South Dakota and North Dakota could have been just plain Dakota, and this would be Forty-Nine Fly Fish instead of Fifty. If I recall correctly North Dakota insisted on separation because they couldn’t trust South Dakota governors around their dogs. I can’t blame them.

However smart North Dakotans were to separate from the south, North Dakota is not a great fly fishing state. There is plenty of North Dakota fishing, but it’s not fly fishing. If you Google “North Dakota fishing guides,” you’ll find endless photo galleries of happy guides and happy clients displaying heavy stringers of unhappy walleyes. In North Dakota they fish deep, way deep, in big lakes. They fish for meat. It’s a perfectly reasonable way to fish for walleye, but it’s the worst possible way to fly fish. I would have to find a boat. I would have to have deep, deep, deep sinking lines that wouldn’t work well. I wouldn’t be able to feel any takes, or set the hook if by some lucky chance I did feel it. I would have to find a gear-fishing guide who knew the water and who wouldn’t laugh at me.

And I would deserve to be laughed at.

Walleye, North Dakota Game and Fish.

This was our second trip to North Dakota. The first time I didn’t catch a fish. We found a guide and he was just fine, but it was still hit or miss. He caught a small northern pike, and we caught nothing.

This time I decided to fish without a guide. I was certain that whatever I did, guide or no guide, I would not catch a fish, and that I’d have to return to North Dakota still another and another and another time. The only state where I would never catch a fish would ultimately be North Dakota. This whole project would die somewhere in North Dakota.

Not only would I have to keep returning, visiting North Dakota is like visiting Amarillo without all the scenic grandeur. There’s a whole lot of flat. And after one or two more trips there would almost certainly be more interesting places, places other than North Dakota, where I would want to go.

National Park Service, Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

Actually that’s not completely fair. We have only been as far west as Bismarck, which is central. The part of North Dakota we’ve seen in the east was glaciated four times over tens of millions of years, so yeah, it’s pretty flat. There’s some rolling terrain as you leave the Red River Valley and start to move west, and that’s kinda pretty, but flat is the predominate motif. Flat and plowed and sown with corn or wheat in summer.

So the eastern part of the state was covered with glaciers and flattened, but 65 million years ago the far west was a giant swamp. This was the period when the Rockies were being formed by colliding tectonic plates, and North Dakota’s giant swamp filled with a combination of mountain erosion from the then-20,000 foot Rockies and volcanic ash from the Rockies’ volcanoes. Wind and water erosion through the hardening sediment created the Dakota Badlands. Like I said, we didn’t get that far west, but it’s supposed to be beautiful. There’s a National Park, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Little Missouri River.

Like the rest of North Dakota though, it’s not a place for fly fishing.

The last time we went to North Dakota, we fished near Bismarck in the Missouri River. The Missouri, like the Rio Grande or the Mississippi or Columbia, defines us. It’s written into our most achingly beautiful folksong, and fishing it, even without catching a fish, was such a privilege.

Anglos went to the Dakotas because of a gold rush (in the Black Hills), the pacification of the Northern Plains tribes, and railroad land schemes. They didn’t go for the fly fishing.

There were indigenous people in the Dakotas for about 14,000 years, and we know as much about them as we know about other early North American inhabitants. We theorize that they crossed from Asia to Alaska and then spread out following the big game. They’re interesting, but it’s really the much later Plains tribes that capture the imagination.

George Catlin, Buffalo Bulls Back Fat, 1832, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

They were the last holdouts against Anglo settlement, in that strip of the American Plains from North Dakota south to West Texas, and we know about them in part because the technology for sharing knowledge had solidified. We had painters like George Catlin and Karl Bodmer, we had photographers like Edward Curtis and William Irwin, and even while we destroyed them we studied the Plains tribes. They fascinated us. They still fascinate us.

When Europeans got to the Dakotas, there were five major tribal groups: the Mandan, the Hidatsa, the Arikari, the Dakota (including the Lakota and the Nakota), and the Cheyenne (who were forced out of Minnesota into North and South Dakota). The Mandan, along with the Hidatsa and Dakota, were part of the Siouan language groups–the Sioux–and lived along the Upper Missouri. They welcomed Lewis and Clark. Before the European encounter, the Mandan population is estimated to have been 10,000 to 15,000 people. By 1838, after smallpox, the Mandan population was estimated to be 125.

