Category: Global Adventures

There is a moment on the drive from Dillon when Montana changes again. We leave the dry Beaverhead Valley behind, pass through Twin Bridges and begin climbing towards Virginia City and Nevada City, the old gold-rush towns sitting little more than a mile apart in Alder Gulch. Virginia City has been preserved rather than simply abandoned, and there is enough of the original town remaining that it does not require much imagination to picture another version of Montana operating along the same street. Old shopfronts remain. Boardwalks run past historic buildings. Inside are collections of machinery, furniture and objects from a period when gold rather than trout determined where people travelled and why they stayed.

Years ago, we wandered into a restaurant there and discovered the owner was Australian. What followed was one of those conversations that only seems unusual until you have travelled for long enough. Two Australians standing in an old mining town in Montana swapping stories about home and grizzly bears. He told us about bears coming onto his property and, on one occasion, one finding its way into his garage in the middle of the night. He had become accustomed to living with animals that would make most Australians reconsider taking the rubbish out after dark. It was another small reminder that although Montana can occasionally feel familiar to an Australian, particularly in its agricultural towns and dry open country, the similarities have limits.

The road keeps climbing beyond Virginia City. Forest appears out to the right and for a while there is little indication of what lies ahead. Then you reach the top and the Madison Valley suddenly opens beneath you. It is difficult to describe the scale of that first view. The valley is broad enough that the mountain ranges on either side appear to belong to different landscapes. Huge, almost level benches step down towards the valley floor, one terrace below another, before eventually reaching the river. Beyond them the Madison Range rises sharply, jagged against the horizon. Ennis sits below, small enough from above to seem almost incidental to the country surrounding it. After the tighter landscape of the gold towns just passed, the sudden space is startling.

We usually stop in Ennis for lunch. It is a proper Montana town rather than a town created primarily for visitors. There are bars, real estate offices, a library, fly shops and businesses serving the ranching country surrounding it. Rodeos and hunting are as much a part of the place as fishing. Main Street is not large, but it feels lived in. People are travelling through as well as staying. Roads meet there from Bozeman and the north, Dillon and Virginia City to the west, and West Yellowstone and Idaho to the south. Eventually we get back into the vehicle, drive out of town and almost immediately cross the Madison.

I first fished the river in 2010. My wife was with me on that trip and I had rented a farmhouse near the water, using it as a base while clients came through for a couple of weeks. Like most anglers arriving at a famous river for the first time, I thought I understood roughly what the Madison was. I had seen photographs and read about it for years. I knew about salmonflies, drift boats, boulder water and the famous fifty-mile riffle. It seemed straightforward enough. Sixteen years later, I am less certain that there is any single thing called the Madison.

I have now fished it from the meadow country inside Yellowstone National Park through Hebgen Lake, the short tailwater between Hebgen and Earthquake Lake, the water around Quake itself, the Slide, the walk-and-wade reaches below it, the long drift-boat water towards Ennis, and farther downstream through Bear Trap Canyon and beyond. I have fished it from boats, from the bank, in small one-man rafts and standing waist-deep in the current. I have fished tiny dry flies to individual trout on flat water and rubber-legged attractors through whitewater. I have chased salmonflies large enough to make delicate presentation seem faintly ridiculous and watched lake fish refuse mayflies almost too small to see. It is one river, but it contains an extraordinary number of different rivers within it.

The section most anglers picture when they hear the name is probably the water above Ennis, the famous fifty-mile riffle. The description is close enough to literal that it makes sense once you have spent a day there. The river runs over a broad bed of cobble and boulders and seems almost reluctant to form anything resembling a conventional pool. You come around a bend expecting the current eventually to ease, only to find another long run of broken water. Beyond that is another. Then another.

The Madison has an energy that is immediately recognisable. On many rivers the angler searches for the fast water among slower pools. Here you often search for the ten per cent reduction in speed. A depression behind a boulder. A small slick. A subtle shelf. A narrow seam beside heavier current. The trout use tiny variations in velocity because there is so much current everywhere else. Fishing it properly demands concentration. The fly is moving almost from the instant it lands. Line begins bowing downstream. Mends need to be made quickly and accurately. The boat is moving as well, and the guide is constantly positioning it around boulders, other boats and the next piece of useful water. There are moments when the angler, guide, line, flies and current all seem to be travelling at different speeds and somehow have to arrive at the same place together.

Years ago, David and I floated a long section in Water Master Kodiaks, little one-man inflatable craft with a seat between the tubes. Your legs hang in the water and a small set of oars sits atop the tubes, but much of the steering can be done with fins. On the Madison we discovered another advantage. By pointing our feet almost vertically down, we could let the tips of the fins brush across the tops of submerged boulders, creating just enough resistance to slow ourselves while we fished a run. We must have looked ridiculous. Proper drift boats passed with anglers and guides looking across at two Australians sitting low in the water, legs hanging beneath them, occasionally scraping their fins across the riverbed to avoid being swept away from the water they were trying to fish.

It worked, though. We fished all day and eventually came out below Varney Bridge completely exhausted. What really brought home the distance was retrieving the vehicle afterwards. Driving back along the highway at Montana speeds still took roughly thirty-five minutes. We did not fish the following day. The river had extracted enough from us in that foolish thirteen hour float.

There is another way to experience that same water, and it remains one of my favourite events in American fly fishing. The salmonfly hatch moves progressively through the Madison each year as summer takes hold. These are not subtle insects. They are enormous stoneflies, often several inches long, and when the hatch is properly underway they cling to bankside vegetation, fly awkwardly across the river and hit the water with enough impact to attract attention. The guides follow them. Everyone follows them. During the peak of the hatch, boats seem to arrive from everywhere. Fly shops know roughly where the leading edge of the bugs is. Guides talk to one another. Reports move quickly. A section that was relatively quiet yesterday can be full of boats tomorrow because the insects have moved several miles upstream.

On one of my early trips we hit it properly. Through dumb luck rather than careful planning. Rather than accepting that we would drift through the hatch once and leave it behind, the guide organised the day around the insects. We floated the productive section, pulled out, drove back and did it again. Then we repeated the process a third time. It was not one of those ridiculous stories where seventy trout somehow find their way into a net before lunch. We probably caught twenty fish across the day. What I remember is their quality and the violence of some of the takes. Big browns came out from structure to eat enormous dry flies. Some smashed them hard enough to make you instinctively tighten your grip on the rod. Others rose beneath an undercut bank with such restraint that the only indication of a take was that the fly was suddenly no longer there.

The contrast fascinated me. The insect was enormous. The fish was large. The river was fast. Yet the eat could still be little more than a sip.

By July, the fishing changes again. PMDs and caddis become important, and later the river can fill with terrestrials. Spruce moths appear in high summer and occasionally fall onto the water in sufficient numbers for trout to become completely preoccupied with them. They are terrestrial insects associated with the surrounding conifer forests rather than something emerging from the river, but the trout do not care about taxonomy. When enough reach the water, fish begin looking for them and can become surprisingly reluctant to eat anything else. The fishing can be exceptional. Then there are hoppers. Caddis. Spinners. Attractor dries. Large rubber-legged patterns worked through broken water. The Madison gives an angler plenty of reasons to keep looking up.

It also gives you difficult days. On one of our more recent trips I was fishing from the back of the boat while we worked likely pockets along the edge. The fishing had been slow from the beginning. There had been some cloud early and we found a handful of trout sitting in the little pieces of softer water behind boulders, occasionally willing to eat a spent caddis or spinner, but as the day warmed the opportunities became fewer.

At some point I wrapped my fly line around a boulder. There are sensible ways to deal with this. The guide can pull the boat to the edge and anchor. You can then walk back and retrieve the fly. Even slowing the boat can buy a few precious seconds to throw a loop back out and free the line. But I was annoyed with myself and chose none of them. Rather than make the guide stop because of my mistake, I pointed the rod directly at the boulder and pulled. About twenty feet of fly line broke off.

There are moments in fishing when decades of experience express themselves as calm judgement. There are others when it apparently expresses itself as destroying a perfectly good fly line because you are irritated with yourself. We still caught eight or nine trout that day, which says something about the strange standards Montana can create. Back home, most anglers would consider that a great session. On the Madison, after several days of exceptional fishing, it felt difficult. We eventually stopped, climbed onto a large boulder overlooking the valley, ate lunch and watched other boats move past below us. Later we swam. It was still a good day.

That is something these trips gradually teach people. A hard fishing day does not necessarily need rescuing.

Upstream of the fifty-mile riffle, the Madison begins changing so dramatically that the name alone stops being useful. Inside Yellowstone National Park it is meadow water. The river moves through open country lined in places by low, scrubby willow growth and vegetation thick enough to conceal an animal remarkably well. I have always felt slightly more alert fishing there than I do on most rivers. Grizzly country changes the senses. You hear things differently. Timber and brush cease to be scenery and become places from which something may emerge.

The Madison eventually leaves the park and enters Hebgen Lake, a large reservoir sitting west of Yellowstone. The river disappears into still water and the fishing changes with it. Hebgen is famous among fly fishers for its gulpers, trout feeding rhythmically on mayflies across the surface. On the right summer morning, particularly when Callibaetis and other mayflies are on the water, the lake can appear to contain an impossible number of rising fish. The guide runs a small motor to reach a productive bay, shuts it down and takes the oars. Then everything becomes quiet.

You watch. A fish rises. Then again. Perhaps ten metres away another begins feeding. Behind it is another. Soon there are rings appearing everywhere and the problem becomes deciding which fish to present to.

The trout often establish a rhythm. Rise. Swim. Rise again. Sometimes they are visible beneath the surface and you can track them between rises. At other times all you have is a sequence of expanding rings from which you try to calculate direction and speed. The guide rows quietly, attempting to put the boat somewhere that gives the angler a chance of placing a tiny dry fly ahead of the fish without putting line across its path. It is technical fishing. Leaders are long. Tippets fine. Presentation matters. The surface is flat enough for mistakes to remain visible for an uncomfortable amount of time.

