Category: Fly Fishing
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Last Chance Ghosts
I’d spent the last several days staring at the surface of the river. I was on the Henrys Fork of the Snake at Last Chance, Idaho, and I’d been there for two weeks. The Harriman Ranch stretch of Henrys is world renowned as a dry fly fishing paradise. On opening day, June 15, you can…
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Fly Fishing Scenes, August in Montana
I started the month down on the Crow Reservation, on the Bighorn river below Yellowtail dam. Cottonwood camp was the base for the first few nights, then I moved to the Bighorn access point downstream. A nasty thunderstorm blew in and threatened the huge tree I was parked under, so I beat feet up to…
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Scouting the Gardner River from the North Gate of Yellowstone
I wrote last summer about my visit to my old favorite honey hole on the Gardner river in Montana, and this year I decided to hike into the park from the North Gate in the Town of Gardiner. The old road through the park from Gardiner to Mammoth Village was destroyed by the flood of…
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Labor Day Fish Tales from Montana
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks on Hebgen Lake, near West Yellowstone, chasing callibaetis-eating rainbows and browns. Today, on my last day on the lake, I found an honest to God “gulper”, a fish that’s eating bugs on a steady tempo… about one every three seconds. That allows you to predict where to place…
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July in Montana, Broken Bikes and Brown Trout
My last post had me dreaming of dry fly action on the Henrys Fork, and sad to say, it was a two week exercise in “hope springs eternal”. Maybe tomorrow the bugs will come out and the fish will start looking up? Apart from a few nights of substantial brown drake hatches, where I at…
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Dreams of June on the Henry’s Fork
The clock is running down on my stretch of work in 2025. I’ve got a date with a river in Idaho, opening day on the Railroad Ranch, at the little fishing community of Last Chance on June 15. Looking back, I think I’ve only hit the opener once, in 2021. Lets see, in 2015, my…
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A Texas Drum at Redfish Bay
April 9, 2019: Today I paddled out for the third day in a row, an unbroken string of sunny skies and bearable winds. Yesterday was almost prime, though the water clarity was still off from the last northern. After almost 4 months in Texas, hoping for a chance to sight fish to reds, I finally…
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A Look Back at Fly Fishing in 2024… WTF, Mate?
2024 was the ninth year that I’ve been a full-time RV’er and I have been looking to upgrade to a new model for the next ten years. My business has been good this last year, or rather you could say I worked more than I wanted. A happy result is that I’ve saved a substantial…
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Finally, A Colored-Up Fall Run Fish
I’ve fished the Madison in Yellowstone 12 days total since September 22, and this is the first legit lake-run fish that I’ve caught. It has been so bright and sunny, some of the willows along the bank think it is spring and have started to bud! But what a fish, just look at that orange…
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An Update from West Yellowstone
I’ve managed to break my weekly posting streak here at travelingwithtools.com, which started back around this time last October. I’d committed myself to a regular writing schedule (more or less) with the goal of making this website into something more useful. Well, two weeks ago, I set up on the Madison River at Bakers Hole…
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