The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 15.4
DRY FLIES, BLOOD AND BIG COUNTRY: Doing Absolutely Nothing in Montana
Words: Matt Smythe 2024-06-17 10:02:19
“The original plan for a road trip from New York to Montana quickly lost its luster when we considered our lack of long-haul stamina and the finite number of days we’d have to fish. Having someone else drive the nearly 40 hours allowed us to take in the full glory of the American West without worrying about stops for gas, food or falling asleep at the wheel.” Photo: Matt Smythe
Two flyfishermen and 50 Mennonites walk into a train station...
Our fishing trip was starting out as much like the lead-in to a good joke as it was the welcome culmination of a year spent scheming and planning.
It was almost midnight when Mike and I finally boarded the train in Rochester, NY. We had simmered in the terminal for over an hour with about two dozen Mennonites all bound for a wedding somewhere outside of Chicago. A lightning storm blazed outside.
The air conditioning didn’t work in the terminal and the inside of the passenger car felt no different given the mass of humanity already gathered within. It was a poorly lit, damp-smelling and crowded free-for-all for any empty seats, but we managed to grab two across the aisle from each other.
“It’s an adventure,” Mike said, just before pulling his ball cap down and falling asleep in the reclined seat. He was right. We were headed to Montana to meet our buddy Rich and fish a few storied western rivers. We’d happily survived far worse in the past for the sake of chasing various piscine quarry.
In Chicago, we gathered our backpacks and rod tubes, claimed our checked bags, and parted ways with the Mennonites. The next leg of our journey would be aboard Amtrak’s Empire Builder for the 31-hour, 28-stop run to Essex, MT, in the heart of Glacier National Park.
There is a lot of America between Chicago and northwest Montana.
The line of passenger and bunk cars barreled northwest to La Crosse, WI, and then farther northwest to Fargo, ND. Taking a sharp left at Grand Forks, our western run then passed through Devils Lake, Rugby, Minot and Stanley, out of North Dakota and into Montana just past Williston, and continued through Wolf Point, Glasgow, Malta, Havre, Shelby, Cut Bank, Browning and East Glacier, before pulling into Essex Station—a single, ground-level, concrete platform among towering Ponderosa pines, small enough that the giant train could only unload one car at a time and had to back up to do so.
The smell of the pines was intoxicating and the August air was cool. I’d spent some time in Montana in the past, so it was a familiar and glorious welcome. Being Mike’s first time under the big sky, he didn’t know where to look first and was rendered to a smile and a slow shake of his head in disbelief. Rich was waiting by his pickup truck.
The moment coalesced into handshakes, hugs and a couple of off-colored jokes, and the trip that we started loosely planning more than a year ago suddenly became a reality. A Massachusetts striper junkie, retired Connecticut State Trooper and former fishing guide, and a writer from western New York at a train stop in far-northern Montana—it was either the beginning of a really good joke or an even better fishing trip.
None of us had any expectations of this journey other than it being an opportunity for three old friends to reconnect somewhat off the grid with fly rods and no family or work responsibilities. Our plans were as fluid as the three rivers we were headed to explore.
We broke camp the first morning for a stretch of the North Fork Flathead River that, word had it, was running cold and had hungry rainbows and cutthroat. Considering the hoot-owl restrictions that prohibit fishing during the hottest parts of the day across the American West, we were thankful our desired water wasn’t on the list. The two-hour drive north put it well out of harm’s way.
Barely 15 miles from the Canadian border as the crow flies, we pulled off a dirt road followed by our own giant cloud of dust and parked in a small lot near a bridge.
The river sprawled in wide and clear-green bends and braids above the bridge, narrowed slightly to flow fast and deep under the bridge, and then widened again as it disappeared downstream with the sun’s blinding reflection.
Again Mike smiled and shook his head in disbelief.
The man knows striped bass and the immense power and scale of the ocean as it berates the Massachusetts coast. What he was experiencing at that moment, however, was another kind of power and scale. One that existed for him only in the literature of Thomas McGuane, John Muir or maybe Edward Abbey.
A holy grail of big sky, big mountains, big rivers and big dreams. Deep breaths, a quiet mind, flyfishing and honest living. This was McGuane’s Montana and here Mike was waist-deep in it fishing for trout like they were stripers.
One time while fishing together in Manchester, VT, Mike watched me tie on a #20 Griffith’s Gnat at my tailgate while my young sons traipsed off with their own rods rigged and ready for brook trout.
