When the Oracle suggests something, you take that suggestion. He follows us outside, goes over the directions once again. “You’ll come to the first meadow and see plenty of fish, but keep on walking until you come to the second meadow. Fish there.”
You’ll see fish but keep on walking—it goes on the table of our trip’s ten commandments, and we keep repeating it over and over again all during the long drive across the park.
A great drive. This is the first time I’ve ever been to the eastern side of the park, driven up the divide near Mount Washburn, seen the view of the Absarokas and the caldera of which they form the distant rim—seen this, then crested the height of land and dropped down the switchbacks to the Yellowstone near Tower Junction, where the landscape goes from thick lodgepole pine forest to those wide and rolling Rocky Mountain plains.
We park just above the Slough Creek campground, note with interest the yellow bear warnings posted on the trail register (definitely shredded—clawed?), then cram our waders into our rucksacks, start out. The hike isn’t bad, not after the first steep section, and the trail is a wide one that suggests a well-worn pilgrim’s way.
“Here’s the meadow,” Ray says, where the trees end and the ledges give way.
I stare down into the long slow curve of water that eats into our bank. There’s a cutthroat holding in the current, wearing that serious, somber pout fish have when they’re resting. I point toward a bigger one, and the shadow cast by my arm is enough to make both quicktail it upstream.
“You’ll see some fish—”
“But keep on walking!”
We pass the ranger cabin, resist the urge to cut across the meadow toward those sinuous and sexy Slough Creek curves, stay to the right on the high, flinty trail. Have I said anything yet about the scenery? Where the next grade levels off we take a break near a park-like grove of trees, stare toward the horizon and the snowcapped mountains that rise sharp across the horizon—Granite Peak and its neighbors, the highest summits in Montana, raising the level of the scenery one notch more.
It’s another hour to the second meadow. We know we’re getting closer when we start encountering some second-meadow kind of guys on their way back down the trail. Young, athletic, looking more like climbers than fly fishermen, with pack rods in the loops where ice axes usually go, they’re in too much of a hurry to chat, though we mange to elicit the information that all of them have caught fish.
And yes, the fishing is good once we arrive. What’s surprising is that we get the entire river to ourselves, or at least the part we pick out. It’s downstream of the trail junction—a wide slow pool where the river hooks right before dropping over a shallow ledge, with a terrace of pebbles we can relax on and look things over.
In a fit of madness we start off fishing attractors, but it’s obvious the fish aren’t interested. What they are interested in are those Drake Emergers we have courtesy of Mr. Mathews. Ray, as usual, catches the first fish—a beautiful copper-dark trout of nearly nineteen inches, with a pronounced yellow shading through the flanks to go along with that characteristic coral flashing on the gills. I hook one a few minutes later, but it takes two of three before I learn to control that first hard, double shake of the head. Pretty soon we’ve established a regular rhythm. Ray drifts an emerger at the head of the pool, hooks a trout on the rise, gets it under control, leads it through shallow water to the terrace and down the miniature falls while I step in and do exactly the same thing, beaching my fish downstream just about the time Ray has waded back around me to hook his next one.
A lot of cutthroat bashing goes on out West. Some flyfishers claim they’re stupid and boring, but what they really are is patient and smart. It’s hard to spook a cut, true, but it can also be extremely hard to fool one, so it’s a perfect combination: a fish you get a lot of chances at, but one that’s extraordinarily fussy (brook trout back East are exactly the opposite: shy to approach, easy to fool). Matching the hatch is the only option on Slough; it’s clear that without Craig’s flies we would have been skunked. Even later, when they switch over to size 18 Baetis, we’re ready for them; one of us or the other is playing a fish the entire time we’re there.
A long and perfect afternoon. We might be there yet if it wasn’t for the thunderstorms that came up late in the day. With all those mountains and ridges, their tricky acoustics, it’s hard to judge when it’s time to take cover in the trees. We wait out the worst of these storms under some pines, right in the middle of what’s apparently a favorite grizzly lair, judging by the whitened mounds of turds, the sun-bleached pile of half-gnarled bones. Talk about your frissons! Lightning bolts flaring down at your forehead, grizzly poop underneath your butt! What a remarkable country this is!
