We took too much stuff. Some of it was necessary; waders, boots, rain gear, clothes, wading staffs; and some of it just made us happy; 5- and 6-weight rods, reels, floating lines, my guitar, running shoes, and boxes of flies; but it all adds up, both in bulk and in pounds. The whole of it makes getting through the airport awkward and fraught. As usual when we fish with freshwater guides, we never touched the flies we brought, and the guides had great rods we could have used. Freshwater guides always favor their own flies, and most of them have good equipment to lend.
Saltwater guides are different. A lot of our saltwater fishing is done in places that are poorer than the US, in Mexico, Belize, the Bahamas, Cuba. The guides have a boat, lunch,1 knowledge of the water, and very good eyes. Anything else, flies, rods, reels, tippet, we have to bring.
There is an excruciating moment on those foreign saltwater trips when the guide opens my fly box and passes judgment. I once had a guide in Belize reject all, every one, todos los dias, of my tarpon flies because I’d crimped the barbs on the hooks. I came home and threw them all away, then I tied dozens more with un-crimped barbs.
One side of one of my three Andros Island fly boxes. I’ve really pared back my luggage after Montana.
We are supposed to go this week with a large group of guys (and Kris) to fish for bonefish at Andros Island in the Bahamas. After Montana I vowed I would never again travel with more than a pair of swim trunks and wading boots. Packing for the Bahamas I’m considerably over budget. Of course I’m also watching the National Hurricane Center (is there anyone left at the National Hurricane Center?) to see whether Hurricane Melissa is going to cancel our trip. It just ravaged Jamaica, a bit south and east of Andros.
But back to Montana, Kris once again didn’t like her ancient Orvis Rocky Mountain 6-weight. She fished instead with the guide’s Orvis Recon 6-weight. Recons I swear are guides’ favorite rods. They’re a bunch cheaper than the top-of-the-line Orvis Helios, but whenever I’ve fished with a guide’s Recon I’ve always been surprised at how much I like them. I know what’s under the Christmas tree for Kris! And to think some girls might not appreciate a new fly rod for Christmas.
Hotelsand Restaurants
I’ve already talked about our learning experience from a week in an RV, and our lifetime experience from two nights at Old Faithful Inn. Other than that we stayed in airport hotels — a Holiday Inn Express and whatnots — charmless and functional. They did what they were supposed to do, which was to get us to and from the airport.
In Bozeman we actually drove past a number of renovated 60s motels, and I really wished we’d stayed at one instead of at the airport. Next time.
While we camped in the RV, breakfast and dinner were in camp, lunch on the river, and all were prepared for us by Justin the camp manager. They were uniformly great. We should eat so well at home.
In Yellowstone you’re captive to the food program of the park concessionaire. No matter how different the setting or how distant one from the other, the lunch menu in the park’s scattered snack bars is always the same. For some reason I kept ordering the vegan black bean burgers, and they contributed greatly to the atmosphere.
Evenings in the park had a broader range of food choices. The best restaurant in the park is supposedly at the Yellowstone Lake Hotel, so of course we never ate there. The dining room in Old Faithful Inn is very pretty, but the food is what I’ve imagined the food on a cruise ship would be, a relatively expensive prime rib-focused buffet with a lot of old folk like me lined up at the trough. It was fine, but it was expensive, and there was pressure to get one’s money’s worth. We had nice conversations with our Romanian waitress, Barbie, about how she and her Romanian boyfriend had made it to Yellowstone to work for the summer.2
We ate at a steak and burger place in Bozeman, Montana Ale Works, and it did have good ale. In Helena we ate at Bella Roma, which is at the edge of a lively pedestrian zone, so we saw a bit of Helena on a Saturday night. The last night in Bozeman we ate at Revelry, and it was great, with great service, a good menu, and an observation-worthy crowd. It seened the opposite of the Yellowstone dining room crowd — young and hip, just like Kris, instead of old and fat, just like me.
We never ate any Montana donuts. I guess we’ll have to go back.
The Montana State Capitol
On the way out of Helena we drove by the Montana State Capitol. From the rotunda surrounding the base of the dome you can see four paintings that sum up Montana history: a trapper, a Plains Indian, a cowboy, and a miner. All they needed to have achieved the completest thing was a portrait of Anaconda Copper and a fishing guide .
Fly Shops
Fly shops in Montana are as common as convenience stores on an interstate. It is a fly-fishing consumer’s dream.
Playlist
There are a lot of songs about Montana, but fewer songs from Montana. Nicolette Larson was born in Helena, but she didn’t really grow up there, and she died too young. Emylou Harris wrote and recorded “Montana Cowgirl,” and also a nice duet of “Montana Skies” with John Denver. The Gypsy Kings recorded a song, “Montana,” but I’m reasonably certain that their “Montana” is Spanish for mountain and has nothing to do with the state. Jimmy Buffett wrote “Livingston Saturday Night” from the wild days when Buffett, Thomas McGuane, Margot Kidder, Jim Harrison, Russell Chatham, Peter Fonda, and Richard Brautigan established Livingston as Key West North.
“I Ride an Old Paint” is the best song about Montana. There’s a New Age pianist, Phillip Aaberg, who’s very pleasant to drive to. Jeffrey Ament of Pearl Jam is from Havre, Montana. Merle Haggard’s “Big City” has something to do with Montana, but I can’t listen to that song because if I do then I can’t stop repeating “so-called social security” over and over in my head.
