to perform “My Sweet Lord” (a Hindu-inspired song!), I decided to sneak away, wondering what George Harrison would have thought about the situation.

Around 11 AM I drove Excalibur downriver in search of another spot to try my luck on the Beaverhead, but I happened to drive past the access to Poindexter Slough and decided to stop there instead.  Many years ago my friend Bill Nelson recommended that I try Poindexter Slough when I got a chance and I still remembered that. The name of this stream makes it sound like some kind of alligator-and-bullfrog-infested ditch in Louisiana, but in fact the Slough is a wonderful little spring creek that meanders north, more or less parallel with the Beaverhead, before the two join in Dillon. In the parking lot I chatted with a guy from California. He said he’d fished on the Slough a couple of prior occasions, but it didn’t sound like he’d done very well. Spring creek fishing can be tough, as I knew from experience on streams like Hot Creek in California. But I cracked the code on Hot Creek and caught dozens of fish on some days there, so I figured I could crack the code on the Slough.

Off I trundled through the brush with my Winston rod rigged with a 13-foot leader, 6X tippet and a tiny mayfly emerger pattern. For good measure, I also tied on a trailer fly - a size 22 olive WD-40 - about 18 inches off the hook of the emerger. It took me about a half hour to bypass a couple of other fishermen and locate a rising trout.  The first one I spotted was consistently coming up to gorge on a prolific hatch of pale morning duns (PMDs), and I began casting to him. Apparently my diligent preparation and delicate tippet and fly selections were the ticket to success.  In short order I hooked and landed the modest-sized brown trout that had tempted me with his repeated splashing. For the next few hours I worked my way slowly upstream. Other fly fishermen were remarkably sparse, which was a pleasant surprise, and overcast skies bolstered my confidence. The PMD hatch continued unabated for several hours.  In some stretches of the stream I spied several risers in close proximity. My WD-40 trailer drew most of the attention from the trout at first. Most of the risers were relatively small fish compared to the reputed average size of trout in the Slough. But as the afternoon wore on, the clouds thickened and the PMD hatch petered out, only to be replaced by a hatch of another, smaller species of mayfly.   At that point I began to see bigger noses nudge out of the water near the undercut banks. I clipped the trailer fly, lengthened my tippet and tied on the smallest olive parachute mayfly pattern in my fly box.

The bigger trout proved to be the challenge I was led to expect them to be. Each time I located one of the larger risers, I snuck up on him as best I could and cast my tiny dry fly across stream, striving to get as good of a drift as possible. But even when my casts were right under the bank and the drift was perfect, the trout would let the fly go by untouched 95% of the time. I noticed that a lot of real flies were drifting over the heads of the same fish and concluded that the problem wasn’t my presentation. I wasn’t getting refusals. There were so many actual flies in the water that the trout didn’t need to come up for every one. They had plenty enough to eat by rising only occasionally. So the only thing to do was to keep plugging at each of those fish. Some of those trout were so tightly tucked in under the bank that I could never get them to take my imitation, but in a few cases I was successful. The 14-incher below was not the biggest fish I hooked but he was the biggest one I landed.  A couple of larger fish demonstrated a remarkable facility for leaping and writhing like tarpon and throwing the hook in the process.  But the brownie in the picture may have been the strongest trout I ever caught relative to his size.  As soon as he took my fly he jumped three feet out of the water, then immediately rocketed 30 feet upstream along the far bank, spooking a couple of other big fish there. He gave my 6X tippet the full test for several minutes, but in the end I pulled him to my side of the Slough and was very glad I recently invested in a new net.  Here he is, along with a picture of a typical section of the Slough:

So all in all it was another great few days on some of the most famous and challenging waters in the west, on the heels of a marvelous week with Trish.  Lots of rainbows and browns landed on the Madison. One trout landed on the Firehole in only 10 minutes of fishing there. One trout landed on the Beaverhead. About a dozen trout landed on Poindexter Slough. Everywhere I look there are mountain ranges crested with snow, sparkling streams, broad valleys and steep canyons. As I write this, Camelot is parked near the Beaverhead.  Across the river are thousands of swallows darting in and out of little holes in a big cliff named the “rattlesnake cliff” by Captain Clark of Lewis and Clark fame.  Clark was almost bitten by a rattlesnake at this site, according to a nearby monument. His journals speak of his troop having dined on rattlesnakes that evening, and of him having caught many nice trout here a little over 200 years ago. Sweet.

Again, time turns on itself, like the snake Ouroboros that eats its own tail. What will tomorrow bring?  I can't wait to find out.