River Nine: The Gallatin. We’ve become advice junkies, and when we can’t borrow or beg some, we’re not above stealing our daily fix. This morning what we basically do is overhear a conversation in the next booth—a couple of guide types, judging by the gravel guards wedged around their ankles, the Polaroids tucked in at their throats. What they’re talking about is the Gallatin—how crowded it is in its lower reaches, but how no one bothers fishing the meadow portion where it leaves the highway and climbs toward the mountains. There aren’t any trout for the first mile of this stretch—no one knew why—but then they appeared again, and you had to keep hiking in order to locate this spot.
Was this a deliberate piece of misinformation planted to put two uppity dudes in their place? We hike a mile and then some without any sight of fish, this despite the fact that the Gallatin is perfectly clear here, and with the banks so high it would be easy to spot anything swimming about.
“Maybe we haven’t gone a mile?” Ray says, mopping off his face with his hat.
I finally do spot a brown, a nice one, but he’s not interested in my hopper. By this time we’re halfway up the valley, hungry, hot, and tired. The only redeeming virtue is the wildlife—mule deer, a coyote, some eagles, and an elk. We also have a good conversation with a park ranger on horseback, on his way into the backcountry for a two-week patrol. Sharing a soda, he tells us some good stories about elk poachers—how smart the smart ones are, how stupid the remainder.
We’ve fished together a long time, Ray and I—it only takes a glance for each of us to know the other wants to turn back. Once to the car we revive enough to spend the afternoon on the Madison. The drift boats have already floated through, so we pretty much have it to ourselves except for an osprey. We’re a lot more relaxed this time, and as a result do well. A whitefish tricks me into thinking it’s a brown, and after hollering Ray over to net it I feel pretty sheepish at what emerges. A few minutes later, hooking what I think is another huge whitefish, I play it casually, afraid to get my hopes up, then am surprised—and even more sheepish—to find it’s a brown trout of nearly three pounds.
River Ten: The Gardner. We’re here for several reasons. We haven’t seen the Mammoth Hot Springs part of the park, it’s on our way back to Bozeman, and we have time for one last stream before driving back to the airport. Then, too, this is by way of homage to the late Charles F. Brooks. We bought his Fishing Yellowstone Waters before we came out here, used it to plan our trip, and have found it a reliable and entertaining source of information all the way around the circuit. “Let’s see what Charlie says” is another of our refrains. Stream-smart, literate, someone who never lost sight of the ambient beauty, he must have been a fine man to fish with.
Here’s what he says about the Gardner:
The five miles or so of stream in the Mammoth area are very pleasant miles to fish. There is just enough difficulty getting into and out of the stream and in fishing it to deter the casual. It is a prolific piece of water for the proficient fly fisher. The fish are larger than farther up, and there are now and then run-up fish from the Yellowstone. You must know what you are about to do well in the lower Gardner.
It’s all true. The day is a hot one, and this side of the park is more arid than anything we’ve seen so fa
r, so the hike down to the river, or at least the prospect of hiking back up again, seems like a particularly grueling ordeal. But what the hell—it’s our last day, and when we finish we can cool off with some beers.
Charles is right about those run-up fish. We see some on the other side of the river, dark, torpedo-like shapes perfectly aligned with one another as they face the heavy current, for all the world like cathode figures in a video game waiting for quarters to be dropped in before moving. With trees behind us and a steep bank, they’re impossible to reach. Further upstream we find the fish wary, but catchable; one of these turns out to be a brook trout, a little guy who’s probably run down the river from one of the beautifully named creeks that make up its headwaters, Fawn, Indian, Panther, or Obsidian. The views here are high, wide, and handsome, though you’re looking up at them, not out or down, and this makes us feel insignificant and small. Three mountain sheep are playing on the cliffs—not a common sighting, even in Yellowstone.
