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.

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.

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.

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. ↩︎