Days 91-94, August 19-22, Missoula to Meeteetse via Beartooths

I'm not a big fan of delayed gratification.  Like just about everyone else, I prefer to have what I want when I want it - i.e., right now.  However, reality dictates that most of us must earn what we get - the rest of us hire really good political lobbyists or are just plain lucky.  So I spent 30 years working very hard to build a retirement fund and start fishing as much as I wanted to.  It was a gamble because I could have died of stress-related diseases or some other malady or accident before I reached my goal.  But I looked at life like an actuary or a top-tier poker player might - that is, the odds of payoff looked pretty good if I took the long view.  I embraced the delayed gratification approach whole-heartedly.  Eventually the payoff happened and I'm now fly fishing to my heart's content.

Trish and I were talking about this topic while at the airport in Anchorage.  We agreed that if we were to die tomorrow, we would pass in a state of fulfillment.  If misfortune should happen to us, we hope everyone we know will realize that.  I don't mean to sound morbid.  We hope that we will have several more decades of life together.  But no matter what else happens, all the effort we put in was worth it.  There's a lot of merit to the "live for today" argument, but I feel it's wise to play the odds and delay receipt of most of life's rewards.  I used to advance that position with the young people who worked with me in our accounting firm.  I believed it and I still do.  I love the song by Cat Stevens (aka Yusuf), "Father and Son."  It articluates the two life approaches quite nicely.  The son desires to live for today, while the father counsels patience and hard work.  The dialogue embedded in that song might have been a conversation between my father and me when I was young.  In the end I think my father, and the father in the song, were right.


What made me think about delayed gratification was that I had to practice it when I was fishing on the East Rosebud River in the Beartooth Mountains of south-central Montana yesterday.  After catching up on sleep in Missoula Friday after a redeye flight from Anchorage, I drove to the East Rosebud south of Roscoe, MT Saturday and set up Camelot in a quiet campground in a spectacular canyon mouth.  The canyon walls lead up to the highest mountains in Montana, including the tallest - Granite Peak.  The headwaters of both the East Rosebud and the West Rosebud originate on the slopes of those mountains, eventually combining and flowing north to the Yellowstone River.  The walls of the lower canyon above the campground are steep and craggy, places where you might expect to see mountain goats in the krummholz.  I didn't actually see any goats, but they may well have been there somewhere, hopping around on narrow ledges and preparing to shine in the next morning's sunlight.  Here's a view of Camelot and my evening campfire:



When I arrived Saturday evening I caught a few trout within sight of Camelot, so I decided to rise early Sunday and fish for a few more hours before departing.  My strategy was to hike down the road for a mile or so, then fish upstream.  A salient fact I hadn't remembered was that the road veered away from the river in that direction, so that by the time I left the road for the river, I found myself trekking through a broad field of 5-foot-high pines and a lot of underbrush.  It was difficult.  When I finally made it to the riverbank, I realized that the entire section of river from where I stood to the campground flowed down a relatively steep grade.  The river was basically one long rapid through that stretch, almost unfishable.  I then had little choice except to return to the road and the campground, which meant I first  had to hike back through the thick pines and a massive tangle of old fallen logs.  I started thinking about delayed gratification about them, and kept thinking about it for the rest of the morning.

Sometimes you choose a course and it's a dead end, but if you remain patient and strive to find a better course, the end result may be the desired one.  When I eventually made it back to the campground and stepped into the quieter waters near there, I soon located numerous rainbows and browns willing to rise to a carefully presented elk hair caddis.  In short order I caught a dozen or so trout, captured some nice video on the GoPro camera, and was back on the road in Excalibur by noon.  Here's a peek at the gorgeous East Rosebud River and the canyon from which it emerges:

