Montana Reflections
by
Andrew French

Easter Sunday 2004, I set out from my niece’s house in the Rattlesnake Creek section of Missoula, Montana, at 8 am headed east on Route 90 toward Butte to meet my guide. There had been ice in the dog’s bowl and frost on the windshield of my rented Alero, so I was wearing or bringing with me all of the warm clothes I had brought along from New York: waterproof shell, polypropylene underwear, fleece pants and shirt and fingerless gloves, anticipating an uncomfortable day, but as prepared as I could be. It was Easter. There were a few pick up trucks around, but mine was the only car.

I turned off the road outside of Missoula at Rock Creek, passed the “Testicle Festival” (Sadly, I was too late.), found Ekstrom’s Stage Station Restaurant, where my guide’s wife had told me I could get breakfast, and ordered the trout (farm raised). “Eat ‘til it hurts” was the motto of the place, a former bunkhouse made of logs, which the menu explained had been moved here from its original location several miles away. After breakfast, at just 9 o’clock, I walked over to the Rock Creek Fisherman’s Merchantile as a huge half-crew cab pickup pulled into the parking lot towing a trailer with a fishing boat on it. An enormous man got out. “’Big’ John Perry,” he said.

 After a few minutes puttering around the Merchantile drinking coffee, we set out east again to where we would be putting into the river. The unseasonable warmth of the two weeks before this one had accelerated the snow melt in the surrounding mountains, and water was a little too high and discolored for good fishing in the lower, better known stretches of river, so we were going to go a little higher up the Clark Fork. At Phosphora, 48 miles east of Missoula, we turned off, backed into the stream and rigged up three rods: first, my 6-weight Sage I had schlepped from New York, we rigged for dry flies, specifically the legendary oversized “skwala” that my friend Greg Belcamino had told me about; a second for streamers, imitating minnows; the third with a “tumbling” skwala as the dropper below a stonefly dry as a strike indicator. Then we both put on all of the warm clothes we had brought along with us, and our waders, and set off. I ask him what kind of trout we should encounter. “Browns, mostly, maybe a cutthroat or two. We won’t see many rainbows today; they’re up in the tributaries, spawning.”

 Long story short: two days, nine- and eight-hour drifts and probably 17 miles of river, seven or eight great blue herons (big as pterodactyls) five or six redtailed hawks, three bald eagles, two ospreys, a beaver and a mink, and – oh yeah, this was meant to be a fishing trip, wasn’t it? – roughly a dozen trout each day ranging from 12 to 20 inches, mostly browns and a few cutthroats. Even the weather cooperated. By noon both days, it had warmed up to the low 50s, and I had to begin stripping off fleece and smearing on sunblock.

My favorite moment: my second guide, Joe Sowerby, took me up a spring creek off the Clark Fork just above Rock Creek. We got out of the drift boat, waded over and stood and watched a particular seam marked by a bubble line running along a steep, but undercut bank lined by brush until we saw a couple of big heads fall into a pattern of rising to vicious takes of skwalas drifting down inches from the bank. I moved into position to be able to cast into a narrow slot between two overhanging branches -- ideally right up against the bank -- then immediately mend my line quickly upstream so the slack would allow my fly to be forced up against the spot where the larger head kept emerging. Cast, mend, wait – one, two, three – big head comes up, swallows fly, I raise the rod tip, set the hook and boom, fish goes wild, zigzagging first right, then left, trying to escape into the roots of the trees on either side of where he was rising. I slam the rod the opposite direction, first upstream, to pull him into the main current, then back to my left, downstream, but out, away from the tree roots and out into the main course of the stream. Moments later, we hold him up, unhook, point him up stream so the current will fill his gills and revive him after his struggle, wait until he kicks free of my light grasp on his tail, then watch him swim away. Unforgettable.

 Two days later, I’m with my nieces, strolling along Rattlesnake Creek, two blocks from their houses and maybe seven minutes from downtown Missoula. As we enter the park, I see a sign with pictures of the five kinds of trout that can be found in that creek and notice that fishing season in it isn’t until much later, early May. I don’t think much of it. Ten minutes later, we discover some pretty big rainbows – one, maybe 15 inches – circling each other and frolicking in the shallows behind some big rocks, just out of the main current. It comes back to me, what the guide said, “We won’t see many rainbows today; they’re up in the tributaries, spawning.”  - Andrew French (andrew.french@att.net).