Refusals are part of the information. If a trout feeding confidently turns away from your fly from two feet below it, something is probably wrong. The pattern, the size, the tippet or the presentation has given the game away early. If the fish rises until its nose almost touches the imitation before deciding against it, you are much closer. Sometimes the answer is another fly. Sometimes the same fly simply needs to arrive more naturally the next time. That process can occupy an experienced angler for hours. A fish rises six times on naturals. You make what appears to be the perfect cast. It approaches your fly and refuses it. Then it rises again five feet away as though nothing happened.

There are mornings when the lake seems covered in fish and you still feel as though you cannot buy one. There are others when everything aligns. The wind can help for a while. A little surface movement disguises the leader and creates lanes where insects collect. Too much eventually makes tracking individual fish difficult. By late morning, as the wind strengthens or the rise begins fading, we often leave the lake and move onto the river.

The transformation can be almost absurd. An hour earlier you were casting a tiny mayfly to one visible trout in flat water. Now you are throwing a Chubby Chernobyl or another large attractor into heavy current and mending frantically as the Madison tries to carry the fly, the line and perhaps the angler towards Ennis. Both are the same river system. That is what took me years to fully appreciate.

Between Hebgen and Earthquake Lake lies another short section of Madison. I have fished it several times, including days when a small boat was useful simply for crossing the river to reach water inaccessible from the road side. Once across, you can walk downstream towards the delta and fish back upstream through a mixture of fast and flatter water. It is beautiful country. Forest rises around both sides and the landscape begins merging with the vast connected country of eastern Idaho and Yellowstone. It is not wilderness in the sense that nobody has ever been there, but there are large areas without roads and remarkably few people once you leave the obvious access points.

That matters because the bears use it too. Last year, while clients were fishing with guides, I had a day to myself. At the trailhead I found a warning sign stating that a carcass and a bear were somewhere in the area. The information was precise enough to make you nervous and vague enough to be almost useless. Other anglers arriving at the trailhead were making the same calculation. Nobody seemed particularly interested in walking farther along the trail without knowing where the carcass was or whether the bear remained with it.

The fishing conditions were almost perfect. Blue sky. Mild warmth. Very little wind. Fish rising everywhere. If this had been New Zealand, I would have regarded the situation as idyllic. Instead I started walking alone down a trail calling, “Hey bear,” every so often into the forest.

It is difficult to describe how much that changes fishing. Rationally, I knew grizzly encounters were uncommon. I carried bear spray. I understood the basic precautions. None of that stopped the older part of the brain from becoming extremely interested in every sound coming from the trees. Eventually I reached a point where I needed to cut through to the river. Between me and the water was a dense wall of vegetation perhaps fifteen feet high. I could not see through it. The only way forward was to push into it. I remember standing there reconsidering how badly I actually wanted to catch a trout.

Eventually I went through. Once in the river, the fishing was excellent. It should have been one of those quiet afternoons when everything else disappears. Instead, every drift was accompanied by another glance over my shoulder. Cast. Mend. Watch the fly. Look behind. Cast again. Nothing happened. I did not see a bear. That did not make the bear feel absent.

Eventually the Madison enters Earthquake Lake, and here the river’s story changes for reasons having nothing to do with trout. The first time I saw Quake Lake, I knew almost nothing about what had happened there. But no one needed to tell me that something extraordinary had occurred. The mountain had a wound across it.

Even from a distance the scar was obvious. An enormous section of forest simply stopped, replaced by exposed rock and debris running down the mountainside towards the lake. Dead trees protruded from the water. Along the Slide itself, timber lay among boulders and broken ground as though the landscape had been picked up, shaken and dropped again. Photographs do not convey the scale particularly well. A wide-angle image reduces the scar to a pale patch on a mountain. Standing among the debris is different. The visitor centre sits within the slide area, and as you drive towards it the size of the material around you begins providing scale. The mountain above towers over the road. What looked like gravel from across the valley becomes rock. What looked like rock becomes boulders.

The event that created it happened late on the night of 17 August 1959. At 11.37 pm, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck near Hebgen Lake. Within seconds of the strongest shaking, a section of the canyon wall approximately 1,300 feet high collapsed into the Madison Canyon. Tens of millions of cubic yards of rock, earth and timber crossed the valley, ran hundreds of feet up the opposite wall and buried part of the Rock Creek campground. Twenty-six people died beneath the slide. Nineteen were never recovered. The earthquake’s overall death toll was twenty-eight.

The detail I find hardest to shake is the timing. Eyewitness accounts suggest the landslide began only seconds, perhaps half a minute, after the strongest shaking subsided. I sometimes try to imagine that from the campground. You are asleep. The ground begins moving violently enough to wake you. Perhaps things are falling inside the camper or tent. People are shouting. It is dark. You have not had time to understand that there has been an earthquake, much less decide what to do next.

Then another sound begins.

I imagine it as something beyond thunder. Rock, trees and part of a mountain accelerating down the slope must have produced a sound for which there was no useful comparison. I can picture being woken by the shaking more easily than I can picture understanding what came after it. In daylight, standing across the canyon, the direction of the slide is obvious. In a tent, in the dark, with the ground still moving, I wonder whether you would even have known which way to turn.

The accounts of what followed are scarcely easier to comprehend. The slide drove a wave of muddy water and a violent blast of displaced air through the camping area. Survivors gathered on higher ground at Refuge Point, trapped between the landslide downstream and damaged roads upstream. By half past six the following morning, the rising water had covered the cars and trailers in Rock Creek Campground. Helicopters eventually evacuated the most seriously injured, while a rough road bulldozed around the damaged sections allowed the remaining survivors to leave.

The visitor centre makes those events difficult to keep at a comfortable historical distance. There are photographs, seismograph records, recovered objects and personal accounts, along with a film that runs through the story. Outside is the actual mountainside. You can look at the evidence indoors, then turn towards the windows and see where it happened. I remember finding that more affecting than any single display. There was no need to imagine the setting. It occupied the view.

Blocking the river created another emergency. Water backed up behind the slide, and the new lake continued rising. Engineers feared it could overtop the debris and erode a breach, sending a destructive flood towards Ennis and other communities downstream. There was also concern that the rising lake could destabilise Hebgen Dam upstream. The shaking had stopped, but the situation was still developing.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers organised the construction of an emergency spillway. By September, 62 pieces of heavy equipment and 190 operators and mechanics were working around the clock. On 10 September, 23 days after the earthquake, water began flowing over the new channel. Even then, the work was not finished. Uncontrolled erosion cut into the steep lower spillway, and attempts to protect it with enormous boulders proved unsuccessful. Draglines were brought in to excavate a lower outlet while the water continued flowing. A stable configuration was finally achieved on 29 October.

I had once assumed that the weight of the slide had simply compressed everything into a barrier solid enough to hold the lake. Learning about the excavation changed that picture. The outlet was not merely a gap the Madison had found for itself. People had worked through the debris to give the water a controlled passage before it could cut an uncontrolled one.

The drowned trees are perhaps the easiest part of the story to read without entering the visitor centre at all. They were standing in the valley before the earthquake, and the rising lake inundated them where they grew. Their trunks still project from the water. The earthquake and slide happened in moments; the lake took shape over the weeks that followed. When I fish Quake now, I find myself looking at those trees almost as often as I look at the scar. From a boat, they give the scale of what happened a more familiar measure.

Below the lake, the water leaves any resemblance to stillwater fishing behind.

On one of my more recent visits, I had been working on my book while the clients went out with their guides. We were one person short on that trip, which left a spare seat beside one of the anglers. His guide had prepared a second lunch in case I decided to join them. I declined, partly because I wanted to write and partly because it seemed a shame not to let the client enjoy having the boat to himself. The guide gave me the lunch anyway. Later, with the weather looking good and a day still ahead of me, I decided to take it down to the Slide.

Getting to the water required a careful descent from the road through loose gravel and broken ground. From above, I could see that the river was fast. Once I reached it, the height of the waves and the size of the boulders became much more apparent. Some of the rocks were as large as small vans. Water struck them, climbed against their faces and dropped into narrow slots before being forced around the next obstruction. Timber complicated the picture further. Looking at that particular water as a rower, I had no desire to put my drift boat into it.

Fishing it on foot required its own caution. I had a wading staff, but that did not turn an awkward stretch of river into a safe one. Every step needed consideration, as did what might happen after a slip. There were places where the current would carry a person straight into the next obstruction, with very little opportunity to recover. Much of the fishing involved working around or over rocks rather than walking through the river, and even that demanded attention. The next useful foothold mattered at least as much as the next useful cast.

At first the water appeared almost too violent to hold fish. After a while, smaller pieces began separating themselves from the general confusion. There was a cushion of softer water against the upstream face of a boulder, a narrow slick behind another and a dark slot running along a rock wall. Some pockets were scarcely larger than a dining table. Others were no more than a turn in the current, briefly slowing before being drawn back into the main flow. Those were the places I began fishing.

One fish remains particularly clear in my mind. I was standing on a boulder, looking almost directly down into a patch of shaded water beneath another. The main current swept past hard, but a small reverse flow curled back under the rock ahead of me. The surface was so broken and distorted that I could get close without seeing directly through to the bottom. There was barely any casting involved. I simply lowered the dry fly into the eddy and kept the line in the air away from the surrounding current.

For perhaps thirty seconds I held it there, making small adjustments as the fly drifted and dapped beneath the boulder. Then a trout took it. After all the effort of getting into position, the actual fishing had involved little more than dropping a fly directly below me and keeping it bobbling in the right water.

