Matt, Melissa, Fishy and I headed down to Dillon for our yearly trip, which includes the Patagonia outlet sale and fishing. We started out at the outlet sale which was completely, well… crazy. It is strange to wait in line to get into a retail store on a Sunday afternoon, but I guess it’s what you do when there are prices are that low. The only problem is that by Sunday, three days after the sale starts, there are only XS,S and XXL stuff left. Needless to say, this year I didn’t buy anything.

On our way from the sale we hopped into the camping rig and headed to Poindexters Slough. As soon as we stepped out of the car weird weather rolled in. The clouds appeared and wind started to whip, which dropped the temp to the point that we all layered up and put on our winter hats. The year before we had a good day on the river, this year not so much. The wind made fishing difficult. I had two violent strikes on a hopper dropper combo but missed them both, well that is not entirely true, the second fish ended up with a hopper/dropper souvenir. Shortly after this we decided to call it a day and head up to Clark Canyon reservoir to get a camp spot.

The night was a bit cold as the wind dropped the mercury further than it would have without it, but luckily Melissa located some wood and we had a decent fire that upped the warmth threshold a bit. Plus I learned a nice trick from a friend on another cold camping trip a few years back, boil the water in your Nalgene and take that with you to bed. That helped keep me nice and toasty all night long.

The next day we drove all over the Dillon area trying to find good wade access to the Beaverhead but just didn’t find anything that was not extremely deep or full of dense foliage. So we decided to get some lunch in Dillon and formulate a game plan. At first we thought that we would do the same thing as last year and hit the Big Hole and drive into Butte, but Melissa came up with a good idea, that we should fish the Ruby. This was a good idea for two reasons, one it put us on a river none of us had fished, and two, it cut some time off our return trip to Bozeman. At first we had a few problems locating access to this river, as the river followed the road we were on but never quite came within eyesight of it. We eventually found an access spot and fished for a few hours.

The Ruby is a beautiful gem of a river, the water was crystal clear and cold enough to fish, and the scenery was also quite easy on the eyes. The fishing on the other hand was slow… extremely slow. We were about to turn around and head back to the car but we decided to see what was behind one more bend in the river. This was a good call as we hit a man made damn that widened the river and opened up some nice feeding lanes for some fish. I was luckily enough to hook into two brown trout within a few minutes of fishing this location. Felt good to finally feel a tug at the end of the line after struggling so hard the last few days, I would have hated to go home with not only no Patagonia deals but no fish to hand either.

We ended up back in Bozeman by about six pm after dropping Matt off at his place in Belgrade. Melissa, Fishy and I were all extremely pooped from an exhausting, but wonderful, two days excursion.

A friend came into town for a visit and we figured it would be in our best interest to do a little camping and fishing. So we started out the week with a trip to the Madison river. We found a great camp spot on the river, blew up our tubes and proceeded for a early evening float. The water was ideal temp and so was the air, even with the harsh wind the float was still extremely enjoyable.

The next morning we headed over to the East to do a little fishing. We jumped in near Spains and headed downstream. The water level was perfect and so was the water temperature. We fished a hole and each had some success. I got into a couple small browns and Matt caught his first trout on a fly rod. We headed down stream to fish some other locations, but one thing became instantly clear, the river that I was familiar with was no longer a river I was familiar with. This years run off drastically changed this portion of the river. One of the bends I loved to fish was no longer a bend but dried up and now the river ran straight, shallow and wide. The rest of the day we didn’t have any luck, a few brief hook ups but nothing to hand.

The next morning we both ended up with a sunburn but decided that it was the last day on Matt’s two day license and we should go get some use out of it. We headed back to the East but went to a different bridge and jumped in, again the water and weather couldn’t have been better. Again a couple brief hookups early on with nothing to hand, the river here changed slightly, mainly some of the river crossing were deeper and harder to manage than they once were, but overall shape of the river was still nice. The highlight of the day was when Matt hooked into a pig of a bow. It was really awesome to see someone new to fly fishing get into a fish of that size (16-20 inches), the fish made some spectacular jumps before we finally had him to hand and we snapped a few photos, unfortunately you can’t see the full size of the fish due to the excitement of the fisherman and cameraman. Either way it was pretty sweet to see.