Early on Sunday afternoon, Excalibur charged into nearby Red Lodge, MT, which was jammed with tourists, and started the climb up the steep grade of Highway 212 - the Beartooth Highway - into the mountains.  I've traveled on many a scenic American byway in my time, but it's hard to think of one as breathtaking as the Beartooth Highway, which tops out at an elevation of almost 11,000 feet.  From Red Lodge, the drive is exhilirating and vertiginous.  The narrow road hugs the steep slopes above Rock Creek Canyon in a maze of switchbacks.  Evidence of dangerous rockfalls lies around every hairpin bend.  High up on the plateau among the high peaks is a calvacade of small lakes and tumbling brooks emanating from large snowfields that remain unmelted even in late August.  After 60 miles or so, just east of the Matterhorn-like Pilot Peak and the northeast border of Yellowstone National Park, the Highway intersects with the Chief Joseph Highway above the Clark's Fork of the Yellowstone River - another amazing stretch of road.  On this occasion I took the Chief Joseph Highway east toward Cody, WY, stopping along the way to ponder the rough majesty of the Sunlight Basin, a place where you can see impossibly deep canyons in several directions and spectacularly tall, sharp-ridged peaks in other directions.  In the late afternoon I climbed another set of switchbacks up and over the slopes of a spur of the Absaroka Mountains and down to the highway that led me into Cody.

Now I'm in Meeteetse visiting my friends Chip and Julie.  You may recall from one of my posts of several weeks ago that Chip had an accident while working on a new deck at his place, breaking a leg and a wrist.  Although he's still wearing braces to protect his injured limbs, the healing process is going well and he's hobbling around effectively these days.  Enough so that we decided to take a picnic and a canoe to Upper Sunshine Reservoir west of Meeteetse and attempt to catch some trout for his smoker.  Catch them we did.  Upper Sunshine teems with cutthroat and cuttbow (cuttbows are rainbow/cutthroat hybrids) trout of all sizes and is lightly fished by comparison with most lakes of comparable productivity.  While Julie read a book on shore in the shade of the car, Chip and I prowled an island in the middle of the lake, soon capturing eight meaty trout, including two beauties that measured over 18" in length.  Here's Chip, holding the largest one:

As you know, I release the vast majority of fish that I catch.  I subscribe to the philosophy that a trout is too valuable of a resource to catch only once.  But there are some places where, and times when, keeping and eating fish makes perfect sense.  The fish we buy in supermarkets and restaurants doesn't magically appear there like the fish that Jesus conjured up to feed the multitudes that came to hear him preach.  The fish we consume are captured and killed before they arrive on our plates.  I think it's a good idea for all carnivores to be directly involved in the process of capturing (or raising) and killing their own meat at some point in their lives instead of always just removing it from a cellophane wrapper at home or sticking a fork in it in a cafe.  When we obtain our food directly from its wild sources like our ancestors did, we gain an appreciation for it that is impossible to gain any other way.  The same is true for eggs or vegetables or fruit or herbs or anything else we eat, and the principle doesn't apply strictly to carnivores.  Supermarket produce cannot easily surpass the taste of produce taken directly from one's own garden or orchard or barnyard, and in any event there's something special about knowing exactly what was involved in the journey from simple seeds to the complex organisms that go into our mouths and sustain our lives.  Animal, vegetable - it's all life, all part of the same chain in which humans are another link.  That's one of the simple realties that weeks in the wild remind me of so poignantly - realities too easily unnoticed when hidden under the veneer of civilization.

Again, the delayed gratification principle comes into play.  It's much more expedient to buy processed food than to participate in the food creation process - instant gratification is great.  But one of the best things about delaying gratification is that the ultimate rewards often seem much sweeter when we finally obtain them.  Perhaps it's the extended period of hope and anticipation that causes that result, or perhaps it's our tendency to cling to the more puritanical notion that something is not worth as much if it is not earned.  In any case, one's sense of appreciation and gratitude is heightened when rewards come with a price.  That's what I believe.  Let me know what you think.

Tomorrow I depart for the upper Midwest.  It will take a couple of days for me to get to the lake country of Minnesota.  I'm sad to have to put the rugged vistas of the Rockies in Excalibur's rear-view mirror, but it's time to see new places and fish in unfamiliar waters.  This will be the final leg of my journey, culminating in Maine before I return home to Pennsylvania in just under a month from now.