Back From Montana

[Al Agnew]

Back when I first started going to Montana to flyfish, it was hard core serious fishing. Not that we got up real early every day...our guide buddy Dennis would always say, "I guess we'll meet at Dan Bailey's at the crack of 8:30." But we'd be out all day every day, fishing hard, no matter what the weather. Horizontal snow, high wind...as long as the river was fishable we'd be on it, and if it wasn't, we'd be driving a long way to another river.

I was thinking about that the other day. My wife's brother and his wife joined us for a quick ten day trip to our house in Livingston, mainly just to get away from all the responsibilities of everyday life. We didn't have any serious plans, and of course at the end of January in Montana, you never know how the weather is going to affect any plans you do make.

Well...flying into Denver on the first leg of our trip, all we could see was brown grass. The snow line was more than halfway up the mountains. In January. And then, flying into Bozeman, more brown grass. Little patches of snow on the north side shadows of hills and trees. The mountaintops didn't even have much snow...you could still see lots and lots of rocks and gravel and grass. Wow.

In ten days, the temperature never dropped below 25 degrees at night, and got up into the upper 40s, low 50s, and one day into the low 60s. The river in front of the house was almost totally ice-free, just a little bit of inch thick ice along quiet banks. I was envisioning going out and fishing it a lot...

Except, there was the wind. Every day the wind blew. Hard. And by hard, I'm talking about sustained 30-45 mph winds with gusts up to 70 mph. Oh, there was one day it didn't blow very hard, which just happened to be the one day we had other plans and couldn't fish. On the other days, we sat in the house in front of the windows, soaking up sun and watching eagles, or we drove the half hour to Chico Hot Springs to soak in the huge pool full of hot spring water. One day we drove up into Yellowstone Park to watch animals. The road from the north entrance at Mammoth Hot Spring up to Cooke City is maintained all winter, the only road in the park that is open. There was almost no snow at Mammoth, less than six inches until we got up to the Lamar Valley, and we didn't see deep snow until we started up through the mountains approaching Cooke City.

It would have been nice hiking weather in some of the lower trails with little or no snow, except Mary's brother Jeff is recovering from a broken ankle and unable to hike. And then Mary and I both got bad colds, so there were two or three days when we didn't feel like doing much of anything.

So, even though we could have had the chance to do some of that old time serious fishing in JANUARY in Montana, I actually only spent about five hours fishing the whole trip. I went out one afternoon to brave the wind on a day when Jeff and Sheila had driven around to Jackson WY to meet a friend who lives in Pocatello, ID. I was nymph fishing, and the first trout came entirely by accident. The little side channel of the Yellowstone that runs alongside the house wasn't flowing much water, and the deeper pools in it have very little current. I was drifting unweighted bead head nymphs through one of those pools, and wasn't getting anything, so at the end of a drift I turned away from the pool to wade out onto the sandbar, and just as I started to reel the line in, I felt a fish on. It was a 16 inch rainbow. Then I got a smaller rainbow "on purpose" where the side channel comes back into the main river, and a whitefish in an eddy just off a riffle in the main channel. By that time I was tired of fighting the wind, which was blowing straight downstream about 50 mph. And, although the air temperature at the house was in the upper 40s that day, that wind coming off the water was cold.

And then, day before yesterday, Jeff and I tried it again. Same wind. Same cold coming off the river. Very cold when the clouds moved in, a little warmer when the sun emerged. Jeff is a novice at fly fishing, but knows how to fish nymphs, so I rigged him with a two nymph rig, while I decided to try a streamer in the slack water pools of the side channel. I quickly caught a nice 17 inch rainbow, and then hooked a huge rainbow, maybe 22 inches or more, and lost it. Meanwhile, Jeff had found a pod of whitefish, and was busy catching them. I hooked and lost another big trout, only saw the flash of its side, and caught another 16 inch rainbow. By that time I'd fished the entire side channel and my hands and feet were almost numb. I walked back up to Jeff, who had dug out a puddle in the sandbar where he'd thrown several whitefish. He wanted to try eating them. Since, as my Montana fly fishing buddy Tom says, you could feed the world on the whitefish from the Yellowstone, I had no problem with that. We filleted them, cut them into small chunks, scored the chunks a bit, and fried them in cornmeal and flour batter. I gotta find a better whitefish recipe. Maybe the reason there are so many of them is that even the bears and eagles don't eat them. Tom said at dinner last night at the Rib and Chop that you have to smoke them. Since just about anything is good smoked, that makes sense. (By the way, he said this while I was shoveling in a baseball cut ribeye, so somehow it still didn't sound all that appetizing. If you are ever in Livingston, Montana, take the time to order the baseball cut at the Rib and Chop. It qualifies as one of the two or three best steaks I've ever eaten.)

One other funny non-fishing story from our "vacation". Mary and I are tired of driving the 22 hour, 1500 mile one way trip from Missouri to Montana, and so we've been gradually collecting stuff until we have duplicates of almost everything in both places, so we can fly out there and back. But we only had one vehicle in Montana, my old beater pickup. We'd decided to shop for a car to leave out there. A lady from Bozeman had a Subaru Outback on Craig's List. It would have been a perfect vehicle, except apparently the Outback is the most popular non-pickup in Montana. She wanted a hefty price for it, and it wasn't in all that good condition. But we made a deal with her (we thought) to get the car for a few hundred less than what she was asking. Only thing, she told us, was that one other guy had already offered her close to what we were offering, and she wanted to give him one more chance. We told her to let us know, because we might be willing to up our offer. She'd call us and let us know what he said. This didn't set too well, but we weren't all that gung ho about the car anyway. So all day we waited for her to call, and finally we drove back to her place of business to put some earnest money down on the vehicle. And she told us that another guy had showed up, offered her a bit more money, and she'd already sold it to him.