I caught a couple of very good fish in that section and lost others that I couldn’t stop. Once a fish reached the heavier current, the balance changed immediately. There was no open gravel bank to follow it along and no way to move quickly between the boulders. Some fish broke me off. I remember being surprised by how few small trout I encountered. The water looked improbable from the road, yet it held fish substantial enough to make the struggle to reach it seem understandable.

Working upstream, I kept looking between the boulders around me and the exposed mountainside above. At the visitor centre, the scale had been measured in photographs and figures. Down here, it was measured in the effort required to get around one rock and then another. The river was loud enough that it was difficult to imagine hearing anything else, and occasionally my thoughts returned to what the canyon must have sounded like that night.

Farther downstream, around Three Dollar Bridge, you find another version of the Madison. It is still quick, still broken and still capable of making wading hard work, but the fishing becomes a matter of examining smaller differences within a much broader sweep of water. From the road, several anglers spread across a section can make it look thoroughly occupied. On foot, I have found that a surprisingly small patch can take a long time to fish properly. One boulder conceals several possible presentations. A shallow seam leads into a slot that was not visible from the bank. Water that appeared uniform from above begins dividing into separate pieces.

There is no need to charge along covering every metre. You might spend a considerable time in an area that would barely register during a drift. The work is in getting a fly through one pocket without having the faster water beside it pull the line away. Then the angle changes, or you move a few steps, and the same section offers something else. It is absorbing fishing, although the concentration can leave you surprisingly tired by the end of the day.

Nor does the river keep that character all the way downstream. Ennis Lake interrupts it again, and below the dam the Madison enters Bear Trap Canyon, where the enclosed canyon eventually gives way to a broader, more open river. My fishing there has generally belonged to the earlier part of the season. Once the summer heat takes hold, I’m usually looking elsewhere. Later, when the inner tubes and rafts begin filling the lower river, it can be difficult to connect that floating summer gathering with the quiet lake fishing or the rough water below Quake.

Moving between these places is one reason the local guides matter. I have fished the Madison with people from several operations over the years, including Big Sky Anglers, TroutHunter and Anderson and Platt. The guides I have particularly enjoyed are the ones who remain good company even when a day proves to be challenging. Some of the Dillon crew have a dry, self directed humour that feels familiar to an Australian. There is plenty of joking, but beneath it they are paying attention. A morning planned for the lake might finish on a river, and not necessarily the river I had expected.

One day, after fishing the lake from a drift boat, I assumed we would launch on the Madison for the afternoon. Instead, the guide decided we would fish the Gallatin. Rather than tow the boat all the way there, he drove back to a junction, pulled over and unhitched the trailer. Then he left the entire outfit beside the main road and we drove away.

I spent considerably more time thinking about that decision than he did. To me, it looked like an expensive boat being left unattended where anyone could attach it to a vehicle and disappear. He did not seem remotely concerned. When pressed on it, his explanation was that people knew the boats and knew who owned them. The wrong boat behind the wrong pickup would attract attention. I understood what he meant, but it did not entirely settle the part of my mind that had watched him disconnect the trailer and walk away.

It is one of those small incidents that has remained with me despite having almost nothing to do with the fish we caught. I cannot now remember every detail of the afternoon on the Gallatin. I can still picture the boat sitting beside the road.

The towns around this part of the trip have similarly distinct characters. Ennis remains the place I most readily recognise as a working Montana town. West Yellowstone is useful and sometimes enjoyable, but I rarely feel any desire to stay in the middle of it. After a day on the water, the crowded streets, souvenir shops and constant traffic can be a difficult adjustment. There are good meals to be found, and it is convenient for accessing the park, but I prefer having somewhere quieter to return to.

Island Park suits me differently. From the main road it can seem scattered and almost without a centre, yet turn into the forest and there are cabins and houses everywhere. On summer evenings, ATVs appear in numbers that initially surprised me. They pass along the roadside tracks, stand on trailers outside accommodation and gather near the bars. It is not silent country during daylight hours. Nevertheless, once dinner is finished and people retreat to their places among the trees, the evenings we spend there are generally quiet.

At TroutHunter in Last Chance, we have often eaten overlooking the Henry’s Fork. After a day on the Madison or Hebgen, it is mildly absurd to sit down for dinner beside yet another river capable of occupying an entire trip. The lodge and shop bring anglers together from all over the world, and the conversations around the tables tend to reflect it. I have heard enough discussion of rivers during dinner there to fill another day before anyone has ordered dessert.

More often, we go back to the house. We usually stay outside the busiest parts of town, around Henry’s Lake or in deep in the timber, with enough room for people to spread out. Someone puts the barbecue on while the others shower. Ribeyes, salad, baked potatoes and a bottle of wine make a fairly reliable dinner after a day outdoors. Photographs are passed around. Calls are made home. Someone may have a book open while another is sorting gear for the morning. Occasionally deer or a moose appear outside and interrupt whatever everyone is doing.

These evenings do not need organising in the way the fishing days do. By this stage, the group has generally worked out how to share the space. Some want to talk. Others are happy sitting quietly for a while. The conversation may stay with the day’s fishing, but it is just as likely to move somewhere else entirely. After enough days together, nobody feels obliged to keep discussing flies simply because it is a fishing trip.

This is usually the final part of our standard journey. There have been three days on the Missouri, a break while we move, three days around Dillon, another day between regions and then these last days near Yellowstone. That spacing matters. People are not simply being marched through two weeks of consecutive fishing days until they can no longer lift a rod. There has been time to travel, look around, eat somewhere different and arrive at the next river with some interest left.

By the final evening, most are content rather than desperate. They have caught fish, sometimes a great many, and have spent days working through different techniques with guides who know their water. They have fished from boats and on foot, watched insects arrive, missed fish they should have caught and landed others they did not expect. An angler who was uncertain on the first morning in Craig may now be making adjustments without waiting to be told. You notice it in the little things, including how much less time they spend looking at the guide for reassurance.

The next morning I will drive them back to Bozeman. Some are flying home. Others are meeting their wives to continue travelling, and a few will remain longer in the West. There are bags to organise and flight times to check, but the final dinner rarely feels hurried. People talk about the places they liked and the fishing they would return for. There are thanks, which I always appreciate. Much of hosting happens before anyone reaches the river, and it is good to know when the work has allowed people to settle in and enjoy themselves.

When I think back over this leg of the trip, though, I do not see one final scene that neatly gathers it all together. I see the lake on a quiet morning, with so many rings appearing that I briefly lose track of the fish we are following. I see the shaded pocket beneath that enormous boulder. I see the empty trailer hitch as a guide leaves his boat beside the road, apparently untroubled by a decision I am still considering a long time later.

The Madison I first imagined from photographs was not wrong. It was simply incomplete. I knew about the riffle water, the salmonflies and the boats. I had not pictured how different the same day could become after moving only a short distance, or how much of the river’s present shape could be traced to a night within living memory. Some of what I now recognise came from guides. Some came from fishing badly enough to have to reconsider what I was doing. Some required putting the rod down and walking into the visitor centre.

Yet the stretch that most often returns to me is the long water above Ennis. I can still feel the movement of the boat there and the need to keep adjusting the line as the fly travels past one boulder towards the next. There is always another small piece of softer water to examine. Before I have quite finished with it, the boat has carried me towards another bank, another seam, another place that deserves a cast.

The valley opens around us, with those level terraces stepping away towards the mountains. Ahead, the river bends out of sight. On most rivers I would expect to find a pool somewhere beyond it, a place where the current gathers and slows enough to give everyone a moment. Here, the bend reveals another long stretch of broken water, moving at much the same pace as the one we have just left. The guide adjusts the boat. I lift the line and cast again.

On this part of the Madison, you eventually stop waiting for the pool.

The river simply keeps going.

Anthony Boliancu
Drift Boat Guide

 

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More from the Madison

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After three days on the Missouri, people begin to think they have Montana worked out. This is usually about the time we leave.

There is none of the careful packing that accompanies an airport day. The rods don’t even go back into their tubes. They’re left fully rigged and laid in the vehicle among the bags, ready for whatever we decide to fish next. We say goodbye to Craig, turn south and begin the journey towards Dillon.

The first part of the drive gives little indication of how much the country is about to change. Interstate 15 follows the Missouri through narrow country south of Craig, with steep canyon slopes pressing towards the road and the river appearing and disappearing beside us. Old railway lines, bridges and smaller creeks cut through the folds in the landscape. For a while, the country still feels connected to the river we have just left.

Gradually it opens.

Beyond Helena the distances become larger. Mountain ranges that once seemed close enough to touch retreat towards the horizon. Dry grass fills enormous valleys between them. Around Butte, the scars of mining appear on the hillsides, reminders that people were drawn to this country for very different reasons long before fly fishing became part of its modern identity. Continue south and the landscape becomes drier again. Rock and pale grass replace much of the green. Irrigated fields appear almost unnaturally bright against the surrounding country.

By the time we reach Dillon, Craig feels considerably farther away than the distance on the map suggests.

Dillon is still a proper Montana town. Pickups line the streets. American flags hang from houses and businesses. Bars and restaurants sit among practical shops serving people who actually live and work in the surrounding valleys. Sparky’s has enough 1950s and 60s memorabilia to occupy you while waiting for dinner, including booths fashioned from old vehicles. There is a small brewery, several fly shops and a taco truck that has become something of an institution for us. After enough years returning to a place, convenience and familiarity eventually become their own form of luxury, and sometimes a good taco eaten without ceremony is exactly what everyone wants.

We generally stay outside town on acreage rather than in a motel. The house we have used on recent trips has a large L-shaped balcony wrapping around the second storey. Below one side is a working yard where horses are handled and exercised. Around the other, the view opens towards distant mountains that spend the afternoon looking bleached by the sun before deepening in colour as evening arrives. Dillon can be oppressively hot in July, but once the sun drops, sitting on that deck with something cold to drink is a very pleasant way to finish a fishing day.

