Tag: Montana

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Three Rivers, Trout, Montana, September 14-20, 2025 (49)

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.

  1. 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. ↩︎
  2. I have only seen the word bibelot in print once, 40 years ago in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. I’ve wanted to use it ever since, this was my chance, and I took it. Sorry. ↩︎
  3. There were at least five fly shops in the town of Ennis, population 917. ↩︎
  4. The seventh day we went fishing again, but that’s a different story. ↩︎
  5. 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. ↩︎
  6. 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. ↩︎
  7. 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. ↩︎
  8. In the 2020 census, a bit over 33% of Bozeman’s population were young fishy guys. ↩︎
  9. 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. ↩︎
  10. 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. ↩︎
  11. 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. ↩︎
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Montana

The 1920s begin modern times. We used electric power for lights and for new gadgets like refrigerators and Hoover vacuum cleaners. There were cars on the streets, moving pictures in the cinemas, jazz on the radio, and telephones in the home. There were airplanes in the sky. Information and people moved in new ways. 1920 looked a lot more like 2020 than it looked like 1820, or even 1890.

You can’t have electricity without copper, lots of copper. Montana had some gold, some silver–oro y plata is the state motto–and when the world began to turn on the lights, Montana brought us Anaconda Copper of Butte, Montana. Anaconda mined and smelted the copper for our copper wire, and we turned on the lights. By the 1920s, Anaconda had eaten up the other copper companies in Montana, and Anaconda Copper was not only the largest mining company in Montana, but one of the largest in the world.

Miners brought with them from Wales and Italy and Germany not only mining skills, but a history of labor organizing and unrest. Cowboys didn’t organize. Shepherds didn’t organize. Farmers did organize briefly under the Populist movement, but the Democrats coopted prairie populism with Free Silver.1 By 1900 Montana miners were unionized, and the unions were strong.

In Butte in 1914 unions in Montana began a swift decline, partly because Anacaonda ate up its competition–the union had a lot less power negotiating with a single powerful employer instead of several divided employers–and partly because of the miners’ own damned fault. The Western Federation of Miners (the “WFM”) had split from the Industrial Workers of the World (the “IWW”, the Wobblies). Insurgent miners formed the Butte Mine Workers Union as a counter to the WFM, which they believed to be in Anaconda’s pocket. While not formally affiliated, most of the leaders of the Butte Mine Workers Union were Wobblies. Anaconda Copper was pitted against the miners, who were pitted both against Anaconda and against each other.

There were gunfights in the streets of Butte. The WFM union hall was dynamited, an Anaconda Copper office was dynamited, and the governor declared martial law. By the end of the clash, the power of Butte miners’ unions was broken, and Butte, which had been a WFM shop, had become an open shop.

Union Hall of the Western Federation of Miners, Butte, Montana, June 1914, International Socialist Review, Aug. 1914, vol. 15 at 89.

It wasn’t a soft landing. In 1917, an IWW organizer, Frank Little, was lynched, at least in part because of the anti-war stance of the Wobblies. In August 1920, the Wobblies and the Metal Mine Workers called for a general strike for higher wages and an 8-hour day. The strikers shut down all of Butte’s mines. Anaconda mine guards opened fire on strikers and shot 16, killing one.2 Federal troops were brought in, union officials were arrested, and the strike fizzled. It was the last major labor conflict in Butte until 1934, when the miners reorganized under New Deal protections.

Lowe, Jet, Butte Mineyards, Berkeley Pit, documentation compiled after 1968, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Along with the end of the union conflicts, other things changed in Montana as well. In 1918 Montanans voted for statewide prohibition, two years before national prohibition. Legal operations of Butte’s red-light district, Venus Alley, were shut down–during the teens there had been as many as 1000 prostitutes licensed by Butte. Hard-rock mining is still a significant sector of Montana’s economy.3 At least three new copper mines are currently proposed, though likely Venus Alley is gone for good.

The last active mine near Butte closed in 1980. In 1982 the last madam of the Dumas Brothel, the longest operating brothel in the US, was convicted of tax evasion, and the Dumas, the last remnant of Venus Alley, closed. The EPA designated the mining area surrounding Butte as a Superfund site, the nation’s largest. The Dumas reportedly was at closing listed in the National Register of Historic Places, though it isn’t now.

Geography and Population

Montana is the fourth largest state by area, after Alaska, Texas, and California, with 147,040 square miles. Its 2024 estimated population was 1,137,233, increased by more than 14% from it’s 2010 population. Montana is growing, probably faster than its residents really want.

It’s still not very big. Its population is slightly smaller than Dallas, and slightly larger than Fort Worth. Puerto Rico has more than 2 million more people, but two fewer senators. Montana is the 43rd largest state by population, smaller than Maine but larger than Rhode Island.