Matt was fishing a flashback pheasanttail in about a size 18.

Fished the East today at Spains for about 15 minutes with Matt. We ended up fishing private water in a private subdivision where one of Matt’s friends lived.

It wasn’t a complete bust, I got into a few fish and so did Matt’s friend.

About a week ago I decided that I thought it might be kind of neat to create a viewshed analysis of an area and then take a 360 panorama photo to see how accurate the viewshed was, and also I thought it would be cool to see an aerial and 1st person view.

So there are some obvious accuracy issues that I should address. The biggest is the image analysis only accounts for a 1 arc second DEM. Originally I was hoping to use LiDAR data to create DEM that had better resolution and also accounted for trees and buildings, but unfortunately LiDAR data is not available for Bozeman Montana. So I had to settle with the DEM I could get from the USGS. So again, this is not an accurate viewshed, but should give you an idea of what you can see from this particular location on Pete’s Hill.

In regards to the photograph, there were also some inadequacies that I feel need to be addressed. The first is the stitching software of the photos had some issues, you can clearly see the edits, which I don’t like all that much. Second, I took these pictures at 6:30 AM in Bozeman, so the sun is coming up and really bleaches out an area or so roughly at due East in the photo. The last thing that I would like to point out is that you can’t see the Bridger Mountains which would be due north, they start to appear at the top of the viewshed analysis, but due to the mountains being socked in with rain/snow mix the photos are lacking part of what makes Bozeman great.

All in all this project was pretty interesting and fun to do, I do wish I could have gotten my hands on some LiDAR information for a more accurate portrayal, but such is life. I would also like to continue doing a few more of these, perhaps one from the top of the M, or one of my fishing spots. Who knows.

update: The girlfriend took a job in Helena Montana.

My girlfriend recently quit her job and is in the process of finding a new one. I decided to make her a quick easy reference guide of desirability. Now if you look at this and you are in a “not so desirable” location, you have to keep in mind that it’s not my intention to insult anyone. It’s just that I am extremely picky and I like cold(er) weather, mountains, no humidity, and great fly fishing. So needless to say, there are a lot of areas that I, ideally, do not want to move to.

Where would I go?

Don’t have a lot of time to update, but I promised myself to update this every time I went out to fish.

Matt and I headed to Axtell Bridge around 5pm to get a few hours of fishing in. We hiked down river and fished. I had small amounts of luck drifting a black stonefly weighted quite heavily in some deep water. When I say small, I mean small.. I caught a fish that was slightly bigger than bait.

On our way back up river we each hooked up a few more times, with myself foul-hooking a white fish and the others we broke off.

All in all, a good day to get out and explore parts of the river I have not seen.. but not a good day for fishing.

Matt and I rolled up to the East and realized that today was the start of the worst time of year, the water was high and looked like chocolate milk. We gave it a moment of silence and realized that it will be a while before that river starts to become fishable again.

We ended up fishing the West Gallatin and did not have a lot of luck, although the river looked ten times better than the East.

Needless to say, fishing will be slow until runoff is done.

