I Lost Something in the Hill Country (III)

PART III

Sunday was our last fishing day in Montana. It was going to be a pretty big send off, actually. The clouds cleared overnight, and as I fished that morning in the bitter cold I caught glimpses of the hills that had hidden from us. Then, on our drive to David's, we just had to stop. The sky had opened up from gigantic to unfathomable and every hill was on display. Some of these were many, many miles away, and yet they looked like you could drive 20 minutes and be right there.

The Crazies

David took us on the scenic route to our intended destination. We stopped on the way so I could take a cast into one of the most incredible little creeks in this area. It is private water, and had we more time David could have really gotten us in there to fish it thoroughly, but a few casts in a culvert pool were better than nothing. On one of those casts, as my streamer traversed the tail-out of the pool, a monster brown emerged from the depths and shadowed it. David and my dad watched it from above me, on the road grade. I couldn't see the fish, so I continued stripping hoping to feel a pull. I never did. We continued through the most beautiful terrain I had ever seen. We stopped at a high place, snow still lingering there, and looked out over the vast expanse of ranch land. It was extremely quiet there. No road noise, none of the whir of civilization I am far too used too any time it isn't blocked out by the sound of moving water. Just quiet, and the distant sound of a few birds in the woods. David told us that, years ago, we would have been looking over a huge heard of buffalo.

Back down into the next valley we went and in a short time got to the river. It was an especially pretty stream with clear blue green water, big boulders, and perfect gravel bars that made wading easier. In a short time I hooked a good brown on my streamer. Unfortunately, as I was landing her, my rod broke at one of the ferules. I went back up to the car to grab a backup and enjoyed watching the hoppers that had just thawed out. I ran, scaring them from their grassy hiding places and watching them fly up and land again, then shimmy down the grass back into the shade.

Upon my return, I carefully plied the water on my way upstream. Eventually the streamer came off. The sun was high and bright and the fish just weren't in the mood to move for a big fly. I changed to a Prince Nymph and was fairly quickly rewarded with a new hybrid, a very odd looking cutbow.

Eventually I decided I needed to suspend the nymph and cast further to avoid putting the fish off if I really wanted to be effective. I changed to a dry dropper, a Frenchie under a small cicada. That worked in spades. I found a few good pods of fish to bother and caught a couple good browns and my first ever mountain whitefish.

 Actually, I got my first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth mountain whitefish. They really are a very cool fish. Their nose is well suited for rooting out insects, and I for one don't find them ugly. They are probably one of the more interesting salmonids I have caught. They are also very successful. By that I mean they have established themselves well throughout the west, having one of the broadest ranges of any salmonid around. It was cool to add a third new salmonid to my life list on this trip, though it was one many anglers consider to be a trash fish. I, of course, never take that word usage into consideration any time I'm working with a species regardless of how many I've caught. Whitefish are cool and I'm sticking to that assessment!

We moved downriver as the bite slowed in that water. I went back to fishing the sparkle minnow. That turned out to be the right call as I hooked into a stud of a brown almost immediately.

 From that point on it was streamer mayhem for me. If the water looked halfway decent at all and I ran the Sparkle Minnow through it at least halfway intelligently it got smoked. I caught a bunch of fish in that very short stretch of water, from just below a bridge up one side of and island and down the other. The biggest fish of the bunch wasn't a brown but an 18 inch rainbow that absolutely kicked my butt. pound for pound the best trout fight of my life. I thought I had a 20-22 inch fish on.

I was going light on the photos at this point for a couple of reasons, the first being that I was catching far more fish than I need to take pictures of, the second being that one of the whitefish I had caught had splashed me pretty good while I was pulling the camera out. Apparently a fair bit of moisture found its way to the inside of the lens, which fogged up every time I pulled the camera out of the backpack. I had to put up with some hazy spots for the next two hours, but as had happened when I took a camera into Mammoth Caves and the inside of the lens fogged up upon exiting the cave, it cleared up after sitting out for less than an hour.

We got back to the shed with time to do some evening fishing before dinner. I worked upstream through some new water and did very poorly entirely because I wasn't being slow and careful enough. I think I missed and lost a dozen good trout while my dad, fishing a dry dropper, had a fanastic pick of fish going down by The Shed.

Feeling unfulfilled and wanting to redeem myself, I decided to ply the slow water under the bridge over the far braid with a mouse. I got reactions not long after I got there, but they didn't satisfy me. When trout are just rolling and splashing behind a mouse I have very little confidence that fishing it will pay off. There was something large repeatedly gulping in the tail of the pool. I changed to a black conehead leach and went down to try my luck with that fish. Five casts, nothing. I made one more and began to reel up to change flies again. I made three full cranks, then felt solid weight.

I left Montana having seen the biggest sky I'd ever seen, fished the biggest trout river I'd ever fished, and looked at the biggest hills I'd ever looked at. I also left having caught the biggest wild rainbow I'll likely ever catch. And that, my friends, is that. It may seem like something is missing here. Am I really going to leave this story at that end? I am, because I don't really have another option. And I don't think I'd want it to end any other way. I'll be back to the mountains and valleys and rivers of Montana. There's no way around that. I lost something there that I'll probably never get back.