George Catlin, Sha-ko-ka, a Pretty Mandan Girl, 1832, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Aren’t those people stunningly beautiful?

The Hidatsa were closely allied to the Mandan. The Hidatsa also lived along the Missouri River in North Dakota. Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark’s guide, was a Shoshone captured by the Hidatsa. After the smallpox epidemic of the 1830s, the Hidatsa were reduced to about 500 people.

Karl Bodmer, Hidatsa Performing Dog Dance, 1832-34, Print, reprinted Part III of Macimilian, Prince of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832-1834, Vol. XXIV, Cleveland, Ohio, The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1906.

There is nothing so final in our history as the defeat of the Plains tribes, from the surrender of the Comanche war chief Quanah Parker at Fort Sill in 1875 to the massacre of the North Plains Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890. The story makes magnificently difficult history with which to reckon. Why, though, should we ever make history easy? We don’t talk about these people except in the most romantic terms: they are the Lords of the Plains, the Empire of the Summer Moon, semi-nomadic or nomadic people who were among the greatest horsemen who ever lived. How do we not admire them? How do we not suffer their tragedy, and for us white folk, feel guilt for our part in it?

But there it is. That’s history. All we can do is try to understand who they were, good and bad, and who we were, good and bad, and parse through to some better world.

Meanwhile, while the North Dakota tribes were being decimated and confined to reservations, the railroads advertised for land purchasers across Northern Europe and Russia. A friend gave me a copy of Rachel Calof’s Story, written by Ms. Calof in the 1930s as a Yiddish memoir for her children. She is a fine writer, vivid, unromantic, and harsh. Rachel was a 16-year old Jewish girl brought to homestead in North Dakota as an impoverished match-made bride from Ukraine in the 1890s.

Here is what you need to imagine about Rachel: the sparsity of food and fuel or any comfort, the long winter retreat by an extended family (including an evil mother-in-law) into crowded, desperately impoverished conditions, and the unending grind of turning the wild grass plains into farms.

Rachel’s story is Jewish, but I suspect it could have been written about any other North Dakota ethnic group: Swedish, German, Russian . . . There was some Jewish migration to North Dakota before World War I, but they didn’t stay. In 1890, with a total North Dakota population of about 191,000, there were about 1700 Jews. In 2024, with a total population of about 780,000 there are about 400 North Dakota Jews.

Rachel Calof’s family moved back east to Chicago. Winter was too cold. The mother-in-law was too mean. There was an established immigrant community in Chicago that they would become a part of. Rachel spent her last years living apart from her match-made husband. Her mail-order marriage was not a romantic triumph.

Later, much later, North Dakota became a shale oil boomtown. From 2008 to 2014, because of fracking, North Dakota had the lowest unemployment rate in the nation. It also had substantial increases in violent crime and environmental damage to the surface estates, whose owners had no control over how the oil companies drilled. Walking by the Fargo street people–why is Fargo’s downtown so full of street people?– I reckoned that they were the remnants of the North Dakota boom.

Politics

Every major elected state official in North Dakota is currently Republican, both senators are Republican, and the single congressman is Republican. Interestingly, North Dakota had a Democratic U.S. senator as recently as 2019. Its last Democratic governor was 1992.

Donald Trump easily carried North Dakota in 2020, by 65.11%. Only two counties, both predominately Native American, voted Democratic.

Demographics

In 1870, the non-native population of North Dakota was 2,405. By 1890, the total population was 190,983. By 1930 it was 646,872, but by 2010 it had only increased to 672,591, and by 2010 the shale boom had started. From 2010 to 2020 the population increased by 15.8% to 779,094, all because of fracking. It will be interesting to see what happens to North Dakota’s population in the next census. Like as not it will have leveled out again below 700,000.