Anglos make up 84.5% of Montana’s population, Blacks alone are 0.5%, Native Americans 6.2%, Asian .8%, Hispanic 4.2%, and two or more races 6.6%.

Population Density in Montana, US Census Bureau.

Montana has a population of 7.73 people per square mile, compared to 1,259 per square mile in New Jersey. Only one city, Billings, has a population greater than 100,000. Three other cities, Missoula, Great Falls, and Bozeman, have populations over 50,000. The towns (and the largest population concentration) spread north-south along the west of the state, along the front range of the Rockies. If you check the maps below, population concentrations pretty much correspond to the western edge of the Rocky Mountains, the the major trout fisheries, and the counties carried by Kamala Harris. The oddest exception for voting in Montana is in Glacier County, population 13,778, where Glacier National Park is located. Park employees and hangers on presumably vote the interest of the Park, or at least their own interest, and Harris carried Glacier County.4

Montana is one of the eight Rocky Mountain states.5 Like New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming, about 60% of Montana, the area east of the Continental Divide, is prairie, part of the Great Plains. The principal mountain ranges are in Western Montana, along the Idaho border. There are more than 100 named mountain ranges in Montana, so Montana is probably a pretty good name for the state.

USGS Relief Map of Montana.

Since the last glaciation, most of Montana’s rivers flow into the Missouri, which in turn flows to the Mississippi and then the Gulf of Mexico. Before the last glaciers, rivers in Montana flowed to the Red River of the North and on to Hudson Bay. Times change.

Montana rivers are among the best-known trout rivers in the world. The Yellowstone begins at Yellowstone Lake in the Park, and flows Northwest into South Dakota to join the Missouri. The Big Hole, Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin are northwest of the Park, and that’s where we’re going. The Missouri begins where the Jefferson meets the Madison, and we’ll fish both the Jefferson and the Madison.

There’s also the Bighorn and Powder, the Bitterroot, Clark Fork, and Blackfoot, and somewhere in there is the Smith. The Flathead, which I’ve spent a pleasant day fishing, is generally considered in fly-fishing literature to be a second-rate fishery. Anywhere else it would be a destination.

There was good reason to leave Montana until last. For fly fishing in the US, only Alaska has a reputation to match. It’s too bad our planning got knocked out of whack by that whole New Jersey thing.6

Montana Natural Resource Information System, Mountain Ranges and Major Rivers.

Trout

The online Montana state field guide to native and non-native trout provides a good identification photo of native and non-native Montana trout, the trout’s current range, their native range (which is often very different), and whether the fish’s survival in Montana is threatened. Arctic grayling, bull trout, Rocky Mountain cutthroats, westslope cutthroats, and lake trout are all native, and are all species of concern in their native Montana habitat. Westslope cutthroats are the most widely distributed native trout in the Northwest, from the West Slope of Montana across the Rockies into Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, all the way to the Pacific.

Brown trout and brook trout are non-native, though both are widely distributed throughout Montana. Rainbow trout (including Columbia River redband trout), are native to a tiny section of far northwest Montana, in the Kootenay drainage. Instead of draining east to the Gulf, the Kootenay drains west to the Pacific, so rainbows native to the Pacific Coast make it to the Kootenay. In addition to the Kootenay rainbows, rainbow trout have been introduced throughout the state.

The state of Montana has led other states to end hatchery stocking programs where there are healthy populations of wild fish, so even where fish caught are non-native browns or rainbows, they are almost certainly wild.

Because it is such an important destination fishery, when something does happen to Montana fish, it makes national news among fly fishers, even people like me who rarely go to Montana. There was the introduction of whirling disease back in the 90s, and in the past years there are reported declines of large trout in the Madison River system. Crowding on Montana rivers is also a big issue, probably because of people like me going to Montana. If it’s any consolation, most of the places I fish here in Texas are also pretty crowded.

Politics.

When the Montana Territory was formed in 1864, the state was oddly populated by unregenerate Confederate sympathizers. The first name proposed for Virginia City, Montana, was Verina, named after the wife of Jefferson Davis. A judge refused to register the name, and named it Virginia City instead. Well into statehood,7 Montana politics would be dominated first by the state’s Democrats–aligned with Southern interests–and then by Anaconda Copper.

2024 Montana election results by county, Wikipedia.

Its recent history has been a mixed bag of Democratic and Republican leadership, though currently the state is dominated by Republicans. The State has had a Democratic Governor as recently as 2021, and John Tester was a Democratic US senator until defeated in 2024.