Mornings begin with coffee and the short drive into town. The guiding operation we use has become familiar enough that arriving now feels more like returning than checking in. Hunting dogs are usually somewhere around the shop. Some mornings they wander over looking for attention. Other times they barely bother lifting their heads from beneath the wader racks, offering something approaching a canine nod before going back to sleep.

Around them, the owners are usually in motion. Boats need guides. Guides need clients. Clients need rivers. Lunches need loading and decisions made about where everyone is going. A large operation may have boats scattered across several rivers and sections on the same day. Water temperature, flows, hatches, yesterday’s reports, fishing pressure and client ability all enter the calculation. So does something less measurable: what people actually feel like doing.

That matters around Dillon because there is no single obvious river. Within reach are the Beaverhead, Big Hole, Ruby and Jefferson, with the Madison not much farther away. They are not different sections of the same experience. They ask completely different questions. After three days learning the Missouri, that can come as a surprise.

The Beaverhead usually makes the point first. We drive south on the interstate towards Clark Canyon Reservoir, leave the highway and cross the dam wall. The reservoir sits broad and still on one side. On the other, the Beaverhead emerges below the dam and immediately begins winding across the dry valley floor. From above it looks almost insignificant, particularly after several days on the Missouri.

Then you reach the ramp.

It does not seem to matter how early we arrive. There are usually boats ahead of us. Everyone joins the queue in the order they arrived and moves forward one place at a time. Nobody seems particularly bothered by the wait. Guides use the twenty minutes to prepare boats, assess the water, alter leaders and tie on flies. Clients drink coffee and watch the river. Eventually your turn arrives, the boat slides down the rough ramp and another day begins.

From the boat, the Beaverhead feels completely different. It is narrow, intimate and surprisingly quick. In places it may be only twenty or thirty yards across, occasionally widening beyond that, before bending back upon itself beneath bankside vegetation. Channels split without warning. Some carry similar amounts of water, leaving the person on the oars only a few seconds to decide which one to take. Timber appears around bends. Shallow gravel accelerates the current. The river is constantly asking the rower to look ahead.

That is part of what makes it enjoyable to row. You are rarely sitting passively on the oars. The boat needs positioning, correcting and anticipating. The angler needs to remain in useful water while the guide is already considering what lies around the next corner. On a large river, there is often time to see trouble developing. On the Beaverhead, decisions arrive more quickly.

The fishing can be equally startling. The upper river holds extraordinary numbers of trout, many of them substantial fish. The conventional approach is often deep nymphing. Not vaguely deep. Properly deep. Long droppers, two weighted nymphs, split shot and indicators large enough to look faintly ridiculous until you watch one disappear.

The first time you see the rigs, it is difficult not to think of the barrels Quint stuck into the shark in Jaws. You wonder how any trout could possibly pull the thing under.

Then the indicator vanishes. Sometimes it doesn’t merely dip. It is violently dragged beneath the surface and begins travelling upstream at a rate that leaves no doubt about what has happened below. The guides want the flies on the bottom. You can often see the indicator tapping rhythmically as the rig moves through the run. Tap, tap, tap. The flies are down where they need to be. Then one of those taps becomes something else entirely.

It is enormously productive. In the upper few miles there can be so many fish concentrated in the cold tailwater that guides will anchor boats along the edge of a run or below a drop off and repeatedly work the centre channel. At times there may be several boats lined along the same run, with different anglers hooked up simultaneously.

My Australian instincts struggle with this.

More than once I have approached a line of anchored boats, shipped the oars and tried to sneak through whatever narrow gap I could find between the bank and the boats because I did not want to row across somebody else’s fish.

The American guides look at me as though I have lost my mind. “Just go over them.” The first few times I assumed they were simply being polite. They weren’t.

There are plenty of fish, they tell me, and the trout are accustomed to boats. Rowing over the top is preferable to creating chaos along the bank or interfering with a client’s backcast. After enough years I understand the logic perfectly well, yet some part of me still finds it difficult.

Perhaps that is why we have gradually developed a different way of fishing the Beaverhead. Most guides operate something close to conventional hours. They launch around eight or nine and finish somewhere around four or five. We try to get ahead of that rhythm. If conditions allow, we are on the water around seven, sometimes among the very first boat to launch. Then we keep moving.

Rather than spending eight hours working every productive nymphing run, we cover the first drift in four or five. We pick the eyes out of the water, concentrate heavily on dry flies and keep moving downstream. When we reach the takeout, we stop for lunch, return to the top and do it again. By the second drift, many of the boats that followed us in the morning are either well downstream or beginning to finish. For much of the afternoon, the river feels considerably quieter.

There is a trade-off. If the sole objective were numbers, it would be foolish to ignore the deep nymph fishing. Twenty fish is entirely possible. Sometimes more. Our approach may produce five or ten good fish on a pass, perhaps a dozen when everything comes together.

I will happily take that exchange. Fewer boats. Dry flies. Rising trout.

The Beaverhead offers surprisingly good dry-fly fishing for anyone prepared to look away from the obvious way of doing things. Terrestrials can be worked tight to grassy edges and beneath cover. PMDs bring fish into slower water. Spinners gather over flats. Anywhere the current softens slightly is worth examining, particularly where shade reaches across the river.

Double dry-fly rigs allow us to search while still presenting something small enough to interest selective fish. We miss plenty. Some refuse at the last moment. Others rise, inspect the fly and disappear again. And when you snag a branch its $7 gone, not $3.50. That is part of it.

The trout themselves can be exceptional. The lower forty-eight states are not generally associated with the size of trout Australians encounter in New Zealand, but certain fertile tailwaters are different. The Beaverhead is one of them. Heavy brown trout are common enough that landing several genuinely good fish in a day is unremarkable by local standards.

It is easy, in those circumstances, to become complacent. That is probably the greatest danger on the Beaverhead. The river looks small. The boat feels controllable. Fish are everywhere. Then you round a corner and discover fast water, shallow boulders and timber exactly where you do not want it.

There is one section beneath an interstate bridge that has always commanded my attention. The river narrows, accelerates through boulders and shifts heavily from one side to the other before dropping towards trees. At certain flows there is very little time to carefully pick a line and the decision has already been made for you. Years ago, I came through there with a couple of mates while another boat followed behind. I heard the water before I properly saw it and managed to pull over just high enough to get my anglers onto the bank. With the boat lighter, I pushed through alone, sliding across shallow boulders before pulling up below. A few small dings on the hull the only damage to show.

Then I thought about the second boat. The person rowing it had considerably less experience. I ran upstream. By the time I reached them, there was no realistic way for the rower to stop above the rapid. I ended up scrambling onto the rocks, grabbing the boat as it came through and using my weight, the anchor and whatever footing I could find to help slow it enough to get the anglers out. Then I rowed that boat through as well.

A local guide might reasonably describe the rapid as small. In the broader scheme of western whitewater, it is. But small rapids can still put inexperienced rowers into trees, particularly when everything happens quickly. I have sat nearby waiting to photograph clients coming through that slot and watched other boats get pushed into the timber on the far side.

The lesson is not that the Beaverhead is inherently dangerous. It is that complacency can make any river dangerous.

The next morning may be entirely different. The Big Hole opens the country again. Where the Beaverhead feels intimate and contained, the Big Hole feels like a western freestone river. There is no large storage dam controlling its upper reaches. Gravel moves. Channels alter. Timber accumulates and disappears. Spring runoff can rearrange pieces of river between visits. That impermanence gives the Big Hole much of its character.

Large ranches spread away from the banks. Gravel bars open beneath wide skies. Long rock walls have been built along some outside bends to protect against erosion. Cottonwoods, pasture and distant mountains replace much of the tight vegetation of the Beaverhead. Deer are more common. Birdlife seems more obvious. The river feels less engineered even where people have clearly worked hard to hold it in place.

It has good years and lean ones. That matters too.

Not every famous Montana river fishes brilliantly every season, and there is little point pretending otherwise. The Big Hole has experienced difficult periods, and by midsummer conditions can vary enormously. Yet even on a modest fishing day it remains one of those places where the journey itself carries considerable value.

The Ruby changes the pace again. It is smaller water, approached on foot rather than from a drift boat. Pools, riffles and runs replace the constant movement of rowing. You slow down. Watch. Walk. Perhaps wait for a fish to reveal itself before making a cast.

For anglers who have spent six days sitting in boats, that alone can feel refreshing.

The Ruby also introduces another peculiarly western issue: access. For years, disputes around bridges on the river became part of a larger argument over Montana’s stream-access laws. Wealthy landowners challenged whether anglers could legally reach public water from county bridges, leading to litigation that eventually reached the Montana Supreme Court. To an Australian visitor, the intensity of these arguments can seem strange until you understand how important public access is to western fishing culture.

A river can be public while the land surrounding it is not.

That distinction shapes where people park, where they enter and how they move along the water. On the Ruby, the argument was never merely about trout. It was about who gets to reach them.

The Jefferson is another possibility, though by the time we usually arrive in July it can simply be too warm. Earlier in the season it can fish very well. Later, responsible decisions about water temperature become more important than whether somebody would like another day on a particular river. That is where the depth of local guide knowledge becomes invaluable.

A guiding operation may have twenty boats spread across different rivers and sections on any given day. Reports return every evening. Guides know which water is warming, where hatches appeared, which section received heavy pressure and where somebody unexpectedly found good fish.

The following morning, all of that information is redistributed. Sometimes the decision has little to do with where the most fish were caught. A client may have spent two days watching an indicator and simply want to throw dry flies against grassy banks. Someone else may want to sight-fish. Another may be tired and prefer a less technical day. A guide who ignores those things can put somebody on the objectively “best” river and still give them the wrong day.

Occasionally the answer is the Madison. It requires a longer drive from Dillon, through Twin Bridges and Virginia City towards Ennis, but it has rescued more than one trip when conditions or restrictions elsewhere narrowed the options. The river itself changes character repeatedly, from the country around Yellowstone through Hebgen and Quake lakes, down through the Slide and into the long section anglers call the fifty-mile riffle before eventually flattening towards Ennis.