“The Red-Headed Stranger” is from Blue Rock, Montana. “Long-legged Hanna” is from Butte. “Oh Shenandoah” is our loveliest folk song, and while it doesn’t specifically mention Montana, it does mention the wide Missouri, which gives it credence on the playlist of any state that the Missouri touches.
Guitar
I took my 70s Kohno and added some new stickers to my guitar case. I played a lot, especially in the evenings, and I don’t think I bothered anyone, much. In keeping with my new austerity program, I’m debating whether to take a guitar to the Bahamas. I’ll really miss it if I don’t, but there you are. I will not miss lugging it through the airports.
In the States, saltwater guides usually don’t have lunch, and the old line about guides in the Florida Keys is that you’re expected to take them lunch. On one of my favorite trips for redfish in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, the guide brought two pounds of boiled crawfish. The fishing was a bit sparse, but we spent the day eating crawfish and shucking the shells into the bay. ↩︎
Barbie looked just enough like Scarlett Johansson to make her a fascinating conversationalist regardless of what she was saying, though I wonder if Barbie is a common Romanian name. I suspect she adopted a waitressing name that amused her. ↩︎
Immediately after our weeklong Montana road trip, Kris and I made our second trip of the summer to Wyoming, this time into Yellowstone National Park. It was my third trip to Yellowstone, Kris’s second, and for me this trip was meant to take care of two bits of unfinished business: I wanted to stay at the Old Faithful Inn, and I had never caught a fish in Yellowstone.
When I first visited Yellowstone, circa 1961, I was five, and was probably better qualified as bait than a fisherman. Other than some state capitols and the Mormon Tabernacle, the Old Faithful Inn was likely the largest building I’d ever seen. It was certainly the most magnificent. We didn’t stay there.
I saw it again circa 1994 when our children were small, after having seen a lot more of the world, but it was still one of the most magnificent buildings I’d ever seen. We didn’t stay there that time either.
This time we spent the night, two nights actually. It was a bit more than $600 a night for a cramped room with a good shower and a cranky, sticking dresser. I hurt my hand when I tried to close the dresser drawer with a good whack. My hand didn’t take kindly to the whacking and the drawer remained stuck. Forcefulness is probably not one of my strong points.
I tell you the cost because of how disproportionate it was to the service. For $600 a night no one made our bed the second day, and there was nary a chocolate on the pillow. Towels dropped on the floor stayed on the floor. Still, after all the busloads of tourists were gone, you could walk into the Old Faithful Inn lobby and sit in a chair and have the view all your own, well, all your own along with a few dozens of others, but that was nothing like the hundreds of others packed into the lobby during the day. The next morning walking out of the hotel at seven I got to see Old Faithful serendipitously erupt. That stuff made the stay worth the money. Once.
Back to fishing.
At age 40 I had a midlife crisis and started tying flies. Over the long haul, going ahead and buying a Ferrari would probably have been cheaper, but of course I thought by tying my own flies I would save money. At least if I’d bought the car it would have been paid for by now.
I also started reading everything I could find about fly fishing. I read whole volumes with titles like Caddis! and Reading a Trout Stream! This was before the internet, when there were still books and magazines. The local Orvis store had shelves of fly-fishing books for sale. None of that reading taught me how to cast, or even how to cast better, but it did give me a good geography lesson as to where I was supposed to fish.
For most anglers then fly fishing was still principally about trout, with some salmon thrown in for exotica, and while Trout by Ray Bergman isn’t mentioned much now, it was then considered holy writ. It was first published in 1931, revised in 1951, and is allegedly one of the best-selling sports books ever published. It was not only impossibly long, 482 pages in the current edition, it was also dense, and even after I waded through I had poor notions of what Mr. Bergman was talking about.
I remember three things about the book. First, I was stupidly proud of finishing it, even though to me it was incomprehensible. I suppose I hoped finishing it would make me a better angler. It didn’t. I got a lot more angling advice out of the second half of War and Peace, though probably a bit less out of Heidegger’s Being and Time. They were both incomprehensible too, so there could well have been angling advice.
Second, illustrated color plates of flies are very pretty, and I can study them for hours. I mostly remember Trout for the pictures. Trout has a lot of mighty fine colored engraved plates, 17 or 18, and because Bergman was a completest, they included plates of pretty trout lures for conventional tackle. They didn’t include plates of cheese balls or salmon eggs.
Third, after finishing Trout, I really wanted to fish the Firehole River. The one substantive thing I took from Trout was that Bergman had fished the park when fishing the park was probably more exotic than fishing the Seychelles is now, and his descriptions of fishing park rivers were thrilling, almost religious experiences, or at least they caught a lot of fish. And the Firehole was his favorite and the most exotic of the lot.
So on this trip we fished the Firehole, and then we fished the Gibbon and then Nez Perce Creek. We didn’t catch much. It sounds rushed, cramming three rivers into a single day, but it wasn’t. The three rivers are reasonably close together, and we drove some, walked some, and then fished each for a couple of hours. I caught two tiny trout, one non-native brook trout and one non-native brown, not much for all the effort and nothing of any size. Kris didn’t catch anything, but she would have fished the same river bend on the Firehole all day if it hadn’t been for an intrusive buffalo.
