My first trout trip out to the Rocky Mountains … and already I had begun thinking of myself as a Western fly fisherman at heart. A week of fishing my brains out amid the glories of Jackson Hole had sealed my fate. All thoughts of Eastern trout fishing back home in New Jersey had been banished. As the poet Rilke commanded: You must change your life.
The memory of all this came flooding back as I went over the contents of my old fly box. It was crammed with reminders of that first momentous trip out West. Here were the very Baetis flies I used on my first day on the Firehole in Yellowstone Park. I had driven up there directly from Jackson Hole. I’ll never forget my initial glimpse of the river at Biscuit Basin. The Firehole seemed to be manufacturing its own light under an overcast sky. Fountain mosses and emerald water weeds streamed against a bottom of black volcanic sand. Trout were dimpling its smooth surfaces. I couldn’t believe how clear and limpid everything looked.
The size 16 Blue-Winged Olives I had in my fly box weren’t good enough or small enough to match those tiny Baetis hatching at Biscuit Basin. I couldn’t figure out a way to fool those elusive brown trout that were rising all around me.
I followed the Firehole downstream as it unspooled through lodgepole pines. Plumes of steam rose from geysers and fumaroles along the banks or escaped from tiny fissures in the ground, their wisps drifting through the dark trees. The riverbed was mostly a thin crust of black lava known as rhyolite, worn smooth in places, pockmarked in others. I had never seen anything like it on any other trout stream. I found the flats at Muleshoe Bend and Goose Lake Meadows every bit as tricky as Biscuit Basin. And again I was defeated trying to match tiny Baetis coming off the water on that dark September afternoon. I did somewhat better hooking small rainbow trout in the riffles near Midway Geyser Basin, so I didn’t feel like a complete hambone that day.
And so I was to spend autumn days on the Firehole, learning its secrets, before managing to outwit a few of the river’s incredible brown and rainbow trout. I became particularly fond of the weedy channels at Fountain Flats, where steam escaped out of vents in the meadow and hot vapors rose from boiling springs and geysers. Often I shared this meadow with one of Yellowstone’s bison herds, the beasts standing mutely under falling snow, their breath steaming in the cold air. I made the gateway town of West Yellowstone, Montana, my trout-fishing headquarters. And there I got to know Cecil, my first trout bum. Cecil lived in Chicago and spent every summer and autumn fishing the Rocky Mountain high country. He didn’t have a pot to piss in, but he owned a bamboo fly rod. He had been sleeping in his pickup truck or in a rented teepee and sponging off a girlfriend in Casper, Wyoming. On the evening I met him in the parking lot of the Alpine Motel, he insisted on trying to teach me how to imitate the trumpeting cries of a bull elk in rut. “I feel mournful whenever I hear that sound,” said Cecil, cupping his hands and emitting a series of loud, high squeals. “Now isn’t that just the most beautiful sound in the world?” Cecil cared little for anything except fly fishing. He was eager to show me how the game of chess was played on the Henrys Fork at Harriman State Park, the old Railroad Ranch water. “The Henrys Fork on the Harriman Ranch is the most beautiful river meadow in the West,” he assured me. And this, like everything else Cecil told me, proved to be one hundred percent true.
“There are more cutthroats on the Yellowstone River around the Buffalo Ford than anyplace else in the world,” said Cecil. This was not hyperbole — fisheries biologists confirm this as a fact. There were miles and miles of cutthroat trout on the gravel bottoms in that section of the Yellowstone. Cecil told me the easiest way to catch these cutthroat was by putting plenty of drag on the fly — a
heresy that ran counter to the commandment that one never does that in dry-fly fishing. I caught eighteen of them on a single day doing that at Buffalo Ford, a personal best. My fishing diary confirms they were all taken on no-hackle f lies called Comparaduns, and I was pleased to see that I still had a few of them left in my old fly box.
The Yellowstone was a scenic eyeful at Buffalo Ford all the way down to its even prettier Lamar Valley, where fishing was prohibited to give the cutthroat some respite from ace flyrodders like Cecil. I remember well a midday when an ominous rumbling started coming out of the lodgepole forest at Buffalo Ford, as if to dramatize how the place got its name. The sound grew louder as bison appeared out of the pines, and fly fishers in the river hastily cleared a path for the beasts to cross. On and on they came, shoulder-deep in the river. I counted ninety-six bison making the crossing. “Look for brown trout in the meadows of the Gibbon River,” Cecil told me. “You’ll see lots of elk there.” And indeed I did. And I took eight browns in the meadow during an evening hatch of mahogany duns. There are still a few of those left in the old fly box, as well.
