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On the day my friend was set to fly out of Bozeman in the evening, we began by heading to the Firehole to fish early in the morning before the water got too warm. We planned to fish upstream through Fountain Flats from the bridge near the Ojo Caliente hot spring, more for the geothermal scenery than for any idea that the fishing might be particularly good there. However, thunderstorms with frequent air-to-ground lightning kept us in the car for nearly an hour at the parking lot waiting for a safe window to fish. While we waited, my friend read from my copy of Ernest Schwiebert's story about the Firehole, The Strangest Trout Stream on Earth. He commented, "That guy makes it sound like it's impossible to catch a fish on this river."

When we finally got out on the water, there were no rises and little to no sign of bug life. Although the occasional splashy refusal and a couple brief hookups kept things interesting, neither of us caught anything. Apparently, Ernie called it.

Once we decided the Firehole was a dud for the day, we picked up the trailer in West Yellowstone and drove up MT-191 through the Gallatin valley. We stopped to fish a couple times in the headwater reaches inside the park, first just shortly above the Taylor Fork confluence, where we fished a couple good pools with no action and decided the high, cold water from runoff wasn't helping matters. We drove back up into Fawn Pass, thinking those upper headwaters might cut some of the higher mountains out of the equation. The water was still a bit high, but more manageable, and I picked up a couple spunky mid-sized rainbows on nymphs.

With about an hour left before we had to leave from the airport, we decided to leave that spectacular scenery early in case something struck our fancy to fish farther down. In the valley near Big Sky, we were very glad we did, as we stopped at a pulloff to check out the river and found giant salmonflies in the air. We captured a few for photos, then broke out the rods. No fish seemed interested in a salmonfly limitation, but I did spot a couple risers, switch to a smaller attractor (Attractor: Flies not designed to imitate any particular insect, but to incorporate characteristics attractive to trout. When trout aren't feeding selectively, attractors often outperform careful imitations as searching patterns because they are easier to see and incorporate more strike-triggering characteristics. They include legends like the Adams, Bivisible, and Royal Wulff.) dry, and land a 12-13" rainbow. Then, running low on time, I switched to bug collecting and kick-netted a good mix of nymphs for the website.

We began July 1st with plans to fish a lesser-known river that produced well for me last year in the low water of August. Although the scenery was great, we found the river high and off-color due to an unknown combination of snowmelt runoff and rainfall from recent thunderstorms. We still plied the known good water with streamers for an hour or so, but gave up after I had no strikes and my friend missed one.

Wanting to make the most of the drive out there, we drove to try a new spring-fed tributary. Some PMDs and green "yellow sallies" (Chloroperlid stoneflies) were emerging sporadically, but nothing to really get fish rising. However, the water was so clear we could spot the fish anyway -- brook trout on the large side (mostly nine to twelve inches), huddled mostly in small schools in the bottoms of pools. They were skittish and mostly unwilling to rise for dry flies under the bright midday sun, but well-place nymphs brought several fish to hand as we worked our way upstream to the end of the good-looking water.

With much of the day still remaining after that, we drove to the Madison, bought some flies at the Slide Inn, and headed down to the Eight Mile Ford access near Ennis to try our luck. We hoped, on a tip, to find some salmonflies in the area, but there was no sign of them except one solitary shuck (

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Here's an underwater view of the pupal shucks of several already-emerged Brachycentrus numerosus caddisflies.

Shuck: The shed exoskeleton left over when an insect molts into its next stage or instar. Most often it describes the last nymphal or pupal skin exited during emergence into a winged adult.) on a rock. Instead, there were caddisflies by the thousands in clouds swarming around every tree, truck, and other prominent object up and down the banks. There was a good mix of mayflies, too--mostly Ephemerella. I collected a box full of bugs to photograph for the website before we even set foot in the water.

Maybe all those caddisflies filled the fish up when they were emerging, or maybe we just didn't have imitation dialed in, but we were unable to catch anything that evening. Nothing was rising, and nothing we did with nymphs, streamers, or soft-hackles drew more than the occasional bump of a maybe-strike. It was hard not to have a good time, however, based on the scenery alone as warm evening light painted the Madison Range and scattered storm clouds added great drama to the view.

On June 30th, we got a late start from our campground outside the park near the bug-factory Madison and drove up the Firehole valley, a surreal hotbed of steaming springs and geysers lining a fertile trout stream that winds through meadows and sparse pine forest. Given the late start, we didn't want to fish the warm water downstream of most of the geyser basins, and we certainly didn't want to join the inevitable crowds in the meadows where the river approaches the road. So we found an inconspicuous pulloff with a bit of a hike through the forest to reach the river and started fishing.