Until 2010, the North Dakota population was 90% Anglo, and about 5% Native American. Fracking decreased the percentage of the white population by about 7%, to 82.9%. not because the number of Anglos decreased, but because of relatively higher increases in African American, Hispanic, and Asian populations. Native Americans remain at about 5%.

Weather

In January, in the north of the state, the average temperature in North Dakota is 2°. In the south it’s a balmy 17° Farenheit. For at least 50 days a year temperatures in the state’s southwest reach below 0°. That doesn’t factor in wind chill.

I’m sorry. I just don’t know how else to say this. I’m not generally a cursing man, and I don’t curse often, but here there’s reason: it’s fucking cold in North Dakota in winter. I would have no clue of how to deal with 50 days of sub-zero temperatures. You can’t ice fish with a fly rod.

Gear

We took 9-foot 5-weight rods. I took a Winston Air and Kris took an Orvis Helios 3, an ancient, outdated technology rod since Orvis came out with the Helios 4 a couple of months ago. I’m surprised it still works.

We had coldwater floating lines to match the rods. I had leaders tied, but the guides all hated my hand-knotted leaders and replaced them with store-bought knotless leaders. One said my knotted leaders would gather weeds in the water, and that was possibly true, so I didn’t mention that I fished a lot in Southern bass ponds. I’m not sure how to fish unless I’m gathering weeds from the water. My leaders would have worked fine, but if the guides wanted theirs, that’s fine, too.

I fished again with the newish Abel reel my sister gave me when I retired. We took waders and boots but never wore them. All the fishing was out of boats.

Playlist

Here’s what you need to know about putting together a Utah playlist. The Osmonds, the brothers, have at least two greatest hits albums. Donnie Osmond has at least four greatest hits albums. Marie Osmond has two greatest hits albums. Donnie & Marie together have a greatest hits album. I suspect that getting caught in your college dorm listening to any of the songs on any of those albums would have ruined whatever pretense of collegiate coolness you’d managed, and with good reason. The Osmonds were never cool, and time hasn’t changed them. And you can’t put together a Utah playlist without including the Osmonds.

Somehow Mormon clean living and rock music just don’t belong together. Even country music needs whiskey and a divorce to really get cranking. It would take a better man than me to listen to the Osmonds singing One Bad Apple again.

I’m not much of a fan of the Utah band Imagine Dragons, either, though I gather they were fairly recently quite the thing, and may still be. They’re a kind of Las Vegas lounge act aspiring to alternative rock. On the plus side, I convinced myself that Green River by Creedence was about Utah’s Green River, and stuck it on the list. That’s always good for a sing-along. And just to prove how much you should discount my opinion, I think the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” may be just about the best thing ever.

Here I raise my Ebenezer,
Here by Thy great help I've come.
And I hope by Thy good pleasure
Safely to arrive at home. 

Robert Robertson, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, 1758.

Otto Eliger, Stone of Ebenezer, engraving.

The Arizona list included Charles Mingus and Linda Ronstadt, and Ronstadt became our go to when all else failed. There was also Marty Robbins singing El Paso, and that one woman from Fleetwood Mac whose voice is like a cheese grater. I never could keep the members of Fleetwood Mac straight, and was surprised when one was from Arizona.

Books and Movies

I’ve already talked about Stagecoach (which is supposed to take place in Arizona, but at some of its best is filmed in Utah’s Monument Valley). I would add that one of the greatest quirky movies ever, The Sandlot, was filmed in Salt Lake City. Who knew?

Arizona also has a penchant for quirky movies: Raising Arizona, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (filmed in Arizona, but set in San Dimas), Little Miss Sunshine, Thelma and Louise . . . All of them are good but peculiar films. 3:10 to Yuma with Glen Ford and Van Heflin is not quirky, but it is terrific. The 1957 version is supposed to be better than the remake.

Glen Ford, 3:10 to Yuma, Columbia Pictures, 1957.