“The Madison River outside the Park is a fifty-mile trout riffle from Quake Lake down to Ennis,” said Cecil. And so it was. At Slide Inn, just below Quake Lake, I lost a huge rainbow, but landed an even chunkier brown in the fast-water chutes while fishing a Bitch Creek Nymph, a popular rubberlegs pattern tied to loosely resemble the big stoneflies crawling all over the bottom of the river there. A Bitch Creek Nymph worked wonders wherever there was a rubble bottom, and I still had a survivor left in my fly box. An afternoon thunderstorm pelted me with hailstones on the day at Slide Inn, because nature was always putting on a show in Montana.
“The cutthroats on the Lamar River cruise around and never stay in one place,” Cecil told me. I landed a gross of them at a favorite bank in the Lamar’s sweeping valley. Oddly enough, I took all those cutthroats on Hendricksons, an Eastern mayfly not found out West. But then cutthroats, Cecil patiently explained to me, as if I were the world’s dullest pupil, are stupid fish that will rise to anything. Which also explained the reason, I suppose, why they were the only trout that would ever take a dry fly on a drag.
“Hike into Slough Creek. Some of the best scenery in the world is up there in those meadows,” Cecil promised. Indeed, I found plenty of postcard vistas up there. And even more dumb cutthroats taking my politically incorrect Hendricksons.
Cecil told me over and over that the Henrys Fork on the Harriman Ranch is the most beautiful river meadow in the West, but I already knew that to be true. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the distant views of the Tetons from the Idaho side. I spent days on the ranch water, intently fishing the Millionaire’s Pool, the Back Channels, and Bonefish Flats, looking up from my fishing now and again to watch the meadow drinking up the sunlight or to listen to geese calling down the sky. I counted white pelicans overhead and spotted Sandhill cranes resting in tall grasses. And maybe the evening star would be coming out as I waded from the river, shivering.
A typical day at the old Railroad Ranch might find me fishing multiple hatches of beetles, ants, Baetis and Pale Morning Duns, ones very much like the raggedy insect collections still there in my old fly box. I had PMDs in different sizes to match the various hatches on the Henrys Fork. It was my favorite Western mayfly. I consider it the most beautiful mayfly in the world. I saw PMDs so teensy on the ranch water that at first I couldn’t figure out exactly what the trout were rising to. Tricos swarmed over the water, too, and I couldn’t seem to do a thing with those minuscule black-and-white flies that Donna had tied for me back in Pennsylvania. There was nothing wrong with her Tricos — the problem was all in my presentation. Cecil told me to fish my dry flies on a downstream drift, the opposite of how they tell you to do it in books. “You get a longer drift that way,” Cecil said. I followed his example, slowly playing out line from my reel to lengthen the float as it wended its way through the weedy channels until the famous rainbows finally started sipping my mayfly and terrestrial imitations.
One afternoon, Cecil told me to ignore the many trout rings forming and disappearing at midstream and look instead for tiny bubble trails near the banks that would betray the presence of the very largest bank feeders in the river. Cecil told me these big trout preferred ants and beetles over mayflies. And just as he said it would, a lunker lying close to the bank and releasing a trail of almost invisible bubbles seized my Cinnamon Ant. My Pflueger screamed like a banshee until the leader snapped. Later in the evening, Mahogany Duns started emerging, and the mayfly imitations I had used on the Gibbon came in handy once again. The sight of those brownish duns in my old fly box sent me straight back to those peerless evenings.
And so I, an Easterner, began taking all my annual fishing vacations out West, alternating between the seasons, until I finally began to convince myself that as a fly fisher, I actually was a Westerner. The best dry-fly fishing overall I found to be in summer, but I preferred high-country autumns, when the aspens and cottonwoods flamed into gold and the spawning hues of brown trout glowed like the halos around saints in Renaissance paintings. That’s when the Firehole came into glory. It was from the outset my favorite river inside the park, just as the Henrys Fork was always my favorite outside it. Firehole trout would fall to Joe’s Hoppers on windy September afternoons. And on October days when dark squalls moved in over the Yellowstone Plateau and the air grew colder than the water, trout would be sipping Pseudocloeon Blue-Winged Olives on the Firehole’s surface or maybe something even smaller, such as midges. In a spinner fall of nearly invisible insects, the water at Fountain Flats would be pockmarked in disappearing rings. And as snow fell, the bison would be gathering a hundred strong in the meadow basin.