By then, the idea of “Montana fishing” as a single thing has become almost meaningless. The rivers are too different. So is the country surrounding them.  One of the pleasures of staying around Dillon is discovering that the landscape carries stories far older than the fly shops.

Beaverhead Rock rises above the valley north of town. In 1805, Sacagawea recognised the landmark as Lewis and Clark’s expedition moved through the region and understood that they were approaching the country of her Shoshone people. The expedition desperately needed horses if it was going to cross the mountains. A shape in the landscape told her they were getting close.

Nearby, William Clark climbed high ground to survey and sketch the country. Today we drive through the same valley in air-conditioned vehicles, watching river reports on phones and deciding where to fish tomorrow.

A little farther away is Bannack. Gold was discovered there in 1862, and for a brief period the settlement became one of the most important places in Montana Territory. Today much of the town remains standing. You can walk along the old main street past weathered buildings, looking through empty windows into rooms that once held schools, businesses and families.

Ghost towns are strange places. The buildings remain, but the reason for their existence has disappeared. Coolidge, hidden in the Pioneer Mountains, feels different again. It grew around silver rather than gold. Reaching the remains involves leaving the vehicle and walking through forest into country where the industrial ambition of another era is slowly being absorbed back into the landscape. Mining structures, abandoned buildings and remnants of the old operation remain among the trees.

It is difficult to reconcile those quiet ruins with the effort required to put them there.

Then there is the Big Hole Battlefield. I first visited without fully understanding the story attached to the place. The trails move through open country towards the edge of the timber. Interpretive markers explain what happened there in August 1877, when more than eight hundred nimíipuu, or Nez Perce, were travelling with their families and thousands of horses during their attempted flight from U.S. forces.

The attack came at dawn. Nearly ninety Nez Perce were killed, many of them women and children, along with soldiers and civilian volunteers. The survivors continued eastward, fighting and travelling for weeks before much of the group was eventually stopped close to the Canadian border.

I remember walking the trails and reading the markers. At one point we saw what appeared to be a bear near the distant timber. Mostly, though, I remember the quiet.

Places like that require very little interpretation from the visitor. The landscape is still there. The distances are still visible. Once you understand that families were moving through this country with children, horses and possessions while being pursued across hundreds of miles, the neat lines on a modern map become something else entirely. Montana contains a great deal of that.

A road followed because it leads to tomorrow’s fishing may also cross the route of Lewis and Clark, pass an abandoned mining settlement, skirt a battlefield or run beside country used for thousands of years before any of those names existed. The fishing is only one layer.

By the time we leave Dillon, clients have usually been in Montana for more than a week and fished six full days. Something has changed. The nervousness of the first Missouri morning is gone. They have caught trout in slow slicks and fast pocket water. They have watched indicators disappear and fish rise to dries. They have blind-fished likely banks, stalked individual trout and learned that a guide changing tomorrow’s river is not necessarily changing the plan. Sometimes that is the plan.

They are also tired in the good way. The bags go back into the vehicle. The rods remain rigged. Then we turn towards the next part of the journey.

Usually that means West Yellowstone or Island Park, and another complete change of scale. Drift boats may give way to wading. The next trout might be a native cutthroat in Yellowstone National Park. There will be bison, thermal basins, high meadows and the possibility of wolves or bears at first light. The Madison remains nearby. So does the Henry’s Fork. By this stage nobody needs convincing that the next river will be different.

Put me into a drift boat on any of these waters and I would know where I was almost immediately. I wouldn’t need the mountains, a road sign or a familiar house on the bank. The river itself would give it away. The Missouri with its broad, deceptive slicks. The Beaverhead turning back upon itself beneath willows and brush. The Big Hole opening across ranch country. The Madison running seemingly without end through riffle water.

After enough time, you recognise them in much the same way you recognise familiar handwriting. Not because you consciously examine every detail, but because the details together could belong to nobody else.

That is perhaps what changes most during these middle days of the trip. On arrival, clients know the names. Missouri. Beaverhead. Big Hole. Madison. They are famous rivers collected over years from books, magazines, films and conversations with other anglers. Six days later, the names have acquired shape and movement. One is broad and subtle. Another narrow and quick. One asks you to stare at a tiny dry fly in flat water. Another has you throwing something large against a grassy bank while the boat moves beneath you.

Tomorrow there will be another river.

Somewhere ahead, Yellowstone is waiting.

And nobody expects it to look anything like the water we have just left.

 

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The rods are usually rigged the night before. There is no practical reason for this. The guides will almost certainly alter the leaders, change the flies and perhaps abandon the entire setup before we leave the ramp. Still, on the first evening in Craig, nobody wants to arrive unprepared. Licences are checked, rain jackets located and lunch orders completed before people drift off to their rooms carrying the restless energy of months, sometimes years, of anticipation.

The alarms are generally set for 6.30, though most people are awake well before them. Breakfast on the first morning is rarely impressive. A piece of toast, some muesli, perhaps a banana eaten while looking repeatedly at the time. Eggs and bacon can wait. Outside, the light is already spreading across the valley and somewhere downstream dozens of guides are going through the same preparations.

The drive to the fly shop is usually quiet. There is no music. No radio. People are too busy simply looking through the windows. The interstate follows the river closely in places, and every time the water appears around a bend, heads turn instinctively. Somebody comments on the level. Somebody else spots a drift boat. It does not matter that we checked the flows the night before or that very little is likely to have changed. Looking is part of the ritual.

By the time we reach Craig, the fly-shop car park appears to be in complete disorder. Clients stand holding rods and day packs while guides move quickly between trucks, boats and the shop. Coolers are loaded. Flies are collected. Shuttle arrangements are confirmed. Boat trailers rattle in and out of the gravel lot. On a busy morning there may be sixty or seventy anglers preparing to leave and thirty or forty drift boats scattered across the surrounding lots. To somebody seeing it for the first time, the obvious thought is that the river will be ruined before breakfast. It never is.

The boats begin spreading out almost as soon as they reach the water. Some guides start below the dam. Others launch from town. A few drive further downstream towards the canyon or the more pastoral sections where summer hoppers may bring fish tight to the banks. Some clients will finish early. Others will remain out until evening. By the time the first few kilometres have passed beneath the hull, the apparent chaos has dissolved into long stretches of water and the occasional distant boat. The Missouri absorbs people remarkably well.

Craig itself is barely a town in the conventional sense. A few fly shops. A bar. Places to eat. Lodging scattered along the river. Boats parked beside roads and trucks carrying rods through every intersection. The entire place seems temporarily assembled around the requirements of trout fishing.

Guides are everywhere. You recognise them before anyone makes an introduction. Hooded, long-sleeved sun shirts, trucker caps, sandals or flip-flops, and nippers hanging around their necks. The nippers are practical, of course, but they also operate as a kind of identification badge. You see the sun shirt and lanyard at a petrol station, in a supermarket or beside a boat trailer and immediately know what the person does for a living.

The outfitter we work with draws from a large group of guides, which means no two boats are quite the same. There are young men in their twenties who have fallen in love with the idea of making a life on rivers and want as much work as they can get. They follow new patterns and techniques, consume enormous amounts of fly-fishing content online and often bring an enthusiasm that lifts the mood before the boat has even left the ramp.

Then there are the career guides in their thirties and forties. Many have now lived beside the river long enough to understand how slowly a fishery of this scale gives up its patterns. Most of the guides we request each year belong somewhere in this group. They have made a conscious decision to remain, and their knowledge has accumulated one season and one drift at a time.

Then there are the older hands. Some are legendary, some slightly salty, and many quieter in the boat than the guides who came after them. I rarely miss an opportunity to fish with one. They have seen the Missouri through high water, low water, heat, smoke, changing hatches and every imaginable type of client. Much of what they know is never formally explained. You absorb it by watching where they position the boat, when they change flies and which pieces of apparently ordinary water they refuse to pass.

A river like the Missouri cannot be learned quickly. Its scale makes that impossible. At first glance, it can look broad, smooth and strangely featureless. Australian anglers are often accustomed to reading more obvious structure. Undercut banks. Timber. Fast seams. Gravel edges. The Missouri presents many of those things too, but much of its best fishing is contained within differences so subtle that the river initially appears empty.

A faint change in current speed. A darker lane beneath glare. A soft line of foam moving several inches faster than the water beside it. A fish rising steadily in a slick that looked lifeless moments earlier. The guides see these things immediately. That is their real skill.

The first morning often begins close to the dam, where guides may row through the same productive piece of water several times. A client hooks a fish, the guide nets it, rows back upstream beneath the wall and begins again. To somebody accustomed to Australian trout fishing, the experience can feel almost indecent.

The fish are not small either. Heavy rainbows and browns in the eighteen to twenty-two-inch class sit in water that can seem impossibly productive. On some mornings, an angler may land several good fish within the first forty minutes, including one or two larger than anything they have previously caught. Guides understand that. A good fish early in the trip settles people. Casting loosens. Anxiety drops. The client begins breathing normally again.

A few years ago, one experienced angler told me before the first day that he would be happy if he caught a single fish during the trip. Australian trout fishing had been difficult and he had arrived carrying the quiet assumption that Montana might prove equally demanding. By lunchtime he had landed seven. The rest of the trip continued much the same way. He caught fish on dry flies, nymphs and streamers, including several larger than anything he had experienced before. More importantly, he returned home a different angler. Not because Montana had made fishing easy, but because success had restored confidence he had gradually lost.

Few rivers do that quite like the Missouri. It is generous enough to help inexperienced anglers, yet technical enough to occupy the best fly fishers for a lifetime.

