Trip To Wyoming And Montana

[On The Fly 6]

Ill be headed to Wyoming and Montana for a week and plan on fishing as much as I can. Anyone know of any nice streams up there to try? Ive fished the Big Horn, but it was in the dead of winter this past year. Jackson Hole looks like it fishes well, but im not sure how close Ill be to it. I plan on taking lots of pictures but thats only if I catch some fish!

[Outside Bend]

Any idea of where in those states you'll be passing through? Lots of nice water in the Jackson area, although it can get pretty crowded between guides, outfitters, and DIY'ers.

[Al Agnew]

If you drew a circle out about 50 miles outside Yellowstone Park with the park as the center, you'd enclose so many great trout streams you couldn't fish them all in a lifetime. Floating streams, wading streams, wilderness streams, civilized streams. I've knocked around in the area a lot in the last 15 years, but have only scratched the surface of what's there.

In the Jackson area: The Snake River is the big floatable stream but with a lot of wading opportunities. It's big, but it's braided, with lots of side channels that hold fish and lots of shallowish wadeable water by late in the summer. It's all Snake River fine-spotted cutthroats until you get well below Jackson, where other trout begin to show up. Not far outside Jackson you have the Gros Ventre and the Hoback if you want smaller and easier to wade water. Both are pretty long streams. The Gros Ventre heads up in wild country up in the National Forest, but you can drive a long way up it on gravel roads. The Hoback runs along a highway for most of its length, with plenty of good access except near the lower end.

Yellowstone has an incredible number of fishing opportunities. In the summer the Firehole is not an option, it gets too warm and fish move out. But they all go down into the Madison. It's fished to death, though, so only try it if you want a challenge. You can catch some nice fish out of it, but it's almost graduate level angling. The Gibbon above the Madison is a little easier. Lots of smaller streams, some pretty mediocre, some better than you'd think, are close to the roads in Yellowstone. The Lamar is pounded unmercifully but the Yellowstone cuts don't educate as well as brown trout so it's still possible to catch them. Same thing with Slough Creek. I've always avoided the Yellowstone itself through Hayden Valley, but it does have big cutthroats...just way too many people. But if you want to work at it and avoid the crowds there are several hikes into the Yellowstone in the backcountry that will get you into good, if challenging fishing, and spectacular country. One of my favorites is the hike into Hellroaring Creek, which is fishable, and down it to the Yellowstone. Also, you can do a long hike up to the upper meadows of Slough Creek and get into good and relatively uncrowded angling in spectacular surroundings.

And a sometimes overlooked Yellowstone Park option is the less visited and harder to get to southwest corner of the park, with the Falls River and Bechler River, which have big rainbows. It won't be deserted, but it probably won't be the zoo that the rest of the park is during the summer. You reach it out of Idaho on roads that don't connect to the rest of the park.

Montana, north of the park, is where I spend most of my time out there. The Yellowstone from Gardiner to Big Timber is a whole lot of float water. It'll be crowded with drift boats and rafts, but the fishing is still decent to good and the river is beautiful. You can wade some areas around the numerous public accesses, though as you can imagine, they get pounded.

Perhaps the premier wadeable river in the area is the Boulder, south of Big Timber. Adequate access, and varied water from long stretches of boulder-strewn riffles and pools to winding meadow reaches to fast pocket water up in the upper sections. Browns and rainbows running 14-17 inches.

But there are lots of other wading possibilities. You can hike up into the national forest and fish Pine Creek, Mill Creek, and other small streams, as well as some high country lakes full of cutthroat. The Shields River is decent, though access isn't as plentiful on it. Lots of access on the Gallatin along the highway from Bozeman to West Yellowstone, but the trout on it don't seem to run very big. Still, it's beautiful water. And then there's the middle and lower Madison to the west. Big river, lots of public access, fairly easily wadeable but big enough to float as well. Or get a De Lorme atlas of Montana and go exploring.

By this time the easily accessible rivers will all have a lot of anglers, but not as bad as, say, Bennett Spring. You can always find interesting stretches that aren't too crowded. My favorites are the Yellowstone from Pine Creek to Carters Bridge for floating if you want varied and interesting water and a gorgeous landscape, Yellowstone between Livingston and Big Timber for big browns, the Madison around Ennis if you want big but still wadeable water with lots of nice fish, the Boulder if you want easily waded water with lots of different kinds of water to fish.

Oh yeah...and if you have some extra cash and want a bit different experience, pay to fish Armstrong or DePuys Spring Creek. Costs over a hundred bucks a day, but the number of anglers is limited, the fish are wild, plentiful, and good sized, and the fishing challenging with the normal way of doing it requiring very small flies and 7X tippet...but if you have a dark or windy day, you can murder nice browns on streamers and nobody does that.

[On The Fly 6]

Al, thanks so much for putting that detailed post together! I hope to try one or two of those spots if I'm lucky! Guess I'll just have to wait and see who's willing to go exploring with me! Thanks again!

[On The Fly 6]

Base camp while in Wyoming will be Sheridan. Know of anywhere around there?