I was curious about the history of the Church of Latter Day Saints, and over the years had collected bits and pieces of its history, but never in an organized way. Before the trip I read American Zion by Benjamin E. Park, which was readable, thorough, and I thought very fair. Park alerts the reader early on that he’s LDS, but his belief doesn’t intrude on good history. Towards the end of the book I got curious about Park, who turned out to be an assistant professor at Sam Houston State, just up the road in Huntsville, Texas. I was very proud, like I’d just discovered the book was written by an old friend.

I had bought a copy of Roadside Geology of Arizona for the drive through Arizona, but forgot to bring it from Houston. It was sorely missed. We bought a copy of Roadside Geology of Utah on the road, and it was a great investment. There’s a lot of geology to be curious about.

Restaurants and Hotels

The last time I wandered around in Northern Arizona and Southern Utah was nearly 40 years ago, and I’m certain that the only thing we ate for a week were Navajo tacos. Kris still hasn’t recovered but that was ok with me. I love fry bread, and I love tacos, and the combination is excellent.

Something had happened though over the years, and fry bread was harder to find. I finally found fry bread at at a food truck in Colorado near Mesa Verde. The fry bread may have been harder to find, but it was still great.

I hit the Navajo taco jackpot at a wonderful place, Amigo Cafe in Kayenta, Arizona, just after you turn north for Monument Valley. It was midday and there was a wait for a table, and waiting we had a strained interaction with a drunk guy with meth teeth. He told Kris she was beautiful, which is true, but then he told me I was beautiful.

Inside the restaurant though was wonderful, and the food was lovely. There was a gleaming new espresso machine, that looked like in a pinch it could substitute for NASA launch control. It was a fine place, and definitely a step up from the roadside cafes I remember from 40 years before. You should go out of your way to eat at Amigo Cafe next time you’re in Kayenta. I bet breakfast there is spectacular.

A Navajo taco with queso fresco really is the very thing. What a great place.

Near Lees Ferry we stayed two nights at the Cliff Dwellers Lodge and ate both nights at the Cliff Dwellers Restaurant. We also ate breakfast there once, and they made our lunch the day we fished. There weren’t a lot of other places to choose from, but it was perfectly decent food. There was also a fly shop, but it had seen better days and now mostly sold fishing shirts with a Lees Ferry Anglers logo. This was handy though since I had left all of Kris’s fishing shirts hanging in a closet in Durango.

At Dutch John we stayed at the Red Canyon Lodge, which also had a pretty good restaurant. We sat on the deck and shared a bottle of wine with hummingbirds. Hummingbirds are one and all heavy drinkers.

We flew out of Salt Lake City. Who knew that Salt Lake City could have such a ridiculous street layout, such ridiculous street names, and so many street people? The pioneers started from scratch in the middle of the desert, and with active imaginations and a blank golden tablet they should have done better. Most streets are apparently named a number, and there is nothing more baffling than finding yourself at the corner of 4500 East Street and 700 North Street, or some such. We may grossly mispronounce San Felipe here in Houston, but at least the corner of Kirby and San Felipe means something.

Before our flight we had breakfast with our friend Tom, who from time to time has given us excellent restaurant advice, and who moved to Salt Lake from Milwaukee last year with his husband Sal. Tom isn’t a drinking man, but he is radically intense with his coffee, so he is a heathen gay coffee drinker living in the heart of the Mormon world. I think he likes it, but I suspect there is some culture shock. Salt Lake City should welcome its new citizen by putting Tom in charge of renaming the streets.

Where we ate breakfast, Finn’s, there were three lovely young women, significantly tatted, at the next table over. I kept wanting to ask if they were Mormon, but didn’t. Kris should be proud of my restraint.

Fly Fish Food.

We drove a bit out of our way to visit a fly fishing shop in Orem, Utah–Fly Fish Food. While I can find pretty good saltwater tying supplies here in Houston, the tiny stuff used for trout flies can be hit or miss, and I end up buying a lot of stuff by mail order. One of the places I order from is Fly Fish Food.

I have been to a lot of fly fishing shops, from Vermont to California. Some of them are pretty famous among fly tiers. In person some have been disappointing. Fly Fish Food is one of the few shops I’d go out of my way to go back to. They must have a thousand packages of different sized fishhooks, and all the feathers from all the chickens in the world. How strange it is that they’re in what seems to me an out-of-the mainstream place like Orem.