Nothing major to report here, but a taste of what canyon fishing is all about, and the pleasant, relaxed kind of finale we’re after. Weighted down by some extra juice cartons, my vest rips in half, dropping fly boxes into the river that Ray, wading below me, gracefully scoops up. I’m saddened; on a long trip you come to live in your vest, cramming it with sandwiches, rain gear, aspirin, candy bars, and sodas, let alone flies and tackle, so it becomes something much more essential and organic than mere fabric—it’s as if a well-worn but dearly loved part of my flesh, tiring of life, has shredded away.
Time for that beer. We find a bar in Gardiner that’s long, dark, and empty—the green on the pool table alone is enough to cool us off. We knock back a quick one, then take our time with the refill, talking about our trip, letting it start to settle, concerned that we do this just right. We agree that our survey, big-gulp kind of approach has worked well, giving us both the kind of wide overview that makes sense for a first trip, and a much more detailed, intimate kind of hands-on experience as well. Reading everything we could find, asking everyone questions, experimenting, exploring, we’ve learned quite a bit, will be much better prepared next time we come out here—a trip that’s already entered its planning stage by the time that second beer goes down.
And it’s a funny thing. Even sitting in that deserted bar with those beers, our muscles sore from all the hiking and wading, the rivers seem to flow into one, so the Madison in our memory becomes just a wider portion of Nez Percé Creek, the Bechler just another meadow up from the Firehole, whose headwaters drop into the Gallatin, the mouth of which forms the Gardner, with no dividing line at all, not even the narrow enough one that barely separates them in reality I think of Aldo Leopold and how he tried to find the appropriate phrase to sum up the interconnectedness of the living world, the biotic stream, and how he came up with the perfect one: the Round River. Yellowstone’s rivers, wildlife, forest, meadows, lakes, and ponds flow into one another and are one, that’s the moral; nowhere else in the world would it have been possible for us to navigate so much riverine beauty in so short a time.
There’s some sadness here, the kind that comes when a good fishing trip is finished, but more than that, too. The kind that comes to an aging athlete who knows between one game and the next that the glory days are over, and while he will play on for a few more years yet, it will never be at the same intense level. Hiking to all those streams, forcing our way up rapids, taking some spills, letting the rocks knock us around, the hot press of the sun, the prying leverage of that wind. I know, sitting there in that dark cowboy bar, that I’ll never be capable of such a prolonged physical effort again—know, too, that it’s all right to be sad with this, since it’s another part of the Round River, and I’d be a fool to wish myself free of its current.
What we need is a line to go out on, and Ray pulls one from the silence, raising his glass with the last of the beer. “You’ll see fish,” he says, squinting, “but keep on walking.”
I nod, laugh, tilt my own glass back for its last quarter inch of foam. “You might not think they’re there, but—”
We finish in unison. “They’re there!”
River Eleven: The Lamar. A line to go out on—and yet there is one last river in our trip, a sunset to talk about, the kind that should by rights end any good Western. On our next-to-last night Ray stays in town to make some phone calls while I drive over to the Lamar just upstream of its canyon. While the water itself is invisible, the rivers route through the valley is marked plain enough by the declination and fold of the banks, and so it’s no problem at all to walk through the sagebrush and boulders until I find a likely looking pool. There’s a rainbow waiting between two rocks—he jumps when I hook him and jumps again just for fun. So close have I timed things that by the time I land him its dark enough I have to head back to the car.
From where I’m parked the land rolls toward the west like a very wide inclined plane, up which a transparent force is rolling itself toward the mountains that rise above the intersecting furrow of the Yellowstone two miles away. Even the mountains, steep as they are, seem only a higher, more rugged version of this ramp, so they, too, are helping boost this invisible something into the sky. Above the mountains, as I stare, this force manifests itself in layer upon layer of clouds, flat on the lenticular edges, billowy in their softer centers, the mass expanding upward and outward as I watch. There’s hardly any variation in color from one superimposed layer to the next, and yet by the time the layers end they have gone from a base of stony gray to a ceiling that’s a dramatic and vivid crimson—all this done in such gradual increments it’s impossible to point to any one place on the horizon and say there, the color’s different.
