the north: fish

In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean writes, "I am haunted by waters." Well Norm, I know how you feel. Seven of Trout Unlimited's top 100 trout streams run through Yellowstone Park. Among these is the Firehole River, which flows right outside our door, and the Madison River, a hop-skip and-a-jump away. But since you can't fish in the Park during the winter I have been resigned to staring longingly at the rivers instead of fishing them.

Last week I broke down and hopped a snowcoach for the three hour (bumpy) trip to Mammoth so that I could get a day on one of the spring creeks near Livingston, Montana. Thankfully our car started despite not being used for 7 weeks and the next day I woke up at 6am and headed through Paradise Valley

to Bozeman, about 1 1/2 hours Northwest of the Park.

After running some errands, I drove to Livingston and stopped at the Yellowstone Angler to pick up a couple flies and a 2-day fishing license. The guy in the fly shop recommended some tiny midge nymphs as well as some larger conehead bunny tail streamers in green and black.

A little before 11am, I headed to the spring creek looking for the sign and the big white house "right out of Gone with the Wind" where I was told to check in.

The creek is on private property and you must pay to fish it. It is considerably cheaper to fish it in January as opposed to the Spring or Summer months. Signing in, I noticed I was the fifth person of 2010 to fish the river. Though they allow 16 fishermen per day, I was only one of three for this afternoon.

With the mercury hovering at around 40-degrees and stiff wind blowing through the valley, it might have seemed a little chilly to fish. But since the creek comes directly from underground it stays at a near-constant temperature (around 45-degrees) all year round making it fishable when the Yellowstone River, which it empties into, is frozen solid.

Following the advice of the fly shop guy, I (AKA, the old man on the stream)

geared up and headed to the north end of the property, past the sheep,

and set up a two fly rig with one small nymph trailing a small black and copper zebra conehead. This is similar to the way you fish on Massachusett's Swift River in the winter and I tried this outfit for pretty much an hour and a half with no luck. About the only thing I was catching was any number of the sticks and debris that had found its way into the river.

Finally I came to a stretch of fast water that flattened out in to a long pool before the river shot through a tunnel and dumped into the Yellowstone.

Here I switched to the green bunny tail figuring at least, given its weight, it would be easier to cast into the strong gusts that kept turning my line into a Jackson Pollack painting. The change paid immediate dividends. After letting the streamer drift through the fast water, I started stripping it in and on the third strip I had a strike. Thirty seconds later I landed my first fish of 2010; a decent brown trout.

That pool yielded a few more nice fish including a beautiful little cutthroat trout (sorry he was camera shy). As I fished the far shore down to the tunnel I landed brown after brown

At the mouth of the tunnel I caught a nice 19 incher that put up a good ol' fight.

I ended up losing my green streamer so I switched to the black as I headed back upstream to re-fish the pools I had tried with the nymph. Despite the color change, I had immediate success landing some more browns and a cutt-bow (cutthroat-rainbow hybrid). Just as my hands were getting a little too cold to fish, I hooked into a fat brown that gave me the fight of the day

Figuring I had used up all my luck for the day, and knowing I needed to pick up Wendie at 5pm in Mammoth, I decided to call it quits at around 4pm. Despite being stuck behind some slow-pokes for the 50 miles drive (guy in the Honda Prelude, the speed limit is 70mph!), my luck held and I arrived right as Wendie's coach was pulling up to the hotel entrance.

With the specter of unfishable rivers behind me, all I need is to stop being tormented by ghosts of East-Coast-pizzas-past.