Guitar

I hauled a guitar from Houston to Utah, and played quite a bit, mostly Bach. I would have missed it if it hadn’t come along.

This is about bugs. Big bugs. Ugly bugs. Bugs that swarm and eat whatever is in their path. These bugs have disgusting bug orgies and threaten human civilization, or at least threatened human civilization that one time.

Mormon crickets are not, strictly speaking, crickets, but that’s a little like saying that brook trout are not, strictly speaking, trout. It’s true enough, but not important. Mormon crickets are a bug, and they look like a big cricket. If you need to be precise they are a katydid, and sometimes in the spring–not necessarily every spring but some springs–they swarm. Their reproductive strategy is orgies.

The swarming males secrete a spermataphore, which is both sperm and nearly a third of a boy’s body mass. That secreted body mass is food for the girls. The spermataphore is called by entomologists–I kid you not–a nuptial gift. The females eat the nuptial gift and are both fed and fertilized. With every nuptial gift the girls have dinner with their date.

The females bury their now-fertilized eggs in the soil and march off to die. It’s a short but romantic life, but Kris wanted to know how the females got pregnant through their digestive tract? All I can say is that Many are the Wonders of Our World, Many are the Mysteries of God’s Plan, and all in all it’s probably a necessary quirk of evolution. These are big ugly girls, and the boys aren’t handsome either. Nobody’s gonna kiss ’em. They gotta take their romance as it comes.

Mormon crickets are more than two inches long. When they swarm they are everywhere you look. They can’t fly, thank goodness, because flying swarms of Mormon crickets would be a real horror, but what they can do is creep through the sage and down to the river, crawl along through the brush and the grass and the pathways, wander bankside from hither to yon, and best of all (and most relevant here) they can fall into the water.

Mormon crickets look a lot like Gulf Coast water bugs, American roaches, but even the roaches aren’t as big as the crickets. The roaches may not even be as hideous, though until now I’d have bet that every year water bugs were going to be the county grand champion of hideous. Oh my goodness Mormon crickets are ugly. Big and ugly. Hideous.

But not to trout. In the water they are to trout a DoorDash of protein, tasty and efficient for any trout big enough to swallow a three inch bug.

And this brings us to the ugly truth about fly fishing for trout: it’s not actually about casting skill, or beautiful rivers, or even stylish fishing clothes from Orvis or Simms . . . It’s first and foremost about what trout eat, and what trout eat, first and foremost, are bugs. If you can make a fly look like the bug that trout are eating, and make it float somewhat naturally, then you will like as not catch feeding trout.

Artificial flies can be pretty enough, but they mostly mimic bugs, and most bugs for most of their lives are just plain damn ugly. Of course ugliness is in the eyes of the beholder, and finding a bunch of big ugly bugs committing mass suicide by throwing themselves into a river screaming help! help! help! is to a trout a beautiful thing. It should also be a beautiful thing to every fly fisher.

That’s why I am so enamored with Mormon crickets. How tasty they are to trout! How beautiful they are to me!

We started fishing early, before the crickets really started moving, and our guide, Eli Koles with Western Rivers Flyfisher Guides, first rigged my rod with an underwater nymph below a surface foam cricket. I caught fish, mostly on the nymph, and they were good fish, biggish browns. Then around lunchtime the crickets got active. Eli parked the drift boat at the bank, and we watched the crickets march along in twos or threes or half-dozens. It made for a queasy lunch. These are some mighty ugly bugs.

After lunch Eli cut off our nymphs and in the afternoon we only fished with big foam cricket imitations. Everything was crickets. All of our fishing was on the surface.

I fished my foam cricket in softer current downriver below the boat. I don’t know what Kris was doing. I was watching my cricket, not Kris, not Eli, not the shoreline . . . it was just me and that cricket floating together down the river. Did Kris catch fish? No idea. Watching that bit of floating brown foam 30 feet below the boat was all I was good for.