Away from the parking areas there were no other anglers, though we did keep seeing buffalo.
We had just spent five days fishing with Montana Anglers in Montana’s Madison River area, so we were both fishing pretty well. For Yellowstone we also hired a guide from Montana Anglers, Will Kyle. Boats aren’t allowed on Yellowstone Park rivers, so you have to wade, and on our pre-trip telephone call, Will asked us if we could hike a bit. I didn’t know what to tell him. I’m in reasonably good shape for an old guy, and Kris is tougher than me, but if Will was going to hike us ten miles into the backcountry we probably wouldn’t come home happy. Will was considerate though, and it wasn’t ten miles. It was a comfortable bit, way less than a mile, but once we walked away from the cars Yellowstone was a different place. There was nobody there but me, Kris, Will, and the buffalo.
This was as close as Kris would get to the buffalo. I made sure I stood behind her.
We fished two dry flies all day, with a size 14 or so Parachute Adams trailing a larger indicator fly that looked to me like a size 10 or so Parachute Adams. You can’t go wrong with a Parachute Adams.
It’s rare any more to fish dry flies for a day, flies that float on the surface of the water. It’s not that it’s really harder to fish dry flies (though on the surface it’s easier to see your mistakes), but they are usually not so sure of catching fish. Fish take most of their meals underwater, not on the surface, and dragging a couple of nymphs underwater will more likely catch fish than floating a fly on the surface.
That said, dry flies are more fun to fish. They’re prettier, and seeing a trout break the surface and take a fly is as good as fly fishing gets. We were wading. We were fishing dry flies. We were seeing some fish. We were also in one of the world’s most beautiful places.
You always remember best the fish that you don’t land, and there was a moment when Will and I were standing on a bank above a dark pool watching my flies and saw a tiny bright trout — tiny? it was a monster! — shoot out of the dark, grab at my fly, and then disappear again without taking. We both laughed — shoot, I likely squealed with delight like a wee bairn. It was absolutely better that the fish was never hooked.
The Firehole flows through active geyser basins, and it gets its name from the steam rising from geysers and hot pots along the banks of the river. There are apocryphal stories about anglers catching a Firehole trout and then cooking it on the hook in a neighboring hot pot. Of course now the Firehole is all catch and release, so don’t do that.
The second river we fished was the Gibbon. The Gibbon was named after a member of the 1872 Yellowstone survey expedition, and it joins the Firehole and forms the Madison River at Madison Junction. The third stream, Nez Perce Creek, is named because in 1877 the Nez Perce led by Chief Joseph cut through the newly designated park on their run from the US Cavalry.
Sometimes in these late days I feel just a hint of what the Nez Perce must have felt when they took off from Oregon towards Canada. For the first time in my life I wonder from time to time why I stay in Texas, where we seem to be constantly striving for more than our allocated quota of meanness. I have always believed Texans to be inclined toward kindness and generosity and friendliness, but these days I’m not so sure.
And after seeing all 50 states, I’m more confused by us Americans than when Kris and I started. Still, having wandered for a day in Yellowstone, just watching the water with no greater aim than catching a fish, I do know this: We as a people did right with Yellowstone. We can have unalloyed pride in our absolute rightness when we formed the park.
I’m sure that someone could point out to me many times we as a people have done pretty good with other stuff, but I suspect that the times when we were absolutely right are not that common. There’s Yellowstone, the Emancipation Proclamation, the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, the First and Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, the Clean Water Act, and maybe the Declaration of Independence. In those things we were as right as anyone anywhere has ever been.
Mostly though we muddle through, just like our ancestors muddled through, and when we do the right thing with the right will and humility in the midst of the muddle it should be celebrated and revered. Yellowstone is one of those places for celebration and reverence.
And maybe we catch fish, maybe not, but there is no better place to stand in North America than in the Firehole River, away from the crowds, watching tiny trout slap at flies floating on pure waters.
And now I’ve caught my Yellowstone fish. I surely hope that Caldera don’t blow before I get to go back there.
Montana was supposed to be our final state, but I screwed up. I kept delaying New Jersey, so now it’s our last state. We may not make it to New Jersey this year, so we may not finish all 50 states until 2026, but it doesn’t matter. Like the baseball pundits say, this is a marathon, not a sprint. Short of Divine Intervention, Global Warming, or the Department of War, we will finish, but when we finish is a bit up in the air.
It’s ok. After all, I’m sure that if I’d really thought about it, I would have chosen New Jersey as our final state over Montana. Who wouldn’t rather go to New Jersey? There’s no Real Housewives of Montana. The pizza is better in New Jersey. Montana doesn’t have the Sopranos, though to quote Tony Soprano, chi sono in Montana molti altos. 1
Montana does have really beautiful rivers loaded with fish flowing through really beautiful valleys surrounded by really beautiful mountains, and I’m sure if you looked hard enough you could find some ok pizza.