The most beautiful sunset I’ve ever seen? It ranks right up there. Somewhere behind the ridges the sun is just high enough to take the color and give it a name, a quality, and definition: loneliness. It’s loneliness I’m watching, not the sad kind we feel ourselves, but the kind that has shadings of great pity and acceptance—what the land might feel for us if it bothered noticing our presence at all. It seems the whole wide untouched Yellowstone landscape is scrolling itself toward the heavens to pronounce a judgment, some final word, and then—and this was a very poignant thing to watch—the color suddenly leaves it, from bottom layer to top, and with it all the difficult meaning, so for one last moment it’s the empty land itself that is mirrored there in the sky, before man could color and tame it with his own longing . . . and finally in a last flash of something that isn’t quite orange, the sky rolls over into blackness, the wind comes up off the river, my shoulders start shaking, and it’s time to go home.
August 25
The Yellowstone is not only the most prolific trout river in North America but also the most intimidating, especially inside the national park. Above Yellowstone Lake on the Thorofare Plateau the wading isn’t bad, if you can get there; it’s a long hike in, from whatever direction, and the country is known for its quicksand and grizzlies. Just downstream of the lake is the notorious Fishing Bridge, where the trout butchers used to do their thing, but fishing is no longer permitted there, and with the river flowing at full breadth from one of the largest lakes in the country it wouldn’t be any place to wade. The water in Hayden Valley is approachable and choice, but fishing isn’t permitted there either, even though it’s alive with feeding trout. Further downstream are the famous falls, among the highest on the continent; below these is a thousand-foot-deep canyon with precipitous walls of smooth and friable rock. Even at Tower Junction, where the river re-emerges, the water flows past at warp speed, and this only gets worse further downstream in the hard to get to, impossible to wade section known as Black Canyon.
If you do manage to find a place to fish you can sense all this wild and lusty exuberance working on you as you step into the water—the weight of Yellowstone Lake upstream, the giddiness of the falls just below. This is the longest untamed river in the lower forty-eight states, and the water, it’s very molecules, seem powered by this fr
eedom, so they bear down on you with double the weight and energy of normal H20. This is water, cold water, that has been here a lot longer than man has and will be here rushing and tumbling and foaming downstream long after he is gone—and it’s not above taking a sacrificial victim with it now and then to demonstrate this principle.
Between rapids and canyons and falls and regulations, there are very few stretches of the Yellowstone you can wade safely, let alone comfortably. One of these is called Buffalo Ford—the Buffalo Ford, famous for its cutthroats, pictured in all the magazines, the very epicenter of fly fishing’s remarkable boom, and on a typical summer’s day the most heavily fished pool in the world.
Not a place for the loner, the shy one, the fastidious. And yet on a warm and sunny late-August morning this was exactly who waded through the bright skipping water on its edge, stopped to look things over, stood rocking back and forth in his wading brogues, counting the number of fishermen he could see in the river, vowing that when he reached fifty he would turn around again and go back to his car. Something of an old hand now in this part of the world, a man who was taking a break from the family on what was otherwise a family trip all the way, he had deliberately avoided the Yellowstone on his two previous trips out West, scared off not only by the power of the water, but the power of that mob.
How many? Two fishermen just to the right of him, gearing up. Another straight ahead on the edge of an island, tight to a fish. A man and woman holding onto each other for balance, the current piling up in a golden W around their waists. Three scattered in the shallower water on the far and distant shore, one casting, one wading, one pointing a camera at the stolid echelon of buffalo grazing on the bank.
Seven flyfishers, not counting himself. Seven in a river that could swallow dozens and hardly show the strain. Whether because it was late August and the crowds had gone home, or because of some favorable, impossible-to-predict eddy in the current that compelled people to fish here, the fisherman had come on a day when for all intents and purposes he had the Yellowstone River to himself.
A River Trilogy Page 48