A beginner can fish a nymph beneath an indicator and catch strong trout throughout the day. An experienced angler can choose to ignore those fish entirely and spend several hours trying to fool one steady riser on a tiny dry fly. Streamers can be worked along the banks. Hoppers can be placed beneath overhanging grass. Caddis can be skated or allowed to sit quietly in the film. There are rock walls, drop-offs, riffles, slicks, backwaters and long open glides. The river does not demand a single approach. It offers choices. That is part of what makes it endlessly compelling.

Summer on the Missouri is governed by insects. PMDs, caddis and tricos dominate much of the fishing, though terrestrials become increasingly important as the season progresses. At times the river seems less like water than a moving soup of life. The trico hatch often begins early, with tiny insects gathering over the river while the air remains cool and the wind manageable. The flies may be size 22 or 24, small enough that even experienced anglers struggle to see them. Guides sometimes pair the imitation with a slightly more visible fly, not because the trout need help locating it, but because the angler does.

The approach is rarely random. You watch the rhythm of a fish rising, then try to place the fly so it arrives during the pause before the next rise. Too early and it passes unnoticed. Too late and the fish has already fed. The process can become maddening. Cast, wait, watch, miss. Cast again. Then, suddenly, the fly disappears exactly where it should and the line comes tight. Few things in fly fishing are more satisfying.

As the morning develops, PMDs begin appearing. Some days the hatch arrives in a defined window. On others it trickles through for hours. The difficulty lies in understanding which stage the fish are eating. Emerger, dun or spent spinner. A pattern that works beautifully for two fish may suddenly be ignored as the trout shift to something else. The caddis are less orderly. They can begin midmorning and continue until darkness, sometimes well beyond it. Fish slash at adults skittering across the surface or sip more quietly at vulnerable insects caught in the film. You may think you have solved the hatch only to discover that the next pod of fish is feeding in a completely different way. The Missouri rewards observation but never guarantees certainty.

At times the rising fish form large pods in slick water. From a distance the shape can appear almost triangular, with one or two larger trout near the head and progressively more fish feeding further downstream. Many are substantial trout, often holding in water so flat and exposed that the approach becomes as important as the fly. Methods that work at home do not always translate neatly. Sneaking up from behind may prove less effective than positioning the boat upstream and drifting the flies down on an angle. The guide controls distance and alignment while the angler tries to make a long leader settle without drag.

The first few casts may be ignored. Then comes a refusal. A nose appears beneath the fly and disappears. Another pattern is tied on. The boat is repositioned. The fish continue rising as though nothing has happened. When it finally works, the satisfaction is enormous. This is the fishing that excites me most on the Missouri. Not because it produces the greatest numbers, but because every fish requires a sequence of decisions. Position. Timing. Fly choice. Presentation. Sometimes the entire problem is solved. Sometimes it remains unsolved and the fish continues feeding long after the boat has moved on. The river allows both outcomes.

But not every client wants to spend an hour on one fish, and they don’t have to. There are days when the sensible decision is to move, cover water and enjoy the abundance. There are other days when a single rising trout becomes the entire point. The best guides recognise the difference. They read clients almost as carefully as they read the river.

American guides are often more outwardly exuberant than Australian guides. That is a generalisation, but probably a fair one. They are more likely to lift the mood through talk, celebration and constant encouragement. Australian guides tend to be slightly more reserved. Neither approach is inherently better. Much of it is cultural. But the good ones know when to talk and when to become quiet. That applies to guides on both sides of the Pacific.

On the Missouri, there is often enough fishing happening that the deeper conversations don’t begin until the first proper break at lunch. Lunch, by the way, is ordered the night before from a form offering an almost excessive range of options, from sandwiches and hoagies to salads. Dietary requests are handled easily. Coolers are stocked with water, soft drinks and beer, along with crisps and some form of cake, muffin or brownie. It is over the top in the American way, and nobody complains.

On some rivers, guides set up fold-up chairs and tables in shallow water. On the Missouri, lunch is usually eaten in the boat. The rower’s bench or the space beside the rod racks becomes a temporary serving table. If the fish are rising, the pause may last no more than fifteen minutes. Sometimes the boat never stops drifting and everyone eats between casts.

On quieter afternoons, a guide may pull into the shade beneath a bridge or alongside cottonwoods. Truth be told, there is not much in the way of shade to be found. Sometimes people step into the river and stand waist-deep in the cool water until the heat begins to leave them. This is often when the conversation changes.

Clients begin asking guides about the rest of their lives. Do they remain in Craig through winter? Do they work in the ski fields? Do they head south for bonefish and permit? Are they married? Do they have children? How many years can someone row a drift boat before the body begins objecting?

At first, it may sound like small talk. But these conversations matter. A guide becomes more than the person holding the oars. A client becomes more than the person making the cast. By the end of the first few days, the best trips begin feeling less transactional and more like shared travel.

One thing you immediately notice is that the guides themselves rarely eat the same lunches they provide. Many carry almonds, cashews or something similarly practical. Slow energy, minimal fuss and no heavy afternoon slump. Rowing a drift boat for eight hours requires its own kind of discipline, and eating a big lunch forty to fifty days in a row does nobody any good.

The sound of the river is part of the experience, but so too are the sounds surrounding it. Boat trailers rattling along the interstate. The creak of oarlocks. Conversation drifting between boats as they pass. Fly line slicing through the air. There is a popular sticker in guide country that reads, “Drive it like you shuttled it.” Anyone who has watched an empty drift-boat trailer bounce down a Montana highway understands the joke immediately.

American guides also launch boats differently from the way I do at home. They are almost religious about keeping trailer bearings out of the water, backing only far enough for the boat to slide free. On the steep ramps of the Goulburn, mine is often submerged during every launch and retrieval, but I tend to do the same even on flatter ramps. I like being able to row directly onto the trailer at the end of the day. American guides look at that approach with the same suspicion I sometimes feel while watching them carefully keep their bearings just above the waterline. Different rivers produce different habits.

The Missouri has its own smells too. Sunscreen applied in thick layers. Coffee inside the fly shop. Timber, wet dogs and river mud. Cottonwoods and pine. Occasionally smoke drifting across the valley from fires hundreds of kilometres away. Then there are the birds. Ospreys hunt openly along the river, folding their wings and dropping towards fish with astonishing precision. Occasionally one will strike so close to the fly that everyone in the boat stops casting. Bald eagles watch from trees and canyon walls, often waiting for an easier opportunity. Golden eagles appear less often but carry a different presence entirely. For Australian anglers, these encounters become part of the fishing day as surely as the nineteen-inch brown in the net.

The day eventually ends back at the fly shop. Boats return. Guides unload gear. Clients gather with the tired satisfaction that follows a big day of floating the river. Stories are exchanged in fragments. A fish missed. A larger fish landed. A pod of risers that refused everything.

From there we return to large houses beside the river. On an adventure such as this, the accommodation matters more than many people first realise. The homes we’ve been using for more than fifteen years are spacious, comfortable and private, often with decks overlooking the water. After a full day in a boat, people need room to separate for a while. Some make calls home. Others sit outside with a drink. Rods may be re-rigged, though by the second day they are often left exactly as they finished because the guide will probably change everything again the following morning.

Dinner is either prepared at the house or taken at one of the small hidden gems that can take time to discover. Good wine is bought in Bozeman on the first day before we drive north. Coffee is treated with equal seriousness. American filter coffee has never entirely convinced Australians, and beginning a long fishing day without decent coffee seems an unnecessary hardship.

Steak appears regularly. So do fresh vegetables, local beer and the occasional whiskey brought through duty-free. Weather is checked. River sections are discussed. Requests are sent to guides, often at around the same time they are sitting down to dinner with their own families.

By then the clients are beginning to settle. Jet lag fades. Casting improves. People stop trying to make every moment count and simply begin living within the rhythm of the trip. Breakfast becomes less rushed. The car ride becomes more relaxed. Jokes start finding their way into conversations. Personalities reveal themselves. This change is one of the things I still enjoy most after years of hosting these journeys. On the first morning, people are often cautious. By the end of the third day, they understand the routine. They know where to be, what to bring and when to let the guide take the lead. They begin seeing water they would have missed on the first day.

That may be the greatest gift the Missouri offers. It teaches people, even experienced guides like me, to look again.

The river that initially seemed broad and almost empty gradually fills with structure. A soft seam appears beside a faster one. A faint rise becomes a feeding lane stacked with fish. A glare-covered slick reveals six trout moving in rhythm. The invisible becomes visible, not because the river has changed, but because the angler has.

What keeps drawing me back is not simply the number or size of its trout, though both are extraordinary, but the breadth of possibility.

One boat may spend the day drifting tiny dry flies to individual risers. Another may throw streamers against cut banks. A third may fish hoppers beneath grassy edges. The structure is always there, but no two days ask quite the same questions.

And after several days, clients who arrived seeing only a large western river begin noticing the small things. The faint current line. The rise beneath glare. The fish at the head of the pod. The guide saying nothing but quietly moving the boat a few feet to the left.

That is when the Missouri begins to reveal itself.

Not all at once.

One drift at a time.

Anthony Boliancu
Drift Boat Guide

 

Every Australian winter, we host a small number of anglers on this remarkable river.
Learn more about our Hosted Montana Expeditions →

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Before we left Australia, I wrote that for most of my adult life the rivers had dictated the journey.

They decided where I stayed, when I travelled, which roads I followed and how long I remained in any one place. Towns became useful because they sat beside water. Lodgings were judged by their proximity to boat ramps. Weather mattered because of what it might do to a hatch. Much of the American West entered my life through rivers first and everything else second.

This trip was different.

For the first time in sixteen years, my wife travelled with me. Our children came too. There were still rods in the vehicle and familiar stretches of water waiting to be revisited, but the rivers were no longer responsible for every decision. We began on the California coast, crossed the deserts of Nevada and Utah and gradually worked towards Idaho, Wyoming and Montana.