If you don’t fly fish, you might not know that Montana is a fishing Mecca. The 2020 census counted 42 residents of Craig, Montana. For those 42 residents I counted three fly shops all packed wall to wall with interesting and costly fly-fishing bibelots.2 In 42-resident Craig I counted at least 43 drift boats, maybe 72 if you throw in the rafts. You can’t cast a wooly bugger in Montana without foul-hooking a drift boat, fishing guide, fly shop, or craft beer with a fishy name. You could spend a week just traveling from Montana fly shop to Montana fly shop, and you could spend enough dinero shopping in those fly shops to earn your dedicated angler badge with nary a line cast.
Kris did some shopping. She bought a scarf in rainbow trout colors, and some stickers for my guitar case.
We did cast lines, too, in three parts of the Madison River–twice in the upper Madison above Ennis Reservoir3 and once below. We fished the Jefferson River and then the Missouri below Craig. We fished five days in a row, pretty much all day long every day, and then on the sixth day we rested.4 You could almost say we spent those five days fishing the same river, since the Missouri starts where the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin Rivers meet. We were always fishing the Missouri, more or less.
On previous trips we had fished the Missouri in North Dakota and at least crossed it in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri . . . In fact, the only state where both us and the Missouri wandered but failed to meet was South Dakota. From the Black Hills it was always to our north and east, cutting a line through the state’s dead center and then twisting east. In all those not-Montana states the Missouri is usually big and fat and cloudy, as if it were working up enough grit to join the Big Muddy. In Montana it is clear and clean and fresh from mountain snow.
All through the Missouri’s path there were the reminders of Lewis and Clark, who travelled the Missouri from St. Louis to its source in Montana before they crossed the Rockies.5 Lewis and Clark got to Montana before us, and they probably caught more fish than us, too.
Sacajawea Hotel, Three Rivers, Montana
But we caught plenty. We fished with Montana Angler, on a strange and expensive week in RVs. It was supposed to be the finale, so expense be damned, and for me it was also my chance to seriously fish the Montana promised land. Montana Angler would choose five rivers to fish, choose campsites, provide the RVs, a cook and drivers,6 drift boats, flies, leaders, and fishing guides. We would show up. We didn’t even have to bring rods if we didn’t want to, though of course we did. It’s stupid, but over time rods become very personal, plus you should never miss an opportunity to lug a fly rod through an airport. It is such a manly thing to do.
On the days we fished we were up in the morning around six, were given coffee and fed breakfast, and then carted off by a guide with a drift boat to fish a new river for the day. They brought lunch. They brought flies. They brought us. After a day’s fishing we were brought back to a different campground in the evening and they gave us appetizers, drinks, and then fed us dinner. It was serious glamping, and we were really only left to our own devices for showers and getting into bed at night. It was strange not because it wasn’t a great adventure, but because for six nights and five days it was stress-free travel. Lewis and Clark should have had it so easy.
Mheberger, map of the Madison River created with Global Watersheds web app, Wikipedia. At the top of the map is the confluence of the Jefferson and Madison (and just a bit further north the Gallatin) to form the Missouri.
Our friends, Shelley and Mark Marmon, went with us. Mark is well-known among Houston fly fishers as a casting instructor and freshwater guide, particularly for carp–a current it-girl for fly fishing–and we’ve known Shelley since law school. Shelley only wants to fish for trout, and every other fly fisher we know in Houston seems mostly to want to fish saltwater. Saltwater is where only a relative few freshwater trout go for their gap year. This was Shelley’s chance for a week of unremitting troutiness.
Whatever the fish, there are lots of different ways to travel to fly fish. You can drive to a farm pond and spend a pleasant hour catching bluegill. You can drive twelve hours, spend an unpleasant night trying to sleep in the the front seat of your car, and then the next morning wade into a strange river hoping you’ve picked the right spot. You can fly first class and spend a lot of money to stay at a five-star lodge and be driven or boated or flown to a river or saltwater flat to fish. We’ve done all of those things. This trip was like a lodge on wheels, or even more like a river tent camp on wheels, and Montana Angler did a great job putting it together.7
Kris and I have talked a good bit about buying an RV–I suspect it’s impossible to love road trips and be of a certain age and not consider buying an RV. Who hasn’t coveted an Airstream, and what adventure isn’t promised by a Winnebago Revel? What we learned from a week in RVs was that I am not cut out for the Van Life. RVs are either manageable on the road but a bit cramped inside, or if not a bit cramped should only be driven by retired long-haul truckers. Frankly, I figure that I’ve spent at least a year of my life sleeping in tents, and if I need to stay in a campground tents are just fine by me. Tents are cozy. You don’t have to insure a tent.
That said, there are surely people who would love the mechanics of staying in an RV, and for anyone who fly fishes who is also considering an RV, I would highly recommend spending a week on the Montana Angler trip. If you haven’t RV’d before (as we had not), I suspect you would fill in the blanks, good and bad. And then at the end of the week you could either just walk away or head toot sweet to your nearest friendly RV dealer.
I suspect our next trip will likely involve a fishing lodge. You can meet a lot of interesting people in a fishing lodge.
Shelley and Mark in Tim’s drift boat, demonstrating the proper Houstonian huddling technique for the freezing 60° weather.
We had brought along our own interesting people, but we met some too, including our guides, Carter Capute and Tim Patella. Both were young, fishy guys.8 We fished four days with Carter, and one with Tim. The Marmons, on the other hand, fished four days with Tim and one day with Carter–funny how that worked out. There was no preference involved, unless it was on the guides’ part, or maybe poor Carter had pulled the short straw. Both guides were great, knowledgeable, and both were good company in the camp and on the river.
