I hope you were able to read last week’s post about fly fishing the Upper Columbia River and catching trout with Green Drake dry flies. We are headed to Montana on this year’s fly fishing road trip and made brief stops along the way to enjoy fly fishing the Clark Fork and Beaverhead rivers.
The image above shows Dancingtrout playing and landing a Cutthroat trout on the Clark Fork River.
The Cutthroat below ate a Parachute Chernobyl, a fly I wrote about back in 2017 in a Throwback Thursday Fly post. We were introduced to this fly by Joe Cantrell in St. Regis, MT.
We fish this section of the Clark Fork River in the evening because our experience from previous years has shown we find a few rising trout.
Here is one of Dancingtrout’s cutty’s she landed that evening.
We found some rising trout and a few ate our flies. I hooked several, but for some reason they popped off the hook. Here is one that came to the net for me.
Where we fish, there isn’t enough consistent fishing to keep us there for several days. It’s a convenient stop as we travel to or from Montana.
Another quick stop we have found over the years is the Beaverhead River upstream from Dillon, MT. The first time we fished the river, we drove from Melrose where we’d been fishing the Big Hole River. Not knowing much about the river, we drove along the access road to find a fishable spot. The one below has been good to us over the years and we have returned several times.
This year, the fish didn’t seem to be rising the late afternoon and evening we stopped to fish. Dancingtrout landed two fish, this Brown 20″ trout being the biggest.
I on the other hand didn’t touch a fish.
The spot we fish is a steep bank and several times our backcast hits the bushes. I’ve climbed up the bank several times to dislodge my fly. Dancingtrout has done the same, but on this occasion, she ended up hooking this bird! It fluttered after getting hooked and we were able to quickly remove the hook allowing it to fly off to a nearby bush to gather itself.
This is our campsite for the evening.
We returned to the same spot we fished the previous evening, but only saw one or two fish rise, not enough to stay and target.
Back on the road as we travelled east towards our next stop, the Madison River.
Enjoy…go fish!