Now Mary doesn't take too well to being treated that way, and as we left she was fuming. Just down the street was a Ford dealership, and Jeff, who was driving the pickup, asked her if she wanted to look at the cars on the lot to see if there was anything interesting. She grumbled an okay, and we wheeled into the lot. There, with a price considerably less than the Subaru we'd just lost out on, was one of those quintessential "old people" cars, a Buick Century. Jeff said that the beauty of cars like that was that they weren't popular in places like Montana, so they were cheaper used, but they'd run forever and we ought to at least see how many miles it had on it. After all, since it was a Ford dealer, he probably would like to get a Buick off his lot anyway. So we stopped next to the car, and of course a salesman came out immediately. We asked him about the mileage, and when he told us it had 90 thousand miles, Mary, still grumpy, told him she wouldn't give him (a figure that was less than two thirds of what he was asking) for a car with that many miles (even though the Subaru had considerably more miles than that). He said he'd talk to his manager, and in a few minutes he came out carrying a set of dealer plates, and said his manager said he'd be willing to go down to a figure that was $500 more than Mary's figure and did we want to give it a test drive? Mary said there wasn't even any use to put on the plates unless he was willing to sell it to us for her figure, plus a full tank of gas.

An hour later, we were driving a mint condition "old people's car" home with a full tank of gas...but then again, I guess we fit right in, because we're both gray haired! Heck, it's a pretty nice car, and really the only thing either of us care about cars is that they reliably get us from point A to point B.

It was snowing when we left Montana this morning, but the long range forecast still wasn't calling for either cold or significant snow. It may be a dry summer this year out there. And we arrived at the airport in St. Louis to temperatures in the 50s.

[joeD]

Welcome back to Missouri Al. Given our current "winter," spring and smallie fishing will start in about two weeks. I can empathize with your duel home status and the attendant logistical nits. I too, have a second home. My wife affectionately calls it the "doghouse." I have to admit that I spend quite a bit of time there. I don't have quite the commute that Mary and you have, but I do have to leave our "main" (family) home, frequently with nothing but the clothes on my back. Regardless, it's good to have a native son back in our state, that, weirdly, has two pronunciations.

PS: Big game tomorrow. Can Mizzou get the Bill Self monkey off its back? I'm more pumped for the KS game than the Super Bowl.

[drew03cmc]

Al, that Mary is a hell of a negotiator. Does she want to give my wife lessons? Sounds like you had an interesting trip to say the least!

[Gavin]

Nice report.....The lack of snow doesnt bode well for fishing this Summer.

[Mark]

Did Mary have to use any Wolk wrestling moves on the salesman?

That's amazing about there not being any snow. Have you ever seen the lack of snow this time of year in Montana?

Our stay 2 years ago at a place on the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway near Cooke City ranks up there with any place I've been.

[Al Agnew]

Welcome back to Missouri Al. Given our current "winter," spring and smallie fishing will start in about two weeks. I can empathize with your duel home status and the attendant logistical nits. I too, have a second home. My wife affectionately calls it the "doghouse." I have to admit that I spend quite a bit of time there. I don't have quite the commute that Mary and you have, but I do have to leave our "main" (family) home, frequently with nothing but the clothes on my back. Regardless, it's good to have a native son back in our state, that, weirdly, has two pronunciations.

PS: Big game tomorrow. Can Mizzou get the Bill Self monkey off its back? I'm more pumped for the KS game than the Super Bowl.

Me, too...I'm looking forward to tomorrow far more than the Super Bowl.

By the way, do you know the story on the two pronunciations? It's an Ozark thing, actually, but in a back-handed sort of way. The Ozark old-timers used to pronounce any name that ended in an a or ah with a "ee" instead. The name Sara was pronounced Sary, for instance. This was a holdover from the old Elizabethan English that had survived somewhat intact in the Ozark hills as the Ozark dielect. But as "modern civilization" came to the Ozarks, more in the form of early radio broadcasts than anything else but also as tourists and travelling salesmen began to show up, the younger Ozarkians realized that pronouncing words like Sara with an "ee" sound was rather "backward". So they began to pronounce those words like "everybody else" was. But because the "ee" sounded so "backward" they tended to go overboard, and began to pronounce words that actually ended in y or i with the "ah" sound as well...hence, Missouri became "Missourah".

I learned that from "Down in the Holler, A Gallery of Ozark Folk Speech", by Vance Randolph, an excellent book for those interested in Ozark folk history.

[ozark trout fisher]

I'm more pumped for the KS game than the Super Bowl.

Dang right! Who cares about the Patriots and the Giants anyway? I think we have as good of a chance as we'll ever have against Kansas this year, but we'll just have to see how it plays out.

[Flysmallie]

Great read Al. Cool info on Missourah too.

[eric1978]

The history on Missourah is interesting...always wondered about that. Makes perfect sense, too.

[Mitch f]

This explains why Kit Bond always said "Missourah"