Donald Trump carried 58.39% of the Montana vote in the 2024 presidential election, an increase from 56.92% in 2020 and 56.17% in 2016. As noted above, voting patterns tended to follow population concentrations, and even in population sparse Montana the larger the population the more likely the area is to vote Democratic.

A River Runs Through It

Every fly fisher knows “A River Runs Through It,” and if not the novella then at least the movie. The 1976 story by Norman Maclean is mostly set in Missoula, Montana, and on the Blackfoot River. The movie was produced and directed by Robert Redford and released in 1992, and it made fly fishing great again. The movie is true to the book, and both are based on the lives of Norman Maclean and his brother, Paul. The movie’s popularity probably wasn’t hurt by Brad Pitt as Paul in one of his first major roles.

He looks so young.

Generally people say that the book is extraordinarily well-written, and the blurb on the cover of my current copy–from a review in the Chicago Tribune–says that the book is as beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway. I suspect that the reviewer, whoever it may have been, is suggesting that the book is excellent nature writing, but Thoreau most of the time and Hemingway at his best are American transcendentalists, and are writing about the power of nature to move the observer into a better place. Hemingway’s characters are always closest to tranquility when they’re on a river, and we should all aspire to receiving from nature like Thoreau.

Maclean on the other hand is focused not on the landscape but on his characters, and while they inhabit the natural setting (and the movie has the advantage of the book by showing the rivers au natural), there’s nothing spiritually or psychologically transcendent in it. The closest Maclean gets is when Norman describes younger brother Paul as an artist with the fly rod. There is a long interior dialogue early in the book where Norman plans his cast, and it is all about how he will approach the fish. Hemingway at his best would have described the finning of the fish, the darkness of the water, the light on the angler. Thoreau might have described the beauty of the fish and how it belongs in the natural world.

Maclean doesn’t really tell us much about the fish, or the water. There are bigger fish and smaller fish, fish caught on dry flies and fish caught with bait. What Maclean describes are Norman’s inner thoughts and preparations to make a difficult cast. Nothing wrong with that, and I suspect lots of fly fishers love the book because it is repleat with tales of roll casts and Bunyon Bug Nos. 2. It’s also easy to read, but what it is best at is not describing the Blackfoot River but the characters of Paul and Norman. It has a natural setting, sholy, but–and this is an important difference–the setting is background, a happy accident, not an agent.

Of course plenty of the book’s readers would tell me I’m spouting nonsense.

I will, however, not budge in my argument that there is nothing good about the fly cast in the movie poster. If I ever actually made that cast (and I don’t think it’s physically possible), it would immediately tumble from the sky onto my head and shoulders. Come to think of it, I must have made that exact cast from time to time, and I immediately wore the result. `

It didn’t need the help, but “A River Runs Through It” certainly reminded fly fishers that the trout fishing was great in Montana.

  1. Just like 2025, in the 1890s cheap money was seen as a cure to financial ills. Then it was increasing the money supply by adding silver, not it’s increasing money availability with low interest rates. Or maybe BitCoin. ↩︎
  2. It’s always mentioned that the Anaconda guards fired on fleeing strikers, and the miners were shot in the back. ↩︎
  3. Butte’s population peaked in 1920 at 60,000, and may have been as high as 100,000. The current population estimate is 36,134. At its height, from 1904 to 1917, Butte’s redlight district is estimated to have been second in size only to San Francisco. Licensed prostitution continued in Deer Lodge for a while after Butte was shut down, but it didn’t last long. The economy of Deer Lodge is said to have never recovered. Deer Lodge is the site of the Montana State Prison, and those two enterprises are probably both somehow related to mining. ↩︎
  4. As did Biden and Clinton before her. ↩︎
  5. Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. ↩︎
  6. We still have not fished in New Jersey. ↩︎
  7. 1889. ↩︎
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Happy New 2025!

We’re on the last leg, though I’m pretty sure that fish don’t have legs. Six states to go, and our plan is to finish the last six this year. New Jersey, Massachusetts, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana . . . We completed the South last year with Georgia and South Carolina, and the Southwest with Utah and Arizona. We’re saving Wyoming and Montana for last.

Nothing is planned, except a trip to Montana in September and then a few days at the Old Faithful Inn fishing in Yellowstone. I keep thinking I need to plan, but in January–on January 6 no less–it’s hard to have much faith in the future. What a black day.

I keep thinking that I should calculate things like how many miles we traveled, how many nights we spent, how much money we spent, and how many species of fish we’ve caught. Maybe I will, but not today. Today maybe I’ll think more about Wyoming. Wyoming is a good place to fish.

We won’t be the first people to catch a fish on the fly in each state, but we have earned some great stories, and we’ve met some great people. Someone said to me recently that when we finished we could start again.

God no.