The Rivers were each different. The Missouri was wide,9 mossy, and crowded. The Jefferson was small, less than 30 yards across I think, and on the day we fished the Jefferson we saw no other boats. We caught the most fish on the Madison, both the lower and the upper, and on the day we got out of the drift boat to wade in the Madison I reconfirmed that wading is my favorite way to fish. There is just something about wading in a river that is so childlike, purposeless, and mesmerizing. Fishing from a drift boat has the virtue of being lazier, there’s someone else to do most of the work for you, and it’s safer for us old folks, but walking into a river is just the completest thing.10
All four of us caught fish. As I mentioned, Mark discovered long ago that you could catch carp on the fly in Houston bayous, so he had a special affinity for mountain whitefish. Like carp, whitefish are often considered a trash fish. Historically trout anglers have hated whitefish, and I have never understood why. They are plentiful, fun to catch, are a salmonid just like the beloved trouts and chars and salmon, are native to their waters, and are a predictor of environmental quality. I stood in the Madison and caught eight whitefish in a row, some up to 20 inches, and I caught them with glee. After all, eight whitefish in a row was certain to put me well ahead of Mark for the week’s unofficial whitefish tourney. Not that Mark knew there was a whitefish tourney, and not that I was counting.
We fished with a bead-headed nymph under a crawfish imitation, often with added weight to get the flies deep. I thought about using what I use at home to imitate crawfish, but could never work up the nerve–guide-confidence is a big part of my confidence when I’m fishing new places. The leaders were 5x or so, and were variants from anything I’d ever fished with. In addition to a large floating indicator/bobber, they included a bright orange two-foot bit of monofilament at the fly line that served as an additional indicator.
Because the rivers we fished are fed principally by snowmelt and by September were seasonally shallow, the guides told us not to mend, but to let the fly line belly in the current to stay tight to the fly and to impart dibs and dabs of movement to the big crayfish patterns. After 30 years of being taught to mend to keep from dragging the fly, it was almost painful to leave the line alone. Don’t tell Carter and Tim, but most of the time I went ahead and mended anyway, especially when I was in the back of the drift boat out of their direct gaze. I’m certain they didn’t notice, and never once thought why can’t that idiot follow my instructions.
We never fished dry flies. I had expected in early fall that we’d be able to fish grasshopper patterns on the surface, and I’d brought a small box of my favorites. Carter and Tim told us though that this fall there weren’t enough hoppers for the trout to key on them. Apparently there had been a late freeze in June, and this year’s crop of grasshoppers was decimated by the freeze. It was a shame, because I love to fish with grasshopper flies. They’re big and I can see them, and I had purposefully chosen September because of the likelihood of hoppers.
This week in the journal Nature11 there was an article about the changes in fish populations caused by warming rivers. Every angler knows that rivers are warming. For fly fishers global warming is measured in higher afternoon water temperatures, and it has changed the months when we fish. July and August, which used to be prime, are now often confined on cold water rivers to mornings. In rivers like Montana’s, the study reported that with warming, fish populations were diminished overall, and while the fish were often larger, there were fewer smaller fish.
Whether it was because of Montana, good guiding, or climate change, that was consistent with what we saw. We didn’t catch a lot of small fish, but plenty of fish that I considered large, 18 inches or larger. We didn’t just catch mountain whitefish, either. We caught plenty of browns and rainbows. In fact we caught everything we might have wanted except for a native cutthroat. We even caught native whitefish.
Now if we could just get to New Jersey, where the real fishing happens.
Properly it’s chi sono in Montana molti alti, “in Montana there are many highs,” not chi sono molti altos, but then it wouldn’t be a stupid joke about Tony Soprano. You’ll just have to suffer for my art, and also for my Italian. ↩︎
I have only seen the word bibelot in print once, 40 years ago in Henry James’s ThePortrait of a Lady. I’ve wanted to use it ever since, this was my chance, and I took it. Sorry. ↩︎
There were at least five fly shops in the town of Ennis, population 917. ↩︎
The seventh day we went fishing again, but that’s a different story. ↩︎
It was Lewis and Clark who gave Montana rivers their governmental names. Jefferson, of course, was President, Madison Secretary of State, Smith Secretary of the Navy, and Gallatin Secretary of the Treasury. The political names came in a rush, just before they got to the Rockies, It was as though they suddenly recalled that they were on one of the first governmental boondogles, and that they needed to pay homage to the politicos back home. Before Montana, Lewis and Clark had relied on whim, Indian names, events, members of the Corps of Discovery, and crushes on girls back home to pick place names. The political sops came in one great gush, and its fun to work out what river is who. ↩︎
In addition to our drivers, Justin Helfer was our camp manager and cook, and Tyler Orszulak was the chief factotum. The food was always great, our beds were always made. ↩︎
From what I can tell Montana Angler is one of the largest (if not the largest) Montana angling operations, and the RV trip is only one of many ways they put people onto Montana water, including tent camps on the Smith River, lodges, horse pack trips, and day trips. They also have a nice flyshop in downtown Bozeman, but every Montana resident has a flyshop stashed somewhere. ↩︎
In the 2020 census, a bit over 33% of Bozeman’s population were young fishy guys. ↩︎
I can’t mention the Missouri River without setting off “Oh Shenandoah” as an earworm, and mentioning the wide Missouri certainly isn’t helping. There are recorded versions of “Oh Shenandoah” by the jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Bobby Darin, Jerry Garcia and David Grisman, Jerry Reed, Kansas, Bruce Springsteen, and, I kid you not, Tom Waits with Keith Richards. I hope Keith Richards is supplying the guitar solo, and not the background vocals. ↩︎
The day after we waded we both needed Tylenol, but President Trump said it was ok because as far as I know neither of us is pregnant. Part of the completeness of wading is the exercise of muscle groups you had forgotten. ↩︎
That’s the way you’re required by law to refer to the journal Nature. You can’t say this week in Nature, and even if you were so inclined in some states you might be arrested for saying this week in the magazine Nature. You have to say the journal Nature, like it was one word. Vaughan, Ian P., Climate change is reshaping fish communities in the United States, the journal Nature, September 24, 2025, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02826-x. ↩︎
It’s a toss-up between a good kolache1 and a good donut, but I’d probably choose the kolache because they’re less common. Pretty good donuts can be found in lots of places, but the best kolache are found only on the edge of the interstate in small towns. In Texas they’re common enough, and in one of the best things you can say about anyplace kolache are common in Nebraska.