And because the flies were so big we weren’t catching mediocre fish. The browns that came up for crickets were, I swear, all north of 18 inches. I caught one rainbow, and it was easily 20″. No no no no. It was easily 21″. It’s getting bigger as we speak.

If you read much about fly fishing–and only baseball can match fly fishing for the ruination of good paper–you will sooner or later read something about the Green River below the Flaming Gorge Dam, and you will read about the three river sections named, imaginatively, A, B, and C.

A is closest to the dam and is about 7 miles long. To float A, you put in close to the dam. B is about eight miles long, and is, believe it or not, immediately downriver from A. We fished B because, after I’d carefully studied the qualities of the river and considered the various alternatives, Eli told us where we were going to fish. We fished B.

C is furthest from the dam and has the fewest fish, but it’s also the least fished. It’s about 11 miles long.

My suspicion is that the A, B, and C designations don’t really have much to do with the peculiarities of the river or the fishing, but everything to do with where somebody some years ago built reasonably spaced boat ramps. The truer designations would be “the part of the river below Boat Ramp One, Two, or Three.” Unless you’re familiar with the river, then once you get out of sight of the dam you won’t know where you are anyway, and as for fishing, I’m convinced that at least when there are Mormon crickets, anywhere on the Green River is everywhere the best fishing in the world.

Eli told us the story of the Miracle of the Crickets, which was that one time that Mormon crickets threatened civilization. Ok, it wasn’t all of civilization, but it was 1848 Mormon civilization in Salt Lake Valley. Mormons came to Salt Lake in 1846. In 1848, along with their second spring’s crops, the Mormon crickets came. Having properly filled out the paper work to qualify as a Biblical plague, the Mormon crickets started eating everything in sight.

The newly-settled Mormons faced starvation. The indigenous occupants of Western Utah, the Goshute, Paiute, and Shoshone, almost certainly included roasted and dried crickets in their diet, and would have seen the cricket invasion exactly like brown trout saw the cricket invasion: a God-send of tasty morsels. To the Mormons though eating crickets was like drinking Coca-Cola, or worse. There are emergencies when drinking Coca-Cola is permissible to Mormons, but none of the Mormons seem to have considered eating the crickets.

Then the miracle happened. California gulls came out of nowhere and gorged on crickets, then regurgitated the indigestible parts and gorged some more. That’s why seagulls are the state bird of Utah.

To be honest I wouldn’t have eaten a cricket either. At least I wouldn’t have eaten a cricket outside of a hip Oaxacan restaurant.

The Green was particularly high when we floated–I think over 4,000 cfs against a normal flow of around 900. The high flow had nothing to do with rain, but was purposefully released to wash invasive smallmouth from their spawning beds. It’s a smart strategy, and Eli didn’t think that the high flow affected fishing. There were other guide boats on the river with us, and sometimes I would watch them across the river, still fishing nymphs under bobbers. What the hell were they doing? Why were they fishing tiny underwater nymphs when there were all these beautiful, giant, edible bugs on the water?

Eli said that Western River Flyfishers emphasized floating flies instead of nymphs when possible, and seeing other anglers still fishing nymphs made me really happy we’d lucked into Eli. Eli and all those beautiful, giant, edible bugs.

At day’s end when Eli rowed us across the river from the far bank to the final take-out, he told us to skate our flies across the current. It was the very last possible fishing of the day, and it was a fishing method that is guaranteed to work only when you read about somebody else doing it. This time it worked for me. My fly got slammed. I set the hook. I played the fish to the boat and then Eli released it. It was a great fish.

Do you see that photo right there? Do you know why that is the greatest fishing photo ever taken? I, of course, am the angler, but that’s not what’s important. I probably could have tucked in my shirt a bit better, and my sun buff doesn’t really match my shoes. My pants are a bit droopy. My rod is bent, but that’s not what’s important, either. What’s important is the guy standing in the water by the drift boat at the take-out. Look at that guy’s face. I have been waiting for that jealous face my entire life.

And that guy, that guy right there, had to watch. Not that I would ever gloat.

Hee hee hee.

Man, I could have kissed those beautiful bugs.