I Lost Something in the Hill Country

PART I

Settle in. This is it. And it is going to be a long one.

I had never flown before. I had never seen the Rockies. I had never been west of Kentucky. I had never fished a state whose fluvial trout were all entirely wild.

I'd simply never been anywhere quite like Montana.

Something went severely wrong when the sky over Montana was created. It doesn't fit with anything else I've ever seen on this planet. I've been out so far in the Atlantic that land was no longer visible. I've stood atop Mount Washington, Mount Greylock, Bear Mountain, and quite a few other Appalachian high points. I've been on completely flat, expansive land in Ohio and Central Florida. I've looked up at the night sky in New Hampshire and Maine, blown away by the number and shear depth of the stars. But I really wasn't prepared for Montana's sky. Big Sky Country is accurate... but doesn't prepare you for what you're going to see when you step out of the airport in Belgrade. Even with a low cloud ceiling the sky always occupied more space than it should have. Words aren't going to adequately describe it, photos aren't going to capture it. You just have to got there. 

 My dad and I found a place via Airbnb that was right up our ally. It was right on the water. It was small. It was a glorified shed, really. And it was exactly the kind of thing we could work with.
We got a taxi from the airport to pick up the rental car, found the shed, provisioned up, bought licenses at Fins & Feathers, and ate cheddar brats while watching a some-teen inch rainbow rise to blue-winged olives on the other side of the river. Yup. This would work just fine.

That night we payed my friend David Gallipoli a visit. He moved to Montana last year and had been going out there for years. He was going to be an invaluable resource for us on this trip. We took a little walk through the hills just outside town, chatted over drinks, planned the next day, and got our gear which we had shipped to David (rather than getting it checked and potentially damaged). The next morning dawned cold and cloudy. We got up fashionably late, there was no need to be up with the sun, met David at his place, out breakfast, then set out to find some salmonids. 

The mountains were largely obscured by low clouds during our ride to the creek. It was like my Dad and I were being told that we'd have to pay our dues before we'd be allowed to see it all. And we would.

Driving over the pass to Livingston, then through miles and miles of ranch land, was like driving through an entirely different time. And the amount of wildlife was breathtaking. There seemed to be dear in every field. White tail deer and mule deer. We saw a couple pronghorns too. In one field white tails and sandhill cranes stood practically side by side. The big animals remained hidden for the duration of our trip. No elk, no bear, no buffalo. But that mattered very little to me. 

A short distance from the creek David wanted to show us we got stuck in a traffic jam. The bulk of the perpetrators were black angus. 

The ranchers, having done their work, cleared the road and we continued on our way up to what I thank may very well have been one of the most gorgeous small streams I'd ever fished. 

Photo Courtesy David Gallipoli

Bellow a certain waterfall on this stream it was anybodies guess what species you could catch. Westslope cutthroat, yellowstone cutthroat, rainbow, brown... they were all down there. And one of my first casts above a diversion dam down there produced a fat little wild rainbow. My first Montana trout. It's coloration was so distinct that it took me a few moments to know with certainty that it was a rainbow I had caught and not a cutbow. It was little, and not a new species, but a good start indeed. 

David drove us further and further up the gravel road. As we climbed in elevation we must have left Earth and ended up on some desolate planet in another solar system. This area had burned out years before and as still in recovery. The newly growing small bushes were blazing now, their oranges and yellows contrasting against the red and green low grasses and remained deep green firs. The rock seemed to barely be holding on, and indeed this is a geologically active area. Landslides and earthquakes should be taken seriously. Almost as seriously as the predators. We were not the apex predators here. Grizzlies and mountain lions held the top of that podium together. We made a lot of noise any time we got out of the car.

The stream itself up there was a classic mountain creek and it was full, I mean FULL, of yellowstone cutthroat trout, Oncorhynchus clarkii bouvieri, one of numerous subspecies of cutthroat. Realistically I could also hope to catch westslope cutthroat in this area too, and hybrids between the two and between them and rainbow trout. Hybridization with westslope cutthroat is a major threat to the unique indigenous yellowstone cutties.

  

They weren't as small as the stream they're living in suggested they should be. David has caught them at lengths approaching 20 inches here. We fished a variety of flies, with a dry dropper being a favored method. I found the most effective fly to be a Chernobyl Ant, and eventually ditched the dropped because it seemed virtually every fish in water under three feed deep was willing to move up for that fly. The water was very cold, and these cutties took the fly with a very slow, very methodical rise. I found that counting to three before setting gave me the best odds. 

The first fish I caught was quite remarkable, and not just because it was my first ever cutthroat. It took bot my dropper and my dry, really driving home the fact that these fish needed to be very opportunistic in order to get the nutrients they needed to survive. That's why, on a chilly day after a chilly night, these fish were willing to come up for huge dries that imitated nothing that wasn't buried under the rocks and grass trying not to be freeze. We'd see hoppers on this trip, but not on this creek. 