What surprised me, though, was how little I minded the days when we did not fish.

Without the usual urgency of clients, guides and trout, I had time to notice the places between the rivers. The diner where the coffee arrived before we had properly sat down. The service station attendant who wanted to know why four Australians were driving north through his town. The grain elevator standing above a Main Street that had outlived several versions of America. The old motel signs, the faded shopfronts and the roads that seemed to continue long after there was any obvious reason for them to do so.

These were not the destinations around which the journey had been planned. They were the spaces between them. Yet, looking back, they became much of what I remember most.

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The first part of the trip belonged to the coast and the desert. After two nights in Santa Monica, the landscape began to open. Los Angeles receded into freeway, heat and distance, and the country changed in stages. The Pacific disappeared behind us. Palms gave way to scrub. The horizon widened. By the time we reached Nevada, the distances and dimensions of the West had started to reveal themselves again.

One of the first things the family noticed was the vehicle.

My wife had expressed some doubts before we left about the need for something quite so enormous. She had never done one of these long American road trips with me before, and from Australia the insistence on a Suburban or Denali-sized vehicle probably seemed excessive. I was equally insistent that anything smaller would be a mistake.

Within the first few hours, the argument was settled.

Everyone had their own large, deeply comfortable seat, their own air-conditioning and enough space around them to avoid feeling as though four people were living on top of one another for several weeks. The seats were closer to the sofas and recliners we have at home than anything most Australians would associate with a car. Bags, suitcases, food, jackets, fishing gear and the assorted debris of family travel disappeared into the back without compromising anyone’s comfort.

The sheer size of the vehicle suited the landscape. You sat higher above the road and felt more secure, but also more a part of the American road trip itself. A small vehicle might have been easier to park, but it would have felt entirely wrong on those long western highways.

It was also considerably cheaper to run than expected. Fuel was an eye-watering $5.50 a gallon in California, but by the time we reached Utah and continued north it had dropped towards four dollars, then closer to $3.50 in Montana. The Denali we ended up with was more fuel-efficient than my Ford Ranger at home, despite having twice the space, three times the power and an abundance of comfort. After several thousand kilometres, none of us wanted anything smaller.

Las Vegas is often described as a city in the desert, but that hardly captures the strangeness of it. It feels less like a city than a concentrated act of defiance. Glass, neon, air-conditioning, fountains and spectacle push up against a landscape that does not appear particularly interested in supporting any of it.

For three days we moved through that contradiction.

The children saw it with the kind of enthusiasm adults sometimes lose. The sheer scale of the hotels, the absurdity of the themed buildings, the crowds, the noise, the constant invitation to look at something else. It was a long way from home and a long way from the rivers that usually explain my presence in America.

From there, Utah arrived. The colour of the country changed first. Then its shape.

 

The walls of Zion rose around us with an authority that photographs never quite manage to convey. The roads narrowed. The rock closed in. Light moved slowly across the canyon walls and every change in angle produced another version of the same place. Even after years of travelling through the West, it was difficult not to feel overwhelmed by it.

In Springdale, we hired electric bikes and rode all the way into the canyon to the end of the road. The weather was slightly overcast, holding the temperature somewhere in the high twenties or low thirties, rather than the oppressive heat we had expected. It turned what might have been an endurance exercise into one of the great days of the journey.

There were moments while riding when I looked up and the canyon walls appeared to rise hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feet directly above us. In places they seemed vertical. In others they appeared to lean beyond vertical and hang over the road. The scale was difficult to process from the seat of a bicycle. Deer scattered from the roadside as we passed, the air moved through the canyon and the walls changed colour whenever the light shifted or the road altered our angle of view.

Of everything we did, that ride through Zion may have been the highlight of the trip for me. There was no windscreen between us and the landscape, no searching for a parking space and no pressure to hurry. We simply rode beneath those walls and allowed the canyon to reveal itself gradually.

Further east, the landscape opened again around Moab. Red cliffs, arches, distant mesas and heat that seemed to settle over everything. There were days when the temperature climbed well beyond forty degrees and the only sensible response was to retreat to a swimming pool and wait for the evening. The wildlife appeared only when the light faded and the day began to lose its sting.

Moab itself and much of the immediate surrounding country can appear surprisingly drab beside the landscapes people have travelled there to see. Once you climb onto the plateau and enter Arches National Park, however, the country changes completely. The view as you crest that final rise is worth the price of admission alone.

The park is relatively compact, but every section seems to offer a different arrangement of stone. Arches, fins, balanced rocks and formations that appear too improbable to have survived rise from the plateau. As the hours pass, the light moves across them and the same landscape takes on an entirely different character. A formation that appears flat and colourless at midday can glow red and orange by evening, while another almost disappears into shadow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The desert around Moab also offers a different kind of exploration. We took a float trip down the Colorado River, moving through a landscape that felt more remote from the water than it had from the road. Cliffs rose from the river, the heat settled across the canyon and the immensity of the country became apparent in a way it had not from the overlooks.

It was not trout country, but it was flowing water, and the pools, seams and eddies carried a language I understood.

The desert teaches a totally different form of patience. Rivers encourage movement. You walk, cast, drift, mend, adjust and search. The desert asks you to stand still. It works on a larger scale and over a slower timeframe. Nothing appears hurried, yet everything is changing. Wind reshapes sand just as water cuts stone. Shadows redraw the same wall over the course of an afternoon.

It is difficult to move through that country without becoming aware of your own smallness. That may be part of its appeal.

Most of us spend our lives surrounded by objects built to human proportions. Houses, roads, offices, cars, shops. In canyon country, scale becomes less reassuring. The land is older, larger and entirely indifferent to the fact that you have arrived with a camera and an itinerary. You feel that indifference the moment you step away from the roadway and into the landscape.

There were moments when the kids were bored. Moments when they were tired. Moments when the heat had stripped the novelty from the day. Then we would turn a corner, walk out onto another overlook or catch the last light on a distant cliff and everything would reset.

Travel often works that way. It is not one uninterrupted sequence of wonder. It is heat, traffic, wrong turns, hunger, fatigue and argument, interrupted by moments so complete they justify everything around them.

From Utah we headed north.

The country began to soften gradually. The red rock thinned. The air cooled. Trees returned in greater numbers. Somewhere beyond Salt Lake City, water began to appear more frequently beside the road.

That transition has always mattered to me and is a large part of why I tend to fly into Salt Lake City rather than taking the easier route directly into Bozeman. You can feel when you are entering trout country before you see the first river. The valleys change shape. Cottonwoods gather along drainage lines. Meadows become greener. Bridges begin to suggest water worth stopping for.

The South Fork of the Snake. The Henry’s Fork. The Teton. The Green. Names that have occupied my imagination for much of my adult life. Normally I would have begun organising the trip around them immediately. There would have been calls to friends, weather checks, hatch reports, river levels and quiet attempts to extract another day from the schedule.

This time I found myself looking elsewhere. At the Tetons from the Wyoming side. At the long roads between small towns. At Jackson with its wooden boardwalks, antler arches and summer crowds. At the children trying to understand why certain places mattered more to us than others.

Sixteen years earlier, Maree and I had stood beneath the Tetons and been married with four witnesses, rising trout and a grizzly bear that had chosen the wrong morning for a walk. Returning with our children changed the meaning of the place.

The mountains were the same. The roads were familiar. The view from Schwabacher Landing had lost none of its power. Yet the experience was no longer anchored only to memory. It had become something shared.

That was the quiet change running through the entire trip.

For years, I had returned to the American West as a guide, host, angler or photographer. This time I was seeing familiar places reflected back through three other people. Their interests were not always mine. One child wanted shops, music and wildlife. The other wanted World Cup matches, activities and anything involving speed. My wife wanted us to slow down, walk the trails and make the most of whatever each day offered.

All of that altered the rhythm.

Island Park became our base for exploring Yellowstone and the surrounding country. It was also where we hired UTVs and travelled along mountain tracks through the forest towards Mesa Falls.

We drove to the top of Sawtelle Peak on a road that became narrower and steeper with every turn. By the time we reached the upper sections, I caught myself wondering whether I would be able to drive the UTV back down. The track clung to the mountain, the drop beside us became increasingly difficult to ignore and the summit seemed to move further away each time the road doubled back.

The view from the top justified the climb. Mountains, forests and distant valleys spread out in every direction. On the tracks below, we spooked moose and deer from the timber, although no bears appeared. Depending on which member of the family you asked, this was either a disappointment or a considerable relief.

There was less fishing. There was also more noticing. Yellowstone made that impossible to avoid.

No matter how many times you visit, the park resists familiarity. Steam rises from the ground. Bison stop traffic as though roads are a temporary inconvenience. Elk stand in meadows with the ease of animals that understand the landscape belongs to them. A moose steps into a river and suddenly an entire group of strangers becomes silent.

It is easy to become cynical about famous places. Crowds, queues, traffic and cameras can make even extraordinary landscapes feel processed. Yellowstone survives that pressure because something unexpected is always waiting beyond the next bend.

It might be a herd of bison crossing a valley. Or a wolf disappearing into timber. It could be a thermal basin half-hidden beneath the morning vapour. Or a moose feeding in water so calm that the reflection appears almost too perfect.

 

 

 

The park restores perspective in much the same way the desert does, but by different means. The desert does it through emptiness. Yellowstone does it through abundance, with wildlife, water, weather, geology and distance all competing for attention at once.

The children responded immediately. Not always with quiet reverence. Sometimes with shouting, arguing over binoculars or trying to take photographs through a moving window. But the excitement was real.

I think that matters. Adults often pretend the natural world is best appreciated silently. Children are less restrained. They react before deciding how they are supposed to react. There is an honesty in that, one that allows us to be less serious and to enjoy the moment before deciding what it is supposed to mean. Through them, I was seeing again with fresh eyes an experience I had repeated through many Australian winters.

