Lancaster New Era (PA)
October 19, 1999
Section: OUTDOORS
Page: C-4

Column: OUTDOOR TRAILS

BATTLE OF THE BIGHORN
CHASING TROUT ON A LEGENDARY RIVER

Article Text:

Few places on earth can produce so many quality fish on a daily basis. Ask any trout and they'll tell you the Bighorn is a special river, ideal in so many ways for this most beautiful of fishes. -- Don Hershfeld

FORT SMITH, MONT. -- "Whatever these guys tell you is true. It's unbelievable," Al Booble, 62, of Frackville, told me. He once stood in Montana's Bighorn River and hooked 22 trout without taking a step in his wading boots. "There are hatches so thick the hardest thing about catching trout is to see your fly in the blizzard," added Robert L. Kutz, 49 Strasburg Pike, another Bighorn groupie. Those were swooning words for someone like me who had never caught more than five trout in a day with a fly rod.

So eight of us hopscotched by plane to Big Sky Country and Camp 6X, a former bed-and-breakfast turned fishing camp owned by Kutz and others.

Five of the eight are retired. They have learned about life's priorities, and the Bighorn is up there on the list. Take Wayne Boggs, a former schoolteacher from Stevens. He had a heart attack and triple bypass heart surgery five weeks earlier, but here he is, checking his fly box.

Thirty years ago, the Bighorn was just another warm-water river, brimming with "trash" fish as it flowed through the prairie of the Crow Indian Reservation.

Today, it is a Holy Grail for those who aspire to catch trout with a fly.

What a difference a dam makes.

Namely, the Yellowtail Dam, which provides a constant flow of cool and incredibly fertile water enriched by limestone bedrock.

Aquatic insects in the stream absolutely exploded. Many are underwater insects not normally found in trout streams. There are few stoneflies in the Bighorn, but gobs of sow bugs and scuds.

Midges hatch in numbers so prolific that at times you can scoop them from the water with your palm. The first time Kutz floated the river, he looked out and saw a grayish cloud over the water. Must be a grass fire on the bank, he observed. No, he was told, just a trico hatch.

Today, this happy marriage of conditions supports 5,000 trout per mile, arguably more than anywhere else on earth.

Big and colorful brown and rainbow trout.

In the first 13 miles of tailwater, you rarely catch one smaller than 12 inches and most are in the rod-bending 15- to 18-inch range. Fish 18 to 22 inches are possible with each cast.

When hatches are strong, catching 40 to 50 fish a day is not uncommon, and 100-fish days are possible. For all its trout, you have to earn your fish on the Bighorn. You have to be able to "read" the water and find what the fish are eating at any given time.

Moirajeanne FitzGerald, of Lancaster, who made her first trip to the Bighorn in May, remembers catching fish after fish when a hatch exploded along a mere 15 feet of shoreline, while anglers all around her were getting skunked.

Camp 6X (6X refers to the diameter of fly line) overlooks the Bighorn just off the storied Bozeman Trail and about an hour's drive from the Little Bighorn Battlefield.

Several miles away is tiny Fort Smith, once the site of an adobe fort that protected pioneers heading West. Here, pedestrians are likely to be in wading boots and of about eight businesses, four are fly shops.

This is open-range country and cattle often roam at will. The rule here is let the driver beware. You hit a cow, you pay for it.

In the spring and through the summer, when the Bighorn's fabled hatches unfold in waves, anglers journey here from all over the world. Some anglers camp on islands to get choice spots and other anglers launch their drift boats at 4:30 in the morning.

We took a chance late in the season. We had the river largely to ourselves. But the flip side was strong winds every day and high water.

Worst of all, long mats of underwater grasses were uprooted and snagged our flies as we drifted them. Still, this is the Bighorn, and we were not to be denied. We drifted in boats made especially for fast, high water rivers such as this, into holes with names such as Breakfast Hole, Suck Hole and Last Chance Hole.

One hole, the Drive In, is named for the rows of 1930s-era cars that line the banks for erosion control.

Docking the boats, we spread out and sifted the water with a combination of dry, or floating, flies, as well as nymphs and streamers that we jerked brusquely through the water.

The Bighorn is the kind of place where you fish all day, sometimes skip lunch and fall into bed aching, but arise before sunrise eager to do it all over again.

Most of the group were Bighorn veterans, coming here up to three times a year. Keepers of the legacy, they spend evenings exchanging memories and stories that, being fish stories, tend to become more colorful each year.

Two years ago, the worst lightning storm in 100 years unloaded on the fishing party. Terrified, Booble -- not a small man -- laid flat in the grass of a river island until the storm passed.

Another camp member was chased by a bull into the river. His companions remember seeing his fishing hat floating downstream.

By Bighorn standards, the catching was slow. But standing in a riffle glittering in the sun, casting under a blue and puffy-cloud sky that stretches to the horizon, I find that numbers don't matter. Successfully fighting a trout, bringing it to net, then admiring the brilliant and gleaming colors before a release is one of life's jeweled moments.

And the worst days on the Bighorn are still the best fishing I've ever seen.

Caption: COLOR PHOTOS Ad Crable /

(1) A long-abandoned homestead and bent tree stand sentry over the Bighorn River.

(2) Greg Wilson of Lititz gets ready to release a Bighorn brown trout.

(3) Sunrise comes to Montana's Big Sky Country.

All content (c) 1999 Lancaster Newspapers Inc. and may not be republished without permission. Record Number: 1999292003.

For more information please check our other site: www.BighornRiverFlyFisher.com.