Photo Courtesy David Gallipoli

We all got a fair bunch of cutties out of that undeniably stunning water, but come mid afternoon they suddenly seemed to become picky. I'm not sure which they were eating, beatis or midges, but both were on the water while I failed to fool either of multiple large head and tail risers I found in a long pool with numerous flies that imitated those bugs. We left that stream for bigger waters. Famous waters.

Photo Courtesy David Gallipoli

The Yellowstone. This was famous trout water. Blue ribbon trout water. Big trout water. And I mean both the size of the trout and the river. Even with low fall flows very much underway it was probably the largest trout river I had ever fished. Shortly after we got there my Dad hooked and lost a monster brown on a nymph. Spurred on by that, I tied on a heavy Coffey's Sparkle Minnow and started covering water. I got a fair distance upriver before I got a solid take, which to my surprise turned out to be a chunky rainbow.

Talking to David later that turned out to be a pretty typical occurrence, for some reason most of that stretch I was fishing was loaded with rainbows. Why trout seem to segregate like that I may never know, but this was far from the first place I'd encountered it.

Continuing up I found an eddy just full of heads. It was too good to resist. I tied on a size 18 BWO Sparkle Dun and commenced catching tons of 11 inch rainbows and and one brown of the same size every time there was a gap in the cold, gusty wild blasting down the valley.

When I got back down to where we parked and cracked we cracked open beers and ate some chips and talked. David reveled that while I was upriver, he had caught a whitefish... on a dry! I needed to get a whitefish for the life list so this was a little bit frustrating. Not too much though, the little rise I found up river was fast action. I said I was done with 10 and 11 inch fish though. And, oddly, that didn't result in my only catching 10 and 11 inch trout for the rest of the trip. In fact, for the rest of the trip, fish under 12 inches were very much the minority for me.

That night the weather turned yet again. In the morning it was snowing. By about 8:30 it turned to alternating sleet and rain. Mostly sleet. We had decided to fish the Gallatin this day. We were, after all, staying on that river and could come and go as the weather changed. I started out wearing gloves but they didn't stay on all that long. For some reason, Montana 40 degrees Fahrenheit is not as cold as Connecticut 40 degrees Fahrenheit. It is probably a symptom of the lack of humidity. Even when precipitation is falling, it was dry. Things dried out fast, the sun seemed to have a greater impact on how warm it felt, but the wind.. whoa boy. That sucked the heat right out of you. Luckily, the sleety-snowy-rainy day was not also a windy day.

I started fishing during the first lull in the sleet, which should surprise nobody, and continued to fish though it started to rain and sleet again while I was out, which also should surprise nobody. I fished like and animal. My mantra on trout water, especially new trout water, is to cover ground quickly, thoroughly, and efficiently. I worked downstream with a two fly rig, an orange and olive bugger and an Ausable Ugly. The Ugly was the point fly, 18 inches behind the bugger. The first fish took the bugger, popped off, and managed to break off the Ugly on the way out. The next took the bugger as well but I brought it to hand without loosing any flies.

That should have been my signal that these fish were hot on the streamer and I should have immediately tailored my methodology to that, but I instead continued trying to work the rig in a way that made the nymph work. In reality I should have tied on a bigger, heavier streamer and ditched the nymph. I did do that way on my way back upstream, and the difference was obscene. 

 The every run was fishy. In fact, any water that wasn't fully ripping or fully still and deeper than 5 inches was fishy. But on the way downstream I didn't really see the evidence of that, I only moved a few fish. On the way back up, with a sparkle minnow on, I started moving rainbows and eliciting violent often aerial takes from browns. It didn't take much time to get that down to a solid pattern that bridged conditions over the rest of our time on the Gallatin. The bows showed interest in the Sparkle Minnow, the browns slammed them, sometimes repeatedly.
It took me a little while to get used to how quick and vicious the takes from the browns were. But, after watching a 20 some inch brown fly up to the surface in an eight foot deep run I got my head out of my butt and got to work.

The next fish that hit my fly stuck, and then started flinging itself across the run like a complete maniac. It was a fat, healthy brown. This size brown would turn out to be the average sized brown we'd get in the Gallatin.

In the next deep run upstream I saw a trout flash on my fly. I felt nothing and didn't set, and the fast water in the middle of the run began to sweep my fly downstream very quickly. I didn't expect to see the fish just flying down after it, but there he was, and any fish moving that quick that far for a streamer is going to smash it so you'd better get ready. Don't screw up. I didn't, and I soon had the male twin of the previous brown at the bank.

By that point I was already pretty close to the shed again. The next couple fish that took were either smaller, or didn't get pinned well enough. It was about to begin raining harder and I wanted to dry out before the next lull, so I got out and shed my waders for a couple hours. 

TO BE CONTINUED