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A Week on the Big Mo in July
Tricos, Caddis and PMDs, Oh My! The Missouri river in Montana is one of the top destinations in America for fly fishers who prefer the art of the dry fly over chucking bobbers and lead. I first visited “the Big Mo” in 2018, the year that I spent trying to hit all of the big…
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August on the Bighorn: 2021
I had spent a couple of weeks on Hebgen lake near West Yellowstone, and after getting my fill of that top notch dry fly action, I decided it was time to move on. As often happens in my meandering travels, I didn’t have a plan set in stone. The skies had been getting more smoky from…
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Gulpers on the South Fork Arm of Hebgen Lake
July, 2021 I caught a few fish on the first day out from the float tube, but they were on a leech pattern under the surface, and I was searching for gulpers. They are the famous Hebgen trout that methodically eat emerging and spent callibaetis mayflies over a long stretch of the summer, making this…
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Wade Lake, Montana: Turquoise and Rainbows
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…
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A Boondocker’s Thanksgiving
I’ve been on the road since 2015, and only a few times since then have I been able to spend Thanksgiving with family. That’s one of the impacts of becoming a nomad; it isn’t easy to leave your home somewhere in the desert and fly north for a week. But it’s also related to the…
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Eight Species in an Afternoon
I’ve moved farther south along the Rio Grande and have set up shop for a while at Caballo Lake State Park. Yesterday I fished the river below the dam, which has almost zero flow coming out of the lake, so it is a series of ponds, really. The one closest to the dam was packed…
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Fly Tying Friday
Let’s take a look at my San Juan flybox from my recent not-so-stellar visit to the northern New Mexican tailwater. About half of the flies in this box were tied while camped at the Crusher campground at the end of the “Quality Water”. The holdovers from previous trips include the terrestrial patterns in the lower…
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The Ugliest Trout That I Have Ever Caught
I fished the San Juan river in New Mexico for two weeks last month, and I came away kinda disappointed. Not with the quality of the river, but with what results from the intense pressure it faces from the fly fishing industry. It’s the dark side of catch and release. I’ve caught plenty of trout…
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Doin’ the San Juan Shuffle
The San Juan river in New Mexico, below the Navajo Dam, is one of the more frequently mentioned tailwaters in the country when it comes to fish size and quantity. I’ve heard some people even assert that it is the best river in the whole country, if not the world! There are supposedly around 10,000…
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Big Hoppers in the Nevada Desert
A Trip to the Ruby Lake National Wildlife Refuge On my way north from So Cal heading back to Montana, I stopped at a BLM campsite in the Owens river valley that had a tiny blue line running through it on the map. I walked for a couple of hours looking for gaps in the…