Kolache are Czech, re-homed by Czech immigrants to Texas and the Midwest, and are most often compared to Danish. It’s not an apt comparison. Danish probably originated in Austria, are often glazed, and like croissant are made with a laminated dough. Kolache should never be glazed,2 or laminated, and they feature a mildly sweet pillowy yeast dough.
Kolache are about the size of a biscuit. The center depression is filled with either a fruit preserve, sweetened cream cheese, or sweetened poppy seeds. A kolache without any filling would be a tiny bread loaf, not a kolache, and there’s no such thing as a sausage kolache. Except there are sausage kolache, but more on that later.
Many years ago I witnessed a panel discussion by a group of Tex-Czech bakers, who said that traditional kolache were filled with prune preserves, sweetened farm cheese, or poppy seeds. The panel members had all grown up on small Central Texas farms during the Depression, and explained that their mothers baked the big three because prunes were very cheap, everybody–meaning every Czech farm family–had a cow and made their own farm cheese, and that there were always poppies in the farmyard. I guess that in addition to farm cheese all those Czech farm wives made their own opium.
Kolache are filled with all kinds of fruit, not just prunes. I’d probably eat any kolache offered, but if they’re available I usually order one or more of the big three: a farm cheese, poppy seed, or a prune. At the kolache counter in Hruska’s in Ellinger–which sells my favorite kolache and where there’s always a line–the woman behind the counter once beamed when I ordered all three and said that those were the three kinds of kolache that her mother always made. That touch of tradition made both of us happy.
I don’t know the history of Kolache in Nebraska, or even how I knew that Nebraska, like Texas, loves kolache, but we had a campsite reserved for three nights at Smith Falls State Park near Valentine, Nebraska. Since by the first morning we had our Nebraska fish (or more precisely I had my fish and Kris had decided not to fish), the next morning we packed up our campsite a day early and took a 150 mile frolic out of our way to Verdigre, Nebraska, the self-proclaimed Kolach Capitol of the World.3
The dough in Verdigre Bakery’s kolache is a little different from Texas kolache. It’s less puffy, denser, more bite sized. . . Maybe the dough is a bit less sweet. After extensive sampling I couldn’t tell any difference between Texas and Nebraska fillings. The picture above is of poppy seed, so I guess opium is also a farmyard cash crop in Nebraska.
The lady in the Verdigre Bakery said that Texans sometimes stop by for kolache, but that we always asked for sausage kolaches. Kolache with sausage are not actually kolache, but klobasnek (or pigs in a blanket). Calling klobasnek “sausage kolaches” is common usage in Texas, and they’re made with the same dough as kolache. Still, even if it’s common usage, the misuse greatly annoys some Tex-Czechs.4 Kolache lovers from other states are just confused.
From Verdigre we drove another 180 miles out of the way to Omaha, because we had never been to Omaha, and somewhere during the drive to Verdigre we decided that this was our big chance. The College World Series was scheduled to start the next day, and Omaha’s streets were crowded with LSU purple and gold. I didn’t see any Coastal Carolina fans, which was the other team in the Series, and like their fans the Coastal Carolina team didn’t show up much for the World Series. We saw the stadium, and the lively district around the stadium, then drove on to Wichita, Kansas, where we spent the night. During that round-about meandering we crossed into Iowa, so I guess we actually drove through nine states, not just eight. The next day we drove 560 miles home from Wichita, a day earlier than we had planned.
Gear
In Wyoming they told us to bring six weight rods, which is a heavier rod than is normal for trout, but these were big fish in heavy current, so a six weight was a good idea. In South Dakota we used five-weights, which is the most common rod for trout. I tried a three weight spey rod to fish the Niobara River, but that didn’t go too well. I had Winston rods, Kris had a very old 1991 Orvis Rocky Mountain six weight, and she said it was so heavy she could barely lift it.5 I suspect she might have been exaggerating just a bit. She also had an Orvis Helios 3 five weight, and there were no complaints from her about the five weight.