The Fourth of July introduced another kind of spectacle. Australians tend to be suspicious of too much public enthusiasm. We are trained early to keep emotion within acceptable limits and to mock anything that appears overly earnest. Americans do not always share that instinct.

Small towns celebrate themselves with remarkable confidence. Flags appear everywhere. Streets close. Horses, old vehicles, tractors, marching bands and homemade floats move through town while entire families line the footpaths.

There is no embarrassment in it. No apology. No effort to appear detached.

The parade we watched was loud, colourful, occasionally absurd and completely sincere. People dressed in red, white and blue from head to toe. Children collected sweets thrown from passing floats. Veterans moved slowly along the parade route. Families occupied the same patch of footpath they had probably used for years. Some brought lawn chairs and settled onto the verge. Others watched from the backs of pickup trucks, tailgates down and coolers filled with ice-cold drinks.

It would be easy to reduce the Fourth of July to politics or patriotism, but in small towns it often feels more personal than that. It is partly about memory. Partly about community. Partly about the right to make noise in public and assume everyone else will join in. For visitors, it offers a glimpse of America at its least self-conscious.

That became another recurring feature of the trip: the willingness to participate.

In Australia, people often watch first and decide later whether an experience deserves enthusiasm. In America, particularly in smaller towns, people are more likely to step forward, wave, shout, clap, ask where you are from and offer an opinion before you have had time to introduce yourself.

That openness can be exhausting. But it can also be generous in a way not easily found here at home.

Some of the conversations I remember most happened in places where we had not intended to stop. At a fuel station. In a diner. Outside a general store. Beside a road sign while trying to decide whether to keep driving further before the darkness crept back in.

While the famous destinations gave the journey structure, it was the incidental encounters that gave it texture. By the time we reached Montana, we had entered another version of the West entirely, and even the children could feel the difference.

The towns grew smaller. Grain elevators and storage towers rose above the plains, marking settlements long before the streets themselves came into view. Old bars and shops sat beside roads carrying traffic towards somewhere else. Mountains rose and fell in the distance. Rivers moved through valleys with the confidence of water that has shaped the place for longer than anyone remembers.

Montana has always been easy to romanticise. The name itself does half the work. Big sky, long roads, trout rivers, mountain towns and the lingering mythology of the West. But the version I have come to value most is not the postcard version. It is the working landscape. The trucks parked outside a bar at midday. The rail sidings and storage sheds. The service stations. The taco buses parked in dusty lots beside the highway. The small stores that appear to sell groceries, fishing tackle, ammunition and local gossip from the same counter.

The towns where people live ordinary lives inside scenery that visitors have travelled thousands of kilometres to see.

That contrast interests me more each year. The extraordinary and the everyday occupying the same place.

For someone passing through, the mountains dominate everything. For someone who lives there, they are simply the view on the way to work.

Eventually the rivers reclaimed their place. They always do. We saw water through cottonwoods. Riffles appeared beside the road. Bridges invited closer inspection. Familiar names returned on signs and maps.

There is a deep familiarity in returning to places that, over the years, have become another kind of home.

Of course, there were rods in the vehicle and even a few opportunities to fish.

On the South Fork of the Snake, a few large stoneflies were still around, but perhaps more importantly, the memory of those big insects remained fresh in the trout’s minds. Getting the fly tight to the bank and close to structure was absolutely imperative.

Large rubber-legged flies teased along the edges, or pulled slightly away from them, produced violent takes. Once the fly had travelled five or six feet from the bank, there was little point continuing the drift. You recast and placed it within an inch of the edge again. Some of the rises were spectacular, and some large trout were brought to the net.

The Teton River was far below its normal level, but the evening hatches remained strong. Caddis and mayflies appeared in enormous numbers, and as the light softened the river became dimpled with rising fish from one bank to the other.

The water was crystal clear. From the road bridges, fish could be seen holding in surprising numbers, and whenever we looked back into the low evening sun we saw dorsal fins, tails and snouts breaking the surface as trout mopped up the last of the insects from the hatch.

Around Island Park, we found spring creeks full of large rising fish. These trout demanded considerably more precision. Accuracy mattered. Fly selection mattered. Leader length and diameter mattered. The rewards, when everything came together, were worth the additional care.

Yet even then, the urgency was missing. I no longer felt compelled to turn every encounter with water into a session. Some rivers were enough to look at. Some were enough to remember. Some could wait. I borrowed a boat from friends when I felt like it. At other times, we wet-waded for a few hours and called it a day.

That may have been the most surprising change of all.

For years, my travel had been measured by what I managed to fit into it. Rivers fished. Images taken. Places reached. Opportunities used. This time the journey felt complete without being maximised.

Perhaps that is one of the quieter lessons of age. Or perhaps I am selectively remembering the journey to suit a narrative I have already begun to believe. Most likely it is a little of both. Wherever the truth lies, I do not think ambition disappears. Selection simply becomes more important. You learn that doing everything is impossible and that trying often diminishes what is already in front of you.

A day spent moving slowly through Yellowstone does not need to end with fishing. A road through Montana does not need to be justified by where it leads. A town does not need to be famous to be worth stopping in.

The places between rivers are not empty spaces. They are part of the journey.

That breathing room, and the freedom from feeling that every fish had to be wrung from every day, also changed the way I thought about the Montana trips we will host again next year. It allowed me to notice far more of what lies between the fishing locations, particularly on the travel days. I came home with a much clearer sense of how that time can become part of the experience rather than simply the distance that has to be covered. There are towns, landscapes, short detours and places worth stopping that will give the journey more shape without taking anything away from the fishing.

Back home, with winter settled over Victoria and the familiar work of another season waiting, I find myself thinking less about the places we reached than about the way we moved between them. The distance was never simply empty road. It gave us time to talk, to look, to change our minds and to stop when something unexpected caught our attention. In a journey measured across thousands of kilometres, those pauses became as important as the destinations themselves.

Looking back through the photographs, the pattern is obvious. There are rivers, mountains and wildlife, but also roadside signs, diners, old buildings, parades, shopfronts, service stations and people standing in landscapes they are seeing for the first time.

There are fewer fish than usual. And I don’t mind that. Not one little bit.

For most of my adult life, the rivers have dictated the journey. This time they were simply part of it. They waited while we crossed deserts, stopped in small towns, watched bison block roads and stood beneath mountains that had already witnessed one important moment in our lives.

The rivers were still there when we arrived. The hatches continued without us. The trout rose whether we were watching or not. What changed was the attention we gave to everything around them.

Perhaps that is what the trip ultimately became. Not a journey away from rivers, but a reminder that they do not exist apart from the country through which they flow, or the lives that unfold beside them. Next year, when I return with another group of anglers, the rivers will still give the journey its shape. But I suspect we will travel a little more slowly between them.

There will still be hatches to chase, boats to launch and fish worth staying late for. There will also be towns worth entering, roads worth following and reasons to stop that have nothing to do with trout.

The places between rivers are not simply what we pass through on the way to somewhere else.

They are part of what brings us back.

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At midnight on Monday, the Victorian trout season closed.

For most anglers, the date arrives with a familiar sense of finality. Rods are put away, waders are hung up to dry, and the stretches of river that have occupied our thoughts for months are suddenly left behind until spring. Another season is added to the ledger. Another opening day and another closing day pass into memory. Yet after a lifetime spent guiding on rivers, I have come to view the occasion a little differently. The river itself is not shutting down. In many ways, it is only now entering one of the most important periods of its year.

Over the coming weeks, brown trout throughout Victoria will move upstream towards the gravel beds where they will spawn. Fish that have spent the season spread throughout the system will gather in tributaries and headwaters, driven by instincts far older than any angler. The boats disappear. The foot traffic fades from the banks. The pressure of a long fishing season gradually lifts. For a few months, the river belongs almost entirely to itself again.

Perhaps because so much of modern life encourages us to believe that everything exists for our use, our enjoyment or our convenience. We photograph everything, measure everything and analyse everything. We track river levels by the hour, study weather forecasts days in advance and compare catches before we have even reached the car park. There is a tendency to view the natural world through the lens of what it can provide us. Yet every year the trout season closes and nature quietly reminds us that these rivers were never really ours in the first place. The fish continue their journey upstream. The river settles into winter. Life carries on perfectly well without our participation.

When I was younger, I struggled with that idea. Like most anglers, I always wanted one more day. One more hatch. One more opportunity. There was a time when the closing of the season felt frustrating, almost unfair. Age has a way of changing your perspective. These days I find myself appreciating the pauses almost as much as the activity. The older I become, the more I recognise that every worthwhile thing exists within a rhythm. There is a season for effort and a season for recovery. A season for activity and a season for stillness.

For guides, the end of the season brings its own peculiar transition. For much of the year my life is measured not by months but by rivers. The first Saturday in September arrives and suddenly everything begins moving again. Boats come out of storage. River levels become important. Weather forecasts become daily reading. Clients arrive from around Australia and beyond. Days fill with travel, guiding, teaching and all the variables that make fly fishing endlessly fascinating and occasionally maddening.

Then, almost overnight, it stops.

I have experienced that transition dozens of times and it still feels strange. One morning there is a drift boat to launch, a lesson to teach or a trip to prepare for. A few days later the phone becomes quieter, the calendar opens up and there is nowhere in particular you need to be. The river moves on without you. Part of the feeling is relief. Part of it is exhaustion. Yet there is always a small sense of disorientation as well. When a rhythm has governed most of your life for eight or nine months, its sudden absence leaves a noticeable space behind.

The first weeks of winter are usually spent attending to all the jobs that have patiently waited in the background. Boats need maintenance. Gear needs sorting. Thousands of photographs need organising. Emails need answering. Projects that have been pushed aside during the busy months finally receive attention. This year, however, one project sits above all the others.

After several years of work, my book is finally nearing completion.

What began as a simple idea gradually evolved into something much larger than