TRAVELINGWITHTOOLS

In the Summer of 2022, I spent a little more than a week camped at Wade Lake, Montana, which is up the road from the famed Three Dollar Bridge on the Madison River. A few years prior, I had fished Cliff Lake, which is the adjoining lake to the south, but I walked the shore rather lug my float tube up from my camp site by the river. In 2022, I bought a pontoon boat with oars to replace the belly boat, and wow, what an improvement!

The float tube basically places you in the water from the waist down, where the pontoon boat has a seat that’s elevated, so you don’t even have to get your feet wet if you don’t want to. The increased height above the water also improves visibility and makes long casts easier to achieve. But the best part is that the oars let you cover water at a much better pace.

I had spent a couple of weeks prior on lake Hebgen, hoping to find fish gulping callibaetis mayflies off the surface, but it was too early in the season, especially with the high water resulting from the very wet year we were having. A stark change from 2021 when the water was 6 feet lower at the same point in time. So the gulper phenomenon hadn’t started and the mosquitos were intolerable, and I chose Wade Lake hoping for better conditions, maybe some dry fly action.

I moved from Hebgen to the Raynolds Pass fishing access site, where I unloaded the KTM to go and scout campsites at Wade. The campground near the lake is 50/50 reservations and first come – first serve, and though it was full on a Wednesday evening, I found an ideal spot that was going to open the next morning and made a handshake deal to occupy it when the current folks departed.

Even numbered spots are unreserved, and spot 6 was closest to the water with a large enough spot for 31 feet of Fun Mover… the downside being that it is adjacent to the day-use parking lot, which meant tons of traffic and noise on the weekend. The better spots would be 2 and 4 which are on the water, but spaced from the parking area. There is also a hilltop campground about a mile from the water that is all non-reserved, which had many open spots on a Wednesday.

I paddled out on Thursday morning while waiting for the spot to open and was pretty amazed by the water at Wade. Extreme clarity meant you could easily see fish cruising along the bottom in 15 feet of water, and the bottom varied between white silt and weed beds. So the effect was turquoise blue water with dark green patches and then deep blue where the depth increased dramatically.

There were some fish eating callibaetis mayflies off the surface, so I did get some dry fly action. But most of the fish were eating bugs near the bottom. Since it was so clear, you could easily sight fish to an individual 10 feet deep. I used an intermediate sinking line to get down and most fish ate a leech or woolly bugger, but some ate a trailing hare’s ear or prince nymph. They were not choosy.

On a couple of days, I rowed way up towards the north end of the lake and I did catch a few fish up there. But the south end of the lake proved to be an excellent option, with ton of fish circulating around a group of submerged trees. I focused most of my efforts there after realizing how good it was.

Wade Lake is crazy popular and the parking lot jams up on weekends with the Bozeangeles crowd. I had no idea so many people owned paddleboards, and the noise from air compressors in the parking lot on a Saturday morning was a bit much. But I highly recommend it anyway. Book a spot early or show up mid week to chance it. Well worth the effort.

Reserve a spot at Recreation.gov