We only used cold water floating lines. In Wyoming and South Dakota we mostly fished with underwater nymphs under indicators. In Nebraska I caught those extraordinary bass on black Pat’s rubber legs fished as streamers.
Our Car
This was a road trip, so a few things about our car.
Pre-trip my car had about 50,000 miles on it. The week before the trip we had scheduled maintenance done, and on the dealer’s recommendation had a brake job and I replaced the battery. I had the tires rotated at Discount Tire. I installed a Victory 4×4 rear window molle panel and upper shelf for storage in the cargo area, and re-mounted the fly rod vault on the roof rack. The upper shelf and the rod vault were useful, the rear window molle panel wasn’t but it looked manly. The fly rod vault holds four assembled fly rods, and rod vaults are apparently required by law in Colorado. They’re certainly common enough.
In addition to the rod vault I bought a Pelican gear box and mounting hardware from REI. I got the smallest box to minimize wind resistance, but it didn’t hold enough stuff. I should have bought the largest size.
In Wisconsin years before our muskie guide had demonstrated the cargo drawers in his truck, and since then I’ve wanted a set for our SUV cargo area. Plenty of companies sell cargo drawers for pickups and SUVs, but they’re expensive, and I thought that I could build my own. It took me about three weeks of intermittent labor, and the result includes the appropriate number of design flaws. I built two 35″ wide drawers from side to side, 30″ deep from front to back. The lower drawer is about 10″ deep and the top 6″.
I loved the top drawer. I could throw in my sunglasses and reels and rod tubes, my fly boxes and maps and camera, and all the other smallish stuff that would otherwise be rattling around loose in the back of my car, but the stuff I put in the bottom drawer would have done better in a duffel. Or a larger roof box.
What’s worse, the two stacked drawers ate up the back of the SUV, and the first time I went to the grocery after installation I realized that except for the back seat I no longer had anyplace to put groceries. When we stacked duffels on the drawers we couldn’t really use the rearview mirror. The drawers will get rebuilt as two shallower drawers, hopefully by our next road trip.
By the time I rebuild the drawers I figure it will have cost me as much as buying pre-made drawers in the first place.
Buc-ee’s
Buc-ee’s is a chain of travel centers, placed strategically along Texas interstates. The first Buc-ee’s was near Houston in Clute (home of The Great Texas Mosquito Festival). I have a love-hate relationship with Buc-ee’s. Once when I fished Matagorda Bay I parked my car for the day in an out-of-the-way corner of Buc-ee’s Wharton parking lot, and management tagged my car with a semi-permanent sticker that told me to never, ever leave my car in a Buc-ee’s lot again. It took an hour of scraping to get the sticker and the residual glue off my car window. It wasn’t very neighborly, and a polite note would have gotten the message across. I also don’t trust their brisket or kolache (though I do give them points for having brisket and kolache), and I hate crowds. Buc-ee’s interstate travel centers are huge and are always crowded, though there are so many urinals in the men’s room that there’s never a line.
On the plus side for Buc-ee’s, there are things you have to respect. There are all those urinals and the bathrooms are immaculate. The gas is cheap. You can buy many strange and amusing things in Buc-ee’s, from barbecue pits to onesies for the grandchild, they don’t allow 18-wheelers, and they’re spaced along the major routes out of Houston just where you need ’em. They pay their employees well above the minimum wage.
Buc-ee’s has now spread beyond Texas, to, among other places, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida. On this trip we found one north of Denver. Someday Buc-ee’s will be everywhere, and beaver nuggets and mediocre kolache will be available to everyone.
I made my peace with Buc-ee’s on this trip. I forgave them that window sticker and I suffered the crowds. I bought their relatively cheap gas. I even bought some parched corn and a Rice Crispie treat. I did not buy my grandchild a onesie.
Where We Stayed, What We Ate
Out of our 12 nights, we spent only three in hotels. Two of the hotels were unremarkable, a Holiday Inn Express in Amarillo and a Holiday Inn in Wichita, Kansas. The most expensive hotel, The Rally Hotel in downtown Denver, was across the street from Coors Field where we stopped for baseball. Both the hotel and Coors Field were great, though the Rockies not so much. At check-in they gave us free beer, which was friendly even if it was a Coors. Staying next to the stadium was almost worth the cost, and almost worth the drive through downtown Denver at rush hour.
Because Roo the dog was with us, we felt more comfortable leaving her in an AirBnB than in a hotel on the days we spent fishing. We spent four nights in an AirBnB in Wyoming and three in South Dakota, and both were fine. The one in Wyoming had the better view.
We camped two nights in Nebraska, which meant that our car was packed with camping gear. We’ve owned our tent for most of our marriage, more than 40 years, and it has survived a lot of use. This trip though one of the poles broke. We cobbled together a repair, but I wouldn’t trust it in hard weather. The tent may have seen its last road trip.
Because we were camping and staying in AirBnBs, we cooked a lot. At home we almost always cook, and I’d say we’re adventurous, competent cooks, but on this trip there was no adventure. We ate beef for dinner and bacon for breakfast. We ate steaks. We ate burgers. We ate more steaks and then we ate more burgers. We ate eggs and bacon with toast for breakfast.