Sifting through the contents of my old fly box, I could see I was still in thrall at the time to the concept of matching hatches. I took as gospel what I read in the books, magazines, and tackle catalogs. I was a True Believer. This explains why I owned Pale Morning Duns in eight different sizes, also why I had an equal number of black ants to red ants, dries to emergers, soft-hackle flies to no-hackle dries, and please don’t get me started on all the different caddis imitations I felt I couldn’t live without. I had forgotten the most valuable lesson of all from Cecil: “You can get by anywhere with just an Adams.”
In due time, I drove myself crazy matching hatches in trout rivers from the Rocky Mountains to California. One morning, in the volcano country around Mount Shasta, which was my introduction to Hat Creek and the cornucopia that was the Golden State, I found swarms of Pale Morning Duns, smaller Baetis mayflies, and what looked like Yellow Sallies coming off the water or engaged in various kinds of mating dances in the trees and over the glassy tongues of the spring creek. The trick was figuring out which insects Hat’s famous trout were rising to and whether they were zeroing in on the duns or the spinners.
Spent and egg-laying mayflies were dropping onto the surface of the ultraslick water, and fat trout were rising everywhere. The weedy currents were bewitching, the water transparent, and under a bright June sky, the sand-and-gravel bottom looked radiant. After what seemed an eternity of lengthening my leader, downsizing my flies, and refining my casts, I finally managed to take a fifteen-inch rainbow trout from its clever hiding place beneath a green salad of streaming water weeds.
By evening, large stoneflies started falling in the riffle section below the powerhouse, where the meadow heads. (My first view of the power lines strung over Hat Creek temporarily froze my brain’s reptile cortex.) The trout seemed oblivious to the stoneflies. And then small caddisflies began falling on the water in much greater numbers, and it seemed as if all the trout in the river were rising at once. Fortunately, no entomologist was present to tell me if they were Spotted Sedges or some other form of net-spinning caddis, which would have sent me into a panic if I couldn’t find one in my box. And so I managed to land three browns on whatever I was using where the creek water flattens out just below the Powerhouse Riffle. The hatch ended about the same time the evening light drained off the meadow, and I found my way back to the parking lot by starlight.
There was much to see and do in the volcano country around Mount Shasta. I found the McCloud in a virgin conifer forest, almost busting an axle getting there on a dirt road scarred by ruts and frost heaves. I was rewarded with an impressive view of Mount Shasta’s volcanic cone floating freely over the treetops like in a Hokusai painting. The McCloud River was dark green and turquoise gray in its forest setting. A freestone river fed by underground springs, it was all boulders, riffles, and pocket water in its canyon of pines and Douglas firs. The river’s peculiar bluish tint was said to come from volcanic ash and glacial silt off the drainage of Mount Shasta.
I fished the river near Ladybug Creek at the boundary of the Nature Conservancy preserve. The McCloud’s blue tint and the reflection from the pines gave the water a gorgeous tinge. The McCloud split apart at rocks and frothed lightly, running out of sight around bends in the forest. I didn’t see any mayflies or caddis on the surface, so I reached into my fly box for a Pheasant Tail Nymph. There are many effective and not so effective ways to fish nymphs. Most of the time, this is what trout are feeding on, something we dry-fly fishers have to get used to. Perhaps the most effective way to fish a nymph was the method Cecil taught me back in Montana. He told me to cast across or slightly downstream and mend upstream once or twice to allow the fly time to sink and settle into its drift. Then, following the drift with the rod pointed upward, squeeze the handle ever so gently from time to time. That gentle squeeze would raise the tip of the rod one or two inches, pulling the fly upward from the bottom, imparting life into an otherwise dead-drifting fly. The effect made it look like an insect was swimming off the bottom. Trout found the movement tantalizing. And so, guided by Cecil’s advice, the limber switch in my hand bent suddenly under the weight of a fat McCloud rainbow. The rod bowed deeply as I held it high, maintaining a delicate tension. The rod had a wonderful aliveness and spring to it. The line pulled, the rod jerked and pulsed, and the trout leapt out of the water, displaying its rainbow in the sunlight. I lowered the rod tip to ease the strain on the leader. The trout felt heavy in the fast current as the rod dipped again and again against the struggling fish. Soon I was holding an absolutely archetypal trout in my hand. The McCloud River produced one of the finest strains of wild rainbow trout on the planet, one used in the nineteenth century to stock streams all over the eastern United States and Europe. All the rainbow trout I caught in New Jersey and Pennsylvania were descended from these McCloud River trout. I felt I had come to the source of my obsession.
