Unlike previous years, my summer expedition for 2026 has not been all about fly fishing, as I’ve spent more time working on this website than I have on the water. Working parked next to a river in Montana is a job that I can get behind, if only there was some actual revenue coming in. (Like, Subscribe!)

When I left the Henrys Fork in Idaho back in late June to head over to the Madison in Montana, a cold front blew in and it got ugly out there. I sat in the motorhome parked at Raynolds Pass and watched guys in winter coats casting to the river in front of the campsite, 48 degrees and raining in sheets. It did not look like fun to me.

As I had plenty of work to do before I could launch the new site, and had the first week of July as my goal, I was content to sit inside, toasty warm, and bang away at the keyboard. I was there for a week, and I went out two or three times when the sun came out. There was always a guy planted each of my favorite runs, and the open water that I cast to was stingy with the fish.

I did have one medium-sized rainbow charge my caddis pattern, launching itself entirely out of the water like a breaching dolphin. It was impressive enough that I wasn’t sad that the hook didn’t set and he swam away, unstung. “Good for you, buddy.”

I moved over to the Riverview Campground after my seven days were up at Raynolds, and the weather returned to normal Montana summer. Sunny and warm, with regular thunderstorms that would come out of nowhere and drench anyone standing outside. I thought about my new Yamaha, parked in almost exactly the same spot that my old KTM was in, when a thunderstorm got water into the digital dash and fried its brains almost exactly one year prior.

How to react then, when I got a message from Sturgis Yamaha, notifying me of a recall on my brand new 2025 Tenere 700? I called to inquire, and they told me the dash needed to be replaced! Ha ha!

I spent most of the week at Riverview polishing content and chasing Search Engine Optimization baloney, but the site was getting closer. I went out one day to cast big salmonflies along the bank, just upstream from Lyon Bridge, and on the second cast, a decent fish came up and smashed it! “Hey, maybe this is going to be pretty good.” But that was the only fish for a couple of hours, and a storm blew in, so back inside and back to work.

One day mid-week, I rode the bike 40 miles downriver to Ennis to restock the fridge and I stopped a couple of times along the way to search the bank and bushes for any sign of salmonflies. I did not see a single husk on the bank, nor any flying bugs all along the river. It seems like they did their thing when it was cold and raining, and I missed the hatch entirely.

I decided to give it one more chance, and I rode up to the Raynolds Pass historical marker. There is a short trail there to hike in from the turnout, and I feel like it gets less pressure than the section between the two bridges (Hwy 87 and Three Dollar). As I approached the water, I had an adult golden stonefly land on my shoulder, “Hey that’s a good sign!”

Well, it was the best afternoon I’ve had on the water for a long time. All the fishy spots that I remembered from my last time in this stretch gave up fish, and mostly really nice ones. Casting the big stonefly (a size 6 Doran’s Water Walker) tight the undercut bank produced a couple of really great fish; one brown had me stumbling downstream to keep up with it as it went out into the heavy current.

So it was only slightly disappointing that the final run before climbing back up the bluff, a favorite glide where there are always rising fish, on this day that last run was quiet. No heads, but I did get one rainbow to come up and eat my fly. A great finish to the first week of July, and no, the website still wasn’t ready to push live. I packed up to head to the Missouri River, the campground at Craig would have to be the location for the launch.