We spent a lot of time in grocery stores, which is actually a pretty good way to get to know a place. Mack’s Market in Thermopolis, Wyoming, not only sells groceries, but it has its own liquor store inside, and a gun shop. What more does one need?
I think I’ve covered most of the trip’s restaurant stops in the other road trip sections, except for the pizzas we had in Lander and Thermopolis in Wyoming. This really was a junk food extravaganza. We also had donuts in Amarillo, which would make a pretty good country song, and in Fort Collins, Colorado, which would also make a pretty good country song. The donuts were ok, but I wouldn’t have picked them over a good kolache.
Where We Didn’t Go
I would have liked to see more rivers in Wyoming, and in September we are going to fish for a day in Yellowstone at the end of our Montana trip, probably on the Firehole. 6 I’m already thinking about a trip next May through Wyoming and back to the Green River in Utah.
I’d like to explore more of the streams in the Black Hills, but probably never will.
We didn’t stop for an onion burger when we drove through Oklahoma. We didn’t see the giant ball of twine in Kansas. I guess I’ll be remembered as the guy who never saw the giant ball of twine.
Playlist
I made playlists for Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming, but I have to admit we mostly listened to books while we were driving. “Willow, Weep for Me,” by the Nebraska composer Ann Ronnell was on the Nebraska playlist. It has been recorded by everybody, and we had versions by, among others, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Julie London, Sarah Vaughan, Lew Rawls, Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand, Chad & Jeremy, and Sam Cooke. Ronnell also wrote “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf.”
Disney pigs, likely from Nebraska.
The other well-known song on the Nebraska list was “Nebraska” by Bruce Springsteen, foreshadowing New Jersey, which will likely be our last state. Omaha and Lincoln seem to have pretty lively alternative music scenes. Mannheim Steamroller is from Nebraska. I’m not a fan of Mannheim Steamroller.
Danielle Ate the Sandwich, from Nebraska and Colorado, plays a ukulele and sings. She is wonderful, witty, and fun.
Ooh, I've got soul, I've got soul But you'd never know, never know If you were stuck across the table from me The terrible dinner guest
The Terrible Dinner Guest, Danielle Ate the Sandwich
Danielle Ate the Sandwich.
There are about 100 songs named “Wyoming,” and all of them are pretty good, though the rap song “Wyoming” by Afroman doesn’t live up to his classic, “Idaho.” The country singer Chris Ledoux is the best known musician from Wyoming, and he’s big on melodramatic story-telling, which for me is not quite the thing unless it involves either Laredo, El Paso, or a girl named Rosalita (also foreshadowing New Jersey).
The best song ever written about Wyoming is “Git Along Little Doggies.” This is jumping ahead, but the best song ever written about Montana is “I Ride an Old Paint.”
I never got around to much of a South Dakota list. The only person on my South Dakota list is Shawn Colvin, though I probably should have included “Born to Be Wild” as a nod to Sturgis. I always enjoy Shawn Colvin, though, so I’m ok with sticking to Shawn Colvin.
Guitar
I played the guitar a lot on this trip, probably because we cooked in our adopted homes and there was more free time in the evenings. In Nebraska, at the state park, after the failed attempt at spey casting on the Niobara River, I sat at our campground and played for a couple of hours while Kris went to Valentine to shop for steaks, bacon, and burgers. A woman with a Denver guitar shop tee shirt came over to talk to me about guitars, and invited us to their campfire that evening. It was a nice gesture, but when I went to bed at nine-ish the campfire hadn’t kicked off. I’m sorry. They might have known someplace to fish.
The Czech singular for kolache is properly kolach, and the plural is kolache. The Texas usage of kolache as the singular and kolaches as the plural is not correct, but it makes a lot of sense to English speakers, and probably Spanish speakers as well. At various times I use all of them. Sometimes I suspect I use all of them in the same sentence. I’m betting my usage would make a Czech baker’s head spin. ↩︎
In Schuelenberg, between Houston and San Antonio, there’s an otherwise good bakery that glazes its kolache. It’s unnecessary frippery, and I’ve only stopped for their kolache once. ↩︎
Verdigre is home of an annual Kolach Days Festival. Wikipedia reports that Kolache are also available in other Midwestern states, including Minnesota, South Dakota, and Prague, Oklahoma. Both West, Texas, and Caldwell, Texas, claim to be the Kolache capitol of Texas, and West does have very good kolache. I’ve never had kolache in Caldwell. ↩︎
Sausage kolache are not even Czech, but a Texas variant. The greatest kolache variant of all is from a Cambodian-owned donut shop in St. Charles, Louisiana, where instead of sausage they stuff their koblasnek with rice boudin. Brilliant. There are now boudin kolache at most independent donut shops in Houston. ↩︎
Graphite fly rods are impossibly light, a matter of a couple of pounds and some stray ounces. What’s more, the newer graphite materials in modern rods allow thinner tip ends than rods from 30 years ago, so that when you’re swinging a nine-foot lever a modern rod will feel lighter than a 30 year-old rod of similar weight. The 30-year old rod Kris was fishing was pretty light, but it likely felt heavier than what she was used to. ↩︎
Most of Yellowstone is in Wyoming. This is one of those factoids that always seems unnatural, like Kansas City being in Missouri. ↩︎