The weather in Bozeman today was windy and cold, but Matt and I have been discussing a fishing trip for a few days and figured a little weather would not get in our way. I am glad that we opted to hit the river. The wind at our destination was mild, which made the weather acceptable enough that I was able to shed a sweatshirt and just roll with a long sleeve base-layer. We saw surface action immediately, which is a promising sign. We each had nymphs loaded on and figured that perhaps the fish would hit those as well, which initially it looked promising as my first cast had a high jumping bow at the end of it. This fish broke off and we proceeded to work our way down river with no luck.
We made it to our money hole and fish were going absolutely crazy in this foamline leading to an awesome back eddy. I proceeded to fish a nymph while Matt put on a dry with a midge dropper. I had a few takes, but after watching Matt catch a few fish, I decided that I too would put on a dry. I know, I know, drys are awesome to fish, I just really didn’t think the hatch would last as long as it did, which is why it took me so long to throw one on. I put a small parachute adams on and proceeded to hook into enough fish to completely thrash my fly, by the time I took that fly off it was nothing more than a ball of string located next to the shank. Matt was then nice enough to show me his fly box and I borrowed a regular Adams. This fly turned out to be the key. Almost every five casts I had a fish on. Then all of a sudden the surfacing stopped and our fishing the dry fly ceased as if it was an engine with no oil.

We then headed back to the car, relishing the day on the river. We both commented about how the wind picked up and the weather chilled out, and curiously wondered if this was what put the fishing to a stop, or if it was just 3+ hours of surface action and perhaps the fish were done eating. I think not fully understanding what goes on in the mind of a fish is one of the things I love about fly fishing, sometimes you believe you have them figured out and sometimes you leave the river slightly humbled.

This weeks photos courtesy of Matt Mitchell

Myself on the East

Since I had yesterday off of work, I decided that it would be in my best interest to get out on the river and do a little casting. I tried to make it to Hamilton Bridge but there were four cars there and two guys gearing up, so I decided to head back upriver and try Spain Bridge. Spain was iced over a majority of the year and what ever happens below the ice really changed the structure of the river so the holes I was use to fishing were different and there were new places to fish.
The weather was a bit strange, fluctuated between snow, rain and sunshine. The fishing was very slow, but picked up for about 15 minutes in which I got 3-4 fish to hand, after that little window the fishing shut off again.

Pattern of choice: Large (8-12?) Prince nymph.

(Below is a map I made of the area)
TheEast

So Matt convinced me that it would be in my best interest to go fishing with him. I was initially hesitant, mainly because I was extremely tired, but at the end of the conversation I caved. I told him that I would need to pick up a license and perhaps some flys because I am an idiot and left the ones that I just tied in a location I could not retrieve them. so I went to Sportsman’s or what ever its called now, told them that there is no way in the world that I need warm water tags and put down the 26 bucks for a license. I am after all in Montana, where there great blue ribbon trout streams, if I wanted warm water fish I would have stayed in the Midwest. Silly people.

Anyway we drove out to the East and jumped in at one of our favorite bridges and proceeded to head downriver. My first cast, BAM, big fish on. Matt meanwhile was still rigging up, so I decided to be an idiot and I turned my head and said “Hey, look what you will never feel.” and two seconds later the fish broke off. A lesson in humility. After that the fishing slowed for about an hour or so, and then picked up hot for both of us. We came across a tight fast run of the river that was deep on one side and then it spilled into a giant deep pool. Matt fished the run, and I fished the foam line in the pool. I got into two, what felt like giant fish, but they broke off after fighting them for a few minutes. Matt on the other hand hooked into two football shaped rainbows, he fought those on his four weight, and seeing that bend in his rod and smile on his face made me extremely envious. I helped him land the fish, and went back to pounding the water, vowing not to put to much tension on my line if I hooked up again. It paid off, about ten minutes later I had a small bend in my rod and a nice little brown on.
After catching a few fish in this hole we decided to let it be for a while and we headed down river, mainly to enjoy the afternoon and explore more river. We fished a bit more down river but didn’t have as much luck so we decided to head back to the cars. We stopped and fished a bit more at the money hole and had some more luck, and we decided to call it a day. Went back to Matts had some Pizza and watched the Ricky Gervais show. Good day, and a great start to this years fishing season.

Pattern of choice: beadhead flashback pheasant tail, red copper john, and Matt was having luck on a red brassie style fly.