End of the Season for Dry Fly Fishing

It’s the middle of October and I’m realizing the end of the season for dry fly fishing is quickly approaching. If you are a regular here at RiverKeeper Flies, you know how much we love our dry fly fishing. Searching for insects on the water and following hatches bring us a lot of joy. But all good things come to an end, and I have witnessed that fact for the last few weeks.

The image above is a Metolius River redside caught last week after returning from our fly fishing and scenery road trip. It turned out to be more scenery than trout, but we enjoyed our two weeks on the road.

We didn’t experience a lot of dry fly fishing during our last road trip. I hope you were able to read about our adventure in some previous posts where we fished the Owyhee River, OR; Flat Creek, WY; Green River, WY; Lamar River, YNP.

• Fall Fly Fishing and Scenery Road Trip
• Fall Fly Fishing on the Green River
• Fly Fishing the Lamar River in Yellowstone National Park

After fishing the Lamar River, we drove over Beartooth Pass toward the East Fork Rosebud Creek. We’ve never been in this drainage and found low flows and devastation from the flood in 2022.

The flows were low as I expected in late fall. I was hopeful for at least a few BWO mayflies, but didn’t see a one on the water.

Our last stop was on the Bitterroot River, MT, a place we’ve fished before. And the fall colors were enjoyable along the river.

We were hoping to find a few Hecuba and Mahogany Dun mayflies with trout rising to them. The only evidence of Hecuba’s were nymphal shucks on the rocks. Mahogany Duns were a different story, and we found several on rocks or floating down the river.

A Sparkle Dun and Purple Haze were two imitations that fish rose to.

The other fly we found along the shore was a Trico mayfly. We have had success in previous years with these small size 22 or 24 mayflies, but didn’t see any fish eating them. Here is one I captured on a rock.

We tried our luck on a few sections of the river, but the dry fly action was slow for us.

Once home, I was hoping to find a few fall Green Drakes on the Metolius and fish rising to them. We did see a few duns floating downstream, but no fish rose to them. As expected, other insects were available to the trout.

The smaller Flavs were out, and a few fish were eating them…emphasis on the word FEW. Casting an imitation to a likely holding spot did bring up a few fish. Here is a Flav we found floating down the river.

And another…

I use two Sparkle Dun imitations to imitate them…a regular dubbed body and a darker one using an olive biot for the body on a size 14 hook this time of year.

Don’t forget about caddis either. We find them flitting around, but again not many fish rising to them. I found this caddis hiding in the vegetation.

Here is an olive caddis pupa Dancingtrout found skittering across the water.

This is one of the PMDs.

And a small Baetis mayfly.

I continue to be amazed at the insect diversity on the Metolius. When the fish are rising, determining what they are eating can be a challenge. One recent day, I changed flies six times before the trout ate an olive Improved F Fly #16 which I thought was imitating a Little Olive Stone.

The last image I’ll share is of a size 8 Cascades Stone. There aren’t many of these stoneflies remaining in the bushes. I’ll have to wait till next year to see them again.

I can attest that fall can be a challenging time for the dry fly fisher.

Enjoy…go fish!