The Town Float

[Al Agnew]

The Yellowstone River is well-supplied with public access, but the guides all tend to do the same floats, even though there are accesses in the middle of those floats that could be used to "get out of synch" with where everybody else is floating. And since, as one of my guide friends once said, every guide wants to meet their clients for the day at "the crack of 8:30", those accesses and those floats can get pretty busy, while the intermediate accesses get little used except by locals. There is, however, a reason for that. Those floats are the right length for a day, and the accesses are easy to get to. So the popular floats have shorthand names, such as "the Bird Float", which is the stretch from Gray Owl access to Mallard's Rest access.

One of those floats is nicknamed the Town Float, because it runs from Carter's Bridge on the upstream side of Livingston, through Livingston, to Mayor's Landing on the downstream side of town. You might think this would be one of the least attractive and most heavily fished sections. You'd be wrong.

I really like the Town Float. It's close, it's easy to get to, and it's surprisingly beautiful and the fishing is as good as it is anywhere on the river.

All last week I'd planned to do an all day float on Friday. The forecast was good most of the week, but Thursday evening the latest forecast had one word...wind. It was supposed to be 20-30 mph winds out of the southwest, with gusts up to 40 mph. Paradise Valley above Livingston lies SW-NE, so it meant that there would be a howling wind going straight down the valley. I almost altered my plans to go wade fishing on the Boulder River, but when Friday morning came, the sun was shining and the wind was pretty gentle at the house, so I decided that I had to float the river and to heck with the forecast. I had Mary shuttle me for the Town Float, and I was on the water by 9 AM.

The weather here, after the first couple of weeks since we'd arrived when it was warm and beautiful, had been pretty nasty, with highs in the 30s and 40s, several snowfalls that disappeared quickly (snow doesn't melt out here, it skips that step and evaporates), and the incessant wind. Friday was finally a day with full sunshine and temps in the high 60s. So I'd expected that I'd have competition even on the Town Float. I wonder how much business the guides had been doing in the terrible weather, but I figured that at least some locals would be floating on such a gorgeous day. Maybe it was the wind in the forecast, but Carter's Bridge was deserted when I put in.Carter's Bridge, looking upstreamlooking downstream from Carter's Bridge

With the bluebird skies, and so far light wind, it was unlikely that streamers would be working, so I took two rods, one for nymphs and one for dry flies, in the little Watermaster raft. As I pushed off and turned to take the photo of the view upstream, an osprey was hovering over the water above the bridge, and I watched it dive with a splash into the riffle above and come out with a fish. I drifted slowly downstream, fishing the nymphs while controlling the raft with my swim fins, working my way into the slower water along the bank where I could and fishing soft current seams. The whitefish, at least, were hungry--well, they're always hungry, seems like. I caught several. And then I came to an isolated group of big submerged boulders. It's always looked like a spot where a big brown or two should be hanging, with good current, water 4-6 feet deep, but I'd never caught much but whitefish there before.

The nymphs plopped into the water above the upstream rock, drifted alongside it and then along the edge of the eddy it formed. The indicator dipped, I lifted up on the rod tip...and suddenly my reel was screaming. The fish shot out toward the middle of the river in a sizzling run that took a couple of seconds to almost reach the backing. Then it shook its head a few times and turned downstream, stripping more line, well into the backing. I had no choice but to follow it. It stopped at another big boulder in mid-current, and I gradually worked my way down, keeping the line tight, not giving it too much pressure with the 4X fluoro tippet, until I was only a little upstream of the boulder, then I put on more pressure to the side, trying to bring it away from that rock. Success! The fish swung down and across, finally coming up to the surface and rolling once, giving me a bit of a look at it. Enough of a look...the thing was a brown, and its side looked as wide as my thigh! It was by far the biggest trout I'd ever had on the end of my line in Montana. It hung in the current, almost impossible to bulge. The only way I was gaining line was by the raft drifting downstream toward it. Then it turned to go downstream again, stripping much of the line I had gained.

And then it was off.

I felt a slight pop, but the pop was the hook popping out of the fish, because I still had my flies when I glumly reeled in. I hadn't done anything wrong, it was just bad luck, the kind of bad luck you can have when you hook a huge fish. For the next hour, I periodically bemoaned the loss of that fish.

I continued downstream, catching whitefish and small trout. I hooked another good sized trout, a rainbow, and lost it in almost the same way, after having it on for a while the hook pulled out. The wind came up a bit, but not bad. I was well into the Town Canyon: In the upper end of it, the river used to swing almost at a right angle off to the left to come up against a rip-rapped bank along some houses, before swinging back against the big bluff on the right once more, but last year it had cut through that bend and now stays along the bluff, leaving a big, deep, isolated pool next to the houses. I wondered how happy the people living there were that the river is now several hundred yards away. There is a nice set of rapids just below that point: And then the river opens up into a wide, slow pool where sometimes you can find many fish rising in the slow water. But not today. If you look downstream at that pool, you can see the Crazy Mountains, 30 miles away, on a clear day like this one. Looking upstream, you can see the Absarokas and Emigrant Peak up in Paradise Valley:

I stopped for lunch below some riffles downstream of the big pool. At this point, the river enters a long section of braided channels, and at the extreme low water of this time of year, some of the channels are almost dry and even the largest ones are barely floatable by the drift boats and big rafts. Although there are houses close to river on the left bank, often the channel to take is hundreds of yards away from that bank. There are a couple of houses on the right bank at the base of the bluff. Although very close to town, it has to be a very long drive to get to and from those few houses, especially now with the bridge closed on the downstream end of town. To get to those houses from Livingston, you have to go 5 miles east on a narrow paved road to hit Hwy. 89, cross the river on it, get on the interstate, come back 4 miles to the first Livingston exit, take it for a mile or so, take a gravel road that turns very rough, and drive perhaps another 8 miles or more, just to get to a point where you can see Livingston right across the river.

Emerging from the Town Canyon, you can now look upstream and see the Wineglass, a high ridge that terminates on the west side of the canyon. It's named because, from the west side of Livingston and up the interstate toward Bozeman, you can see two spur ridges off it that appear to come together in a perfect V shape, with the main ridge behind them looking perfectly level, like liquid in a...well, Mary says it's a martini glass, not a wine glass, but calling it the Martiniglass just doesn't have the same ring to it. From the river you can see that notch, but it's not quite the right viewing angle to get the wine glass picture:

I came upon a foam-covered eddy, and as so often happens, there were fish rising in it. They all looked to be VERY small fish, however. I'd already found a couple other foam eddies with rising fish and had caught a couple of small rainbows and hooked a couple more, but these fish didn't look worth fooling with. Still, it was rising fish, so I picked up the dry fly rod with a Griffith's Gnat, and made a few casts. The wind was blowing a little harder and it took several casts to judge it correctly and land the fly in the foam, but when I did, a fish immediately took. And it wasn't a little one. The 16 inch brown would be the best I'd catch that day.

I reached the top of the huge island that lies alongside (and in) much of Livingston. The main channel used to go to the left, and there is a big sawmill, several other businesses, a bunch of apartments, and some houses at river's edge on the left side of that channel, so it looks more like you'd expect the Town Float to look. But last year the channel shifted to the right side of the island, and although there are a lot of houses on the island itself, few of them are visible from the river, and there are no houses on the right bank. So now the river looks much more unspoiled as you float past town. The interstate crosses the river at a very narrow point of the island about halfway down it, but other than that you could be convinced you are still in fairly wild country. Finally the two channels rejoin at the edge of the city park, and there is still very little development visible from the water as you drift on toward Mayor's Landing.

There is a series of rapids between the island and Mayor's Landing that can be pretty impressive at higher water levels. At low water, they are easy as long as you can pick your way through the rock ledges that form them. The last one is just above the ramp at the landing, and in high water can make reaching the ramp, which is only partially sheltered by a rip-rap point, rather interesting. A driftboat finally came by me just before I reached the last rapid, the first people I'd seen all day except for two anglers wading and a few people walking at the top of the bank at the city park. The wind had never gotten really bad, and I'd caught around 15 trout and at least three dozen whitefish. All in all, it was a fine day. And I wasn't even kicking myself for losing that huge trout anymore!

[Mitch f]

Beautiful scenery! Makes me want to jump in the water and swim! I'm struck by the beauty of the water clarity... clear but not too clear.

[Gavin]

Thanks for the Y. Stone eye candy and your report!

[Troutnut69]

Man , that sure makes a guy wanna go fishing! Nice story and some beautiful pics...

[Guest]

deleted

[Al Agnew]

Beautiful scenery! Makes me want to jump in the water and swim! I'm struck by the beauty of the water clarity... clear but not too clear.

Yeah, Mitch, the Yellowstone is never extremely clear. At most, you can see the bottom in about five feet of water, and normal summertime clarity is usually no more than 3-4 feet. We judge the "fishability" of it by the color...greenish is fishable, even though it may be only a foot of visibility. Brownish is unfishable. It was reasonably warm Friday through Sunday, and then yesterday we got a pretty hard, widespread rain, and by yesterday evening the river had come up 6 inches or so and gotten right on the verge of brownish. But today was cool again, and by this evening it was back to being greenish, though with no more than 18 inches of visibility.

As for swimming, we had about a month of water warm enough to swim in by the house last summer. Water temps got up around 70 degrees for a few days, and stayed in the mid to upper 60s for a while. It was still a shock to dive in, but you got used to it.

[jdmidwest]

When are you going to take me up there? That looks wonderful.

[Al Agnew]

Hey, if you are ever coming to the Livingston area, give me a shout.

[Mark]

Careful Al, you may end up with more guests than you figured. I never made it over to the Livingston area on my first and only trip to the Yellowstone area a couple years ago. There was just too much scenery on the Wyoming side where we stayed - on the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway, near the intersection of the Beartooth Scenic Byway. Spectacular scenery in all directions. Don't think I could handle the winters though. I love the mountains in the winter too, but just to visit. Think I would go Jack Nickelson in about a month.