Although it's not as unique as fishing the meadows with plumes of geyser steam rising in the background, this forested reach of the Firehole was greatly charming in its own way. Pools were deep, with big logs for structure, and they all contained numerous fish. To say the fish were easy would give them too little credit, because splashy refusals were more common than true strikes, but they were feeding actively and opportunistically and we had a lot of fun catching small to mid-sized browns and the occasional rainbow.

We worked our way upstream into a more open meadow stretch, far enough from the road to not be crowded. Fish were easy enough to find there, too, and we alternated between stalking from the bank and wading through the middle of the river casting to the cut banks. A good mix of bugs around made attractor (Attractor: Flies not designed to imitate any particular insect, but to incorporate characteristics attractive to trout. When trout aren't feeding selectively, attractors often outperform careful imitations as searching patterns because they are easier to see and incorporate more strike-triggering characteristics. They include legends like the Adams, Bivisible, and Royal Wulff.) dries as good a choice as any.

Eventually the river carried us closer to the road and other anglers, so we drove up to the Little Firehole to try our luck in some cooler water during the hottest part of the day. A few small browns responded and we enjoyed the smaller water for a while, but toward evening we went back to fish a different forested reach.

The dominant evening hatch rolled through a couple different species of caddisflies, primarily the Leptocerids that had been common elsewhere in the area for the last couple days. Fly shops were talking of the "white miller" hatch but these seemed to be a close relative instead. The fish that were eagerly smacking all manner of dry flies early in the afternoon were now rising more frequently but becoming more difficult to catch on dries. They were chasing the egg-laying adults and generally rejected anything on a dead-drift (Dead-drift: The manner in which a fly drifts on the water when not moving by itself or by the influence of a line. Trout often prefer dead-drifting prey and imitating the dead-drift in tricky currents is a major challenge of fly fishing.). I tried a variety of caddis dries and only drew strikes when I managed to impart particularly realistic action in just the right places.

As evening progressed the riseforms changed and seemed to suggest the pursuit of subsurface pupae, so we changed to soft-hackles and started catching fish again. Later in the evening that action subsided and fish were again taking a hard-to-discern mix of prey, so I just bounced between a bunch of dry flies I can't even remember and managed to fool a few fish somewhere along the way.

On June 29th, we hiked ten miles out from our Slough Creek backcountry campsite in the morning and enjoyed a good burger in downtown Gardiner. After picking up the camper trailer from its hiding spot in the hills above, we headed to camp for the next night in the town of West Yellowstone, near the headwaters of the Madison just outside the park.

Along the way we stopped at the Gibbon to fish a reach where I got skunked in the most frustrating manner last year. In that episode, the fish were rising and I had the right flies to draw eager strikes. On the first strike, my hook caught the bony part of a big fish's mouth and bent out without me realizing it. Several subsequent strikes failed because I was unknowingly fishing with a badly bent hook.

This time, I went back to the same area determined to exact revenge on the fish that made a fool of me last year. The big fish weren't rising at first, but I ran a soft-hackle through a really promising pool and caught a fairly large brown in the first few minutes. I missed another. After that, my friend and I both caught several smaller browns and cutts, especially toward dusk when caddisflies were active and the small fish were vigorously chasing them around. Some larger fish rose occasionally, but they were either feeding too sporadically or spooked by inadequate presentations in difficult spots. I don't mind being beaten by a fish that way, when I didn't do anything especially dumb and the fish was just too wily. I had already made up for last year.

Having fished the previous day from our campground upstream to the park boundary, we decided on this day to work our way downstream from camp instead toward the lower end of our meadow. The day started fairly well around 10:00 am when I got an aggressive strike from a deep pool and landed a fish with its gullet packed with earthworms and cranefly larvae:




In the year before I took up flyfishing I became an increasingly avid and technically serious worm dunker (to the extent that it's possible), but as far as I know I never caught a trout that was actually stuffing itself with earthworms until now. It made perfect sense here, given the location toward the tail end of a long bend where the river was eating into the silty meadow and the bank was all soil.

The fishing for the rest of the day was pretty slow, as we only hit one or two spots with good action. However, the sunny weather with scattered dramatic clouds kept me focused on my camera as much as the water, each scene more jaw-dropping than the last:



We worked our way to the bottom of our meadow, walked back to camp for a late lunch, and went out for the evening to re-hash the upstream water we fished the previous day. It was slower this time.