I drove from the volcano country of Northern California to the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Here the mountain wall plunged into an American outback. A vast, sage-covered desert stretched all the way to Nevada. Corkscrew junipers dotted far-off hills and flats. I was stunned by the immensity of the view. I drove to the valley f loor, where the East Walker River flowed through sagebrush flats near Bridgeport. The sharp scent of sage and juniper brought the basin right into my nostrils. And then I began to smell the fresh, willowy scent of the river as it wound its way through banks of sedge and rabbit brush. Its shining bends glowed whisky gold in the morning light. I didn’t want to rush things. A few caddisflies f loated on the smooth current, but nothing was rising. No doubt the trout were preoccupied with something interesting on the bottom. I rooted around in my fly box until I found a San Juan Worm. The smooth river looked calm on the surface, but its pull was strong and steady. I inspected my tackle carefully. I felt if I was to have any success, I would have to go deep. So I decided to put on a sinking leader system that would distribute the weight evenly in such a way that the braided leader would take the red tubular fly swiftly to the bottom, but still allow me some small grace in the form of a relatively smooth cast.
The water was cold, and the gravel crunched under my wading boots. The soles felt for the bottom as the river slid under them. I didn’t go any deeper than my knees, yet the smooth river pulled so hard I had to brace myself to stay upright. I made a few casts to a deep bend by the sagebrush bank. The San Juan Worm drifted way down there, almost touching bottom. I felt a small tug and pulled taut on a four-inch rainbow trout.
I waded downstream, casting. The current carried my lure under the shadows of willow branches lining the bank. The line tapped and I set the hook. A trout pulled hard and drew line out into the middle of the river. Whatever was out there felt very heavy. I got the fish on the reel quickly, holding it steady at midstream. It thumped wildly on the bottom against the vibrancy in the rod. Then the trout dashed downstream and flashed near the surface, but didn’t jump, leading me to suspect I had a brown trout on the line, not a rainbow. Through the rod’s vibration, I could feel the heavy trout circling. The tug-of-war went on as I drew on the jerking, pumping rod, finally forcing the trout to the surface. Walking toward the bank, rod held high, I reeled in line slowly, pleased with the trout’s heaviness. My leader strained as it slid up into the rod guides. I brought the exhausted brown trout to the bank and revived it before release. Five pounds — larger than any brown trout I had ever caught in Montana, Wyoming, or Idaho.
Things change, and the contents of that old fly box show not so much time’s “progress” as its inexorable march. I no longer fish with a hundred different fly patterns. And I no longer take my vacations out West, because now I live there, in California. One day, quite a long time ago, while exploring the Thoroughfare Region around Yellowstone Park, in the Teton Wilderness on the Continental Divide, I came upon Two Ocean Pass. I had been following the North Fork of Two Ocean Creek south to where it split at a copse of trees. Cecil the trout bum told me about this place on the Continental Divide, called the Parting of the Waters. On my left, water from Two Ocean Creek flowed into Atlantic Creek and to the Atlantic Ocean, 3,488 miles away, via the Yellowstone, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers and the Gulf of Mexico. On my right, Two Ocean Creek flowed into Pacific Creek and to the Pacific Ocean 1,353 miles away, via the Snake and Columbia Rivers. These waters journeyed both to my old home in New Jersey and to my new home on the West Coast, where redwoods and orca whales would one day be waiting for me.
To a fly fisher, fly selection isn’t as critical as selecting where and how you want to live your life. I’ve become a steelhead fanatic, so I don’t chase trout as much anymore. And when I do, I get by with a half dozen flies in various sizes. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the most important thing an angler can know is the character of the river. This is paramount to anything else. We have to understand where trout can be found in a river, how they are feeding at different times, and why they act the way they do. Other than knowing where the trout are, the most important thing we can do to catch them is to present the fly properly and to control its action. That’s more important than the pattern of the fly, or even its size and color.
But that probably won’t stop other anglers from wanting to know the half-dozen flies I go fishing with these days. We all love lists. So to satisfy your curiosity, here they are: a Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear Nymph, an Elk Hair Caddis, a Blue-Winged Olive, a PMD, and a hopper. There’s nothing magical in any of these flies. As Cecil once told me, you can probably get by anywhere with just an
Adams. But where would the memories be when we open that fly box? I can’t help but wonder what Cecil might be up to these days. I hope he’s hip-deep in the Henrys Fork.
