I was thinking the other day about the dry flies I use most of the time and the fact they don’t include parachute flies. Sure, I’ll use parachute flies on some rivers and perhaps tie on a Purple Haze in the evening at the spring creek I fish. And sometimes it works. I gave away a…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is Theodore Gordon’s Bumblepuppy. To be honest, when I heard the name of this fly, I thought it was a joke. After a little research, I think the joke is on me. I’ve been reading Mike Valla’s book entitled The Founding Flies – 43 American Masters, Their Patterns and Influences…
If you are a regular RiverKeeper Flies follower, you’ve read about our 2017 fly fishing road trip. Not everything came off without a hitch and I thought is might be helpful to provide a few lessons learned from our fly fishing road trip. If you are like me, the anticipation of fishing new waters is…
I had a different blog post planned for today, but I always say “take what the river gives you”, so I’m taking my own advice. This post is about a returning Chinook salmon to the Metolius River. While fishing the river yesterday, I was waiting for the fish to begin rising again and sat on…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is the Rio Grande King, another fly from the Ray Bergman collection. I haven’t posted a Ray Bergman fly for awhile, so I thought it was high time I tied another classic wet fly pattern. For some reason, I just like the elegance and simplicity of a Bergman wet…
Forest fires. That seems to be the theme the last few weeks and why I decided to name this week’s post Forest Fire Fish. This is a picture of the day our fire grew out-of-control. That was two weeks ago. As I write today’s post, the Milli fire has grown to over 18,000 acres. The…
It might be a little early to begin talking about and preparing for October Caddis, but while fishing last week, we happened to see a large number of caddis cases … big caddis cases … attached to a rock partially submerged in the water. It looked as though someone had collected all of them and…
The last stop on our 2017 road trip was fly fishing the Madison and Yellowstone rivers. Our initial planning didn’t include fly fishing the Yellowstone River, so be sure to read the end of this post about how happy we were with our little side trip. We arrived at the Slide Inn to the words…”you…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is Galloup’s T & A Leech. I stayed at Galloup’s Slide Inn last week during our 2017 fly fishing road trip and had the opportunity to talk with Kelly about a few of his early fly patterns. I told him about my RiverKeeper Flies Throw Back Thursday fly feature and…
The next stop on our 2017 road trip was in southwest Montana. Actually, the original plan didn’t include the Beaverhead River, it was a “plan B” activity. I’ll tell you about it below. I’ve always liked the Big Hole River because of its size. I enjoy the walk and wade experience. We took a guided…