“That’s why I stick with streamers and stripers,” he said. “I can’t see that tiny stuff and my beat-up fingers don’t work that way.”
That day on the Flathead, at the gentle urging of Rich, which sounded something like, “Dude, you need to put that striper shit away and cast a dry,” Mike put his vision and dexterity limitations aside and tied on a small gnat of his own.
After accepting some basic instruction from Rich and me, he promptly caught his first cutthroat—and then almost a dozen more.
“I could die happy right now, boys,” he said. “Amazing. Just amazing.”
The road to hell is better paved than the final mile-and-a-half dirt track that led to the River Junction Campground at the confluence of the North Fork and the main stem of the Blackfoot River.
“It’s an adventure,” Mike reminded us from the back seat.
With no cell service and no way to check availability other than surviving the drive, we went all-in on an open campsite at the first-come, first-served Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks site. Our luck held. The one available space had been vacated just hours earlier.
The Blackfoot was a river that had occupied my imagination since I learned to flyfish over two decades ago, but had represented a piece of my family history that had simmered in my blood since I first learned about it as a child from my dad.
My paternal family tree has roots in Winnipeg, MB, where my French-Canadian great-great-grandfather lived with my Blackfoot great-great-grandmother. Her Native family lineage extended west across southern Canada and south into Montana.
I didn’t expect any visions or a spiritual awakening, but our arrival at the banks of the Blackfoot put me fully at ease.
Even with the persistent cacophony of the river’s current and birds in the willows and pines and a steady pre-storm wind blowing down through the canyon; even when falling asleep that first cold and rainy night wrapped only in the surprisingly warm Amtrak blanket that I put in my duffle (since I failed to pack a sleeping bag); even when a stunning bull trout grabbed my swung streamer from a deep, fast run, slid calmly into the belly of the net and returned just as calmly to the current as Mike watched the whole scene unfold; the quiet in my head and chest was complete.
Rich had fished Wyoming’s Wind River before. It was one of his favorites. Of course, almost every river a fly angler floats down or wades into is a favorite. That’s the nature of the places where our favorite fish live. But the Wind held onto Rich a bit tighter. It was the one nonnegotiable stop we had to make before our road trip back east.
After purchasing state and tribal fishing licenses and some local fly patterns in Thermopolis, we headed south to Riverton to catch Route 26 and followed the Wind northwest toward Crowheart.
The moment we transitioned from open high desert to the deep canyon, it felt as though we went back in time or to another planet entirely. On either side of us towered walls of stone with deep cracks and caves and precariously leaning slabs a thousand feet above Mack-truck-sized boulders that were precariously leaning slabs a century ago. From the back seat, I couldn’t see the sky unless I rolled down the window and stuck my head out into the cool rush of air.
A single railroad track clung to its scant crushed stone bed 70 to a hundred feet above the river as the current fell through the burly and broken valley floor in somersaults and giant pulsing zigzags. It was hard to imagine the steel nerves or insanity that thought that path worthwhile in the first place.
As we drove farther toward the head of the canyon the floor widened and shouldered grass and sage slopes. This is where Rich remembered fishing the last time he was here. Where he remembered being able to wade from the near bank to a gravel bar and catch fish in the far run.
Whether it was actually the spot he had been before, we were dog-tired and the water looked as perfect for fishing as the bank above it looked for taking a load off and watching the clouds. We parked.
It didn’t take long to find fish. Fat, strong cutthroat built like SEC linebackers but picky as 6-year-olds forced to eat vegetables. If we thought our flies were small enough, we had to go smaller and then smaller still with lighter tippet, which was a recipe for repetitive failure or adrenaline-and-luck-fueled surgical success. The reward, if only one fish came to hand out of the half dozen that grabbed and disappeared into the thousands of cubic-feet-per-second ether, was the 40 minutes we spent on the bank talking and laughing after finally deciding that tying on another fly was simply too much work.
We were all far enough along in our fishing lives that one more cast didn’t hold the same sway it did even five years earlier. The 27-plus-hour drive home through America’s heartland loomed large ahead of us as we sat in comfortable silence at a picnic table with the Wind carrying the West’s immense past, present and future downstream below us. The hard-earned privilege of doing absolutely nothing with good friends here, thousands of miles from the familiar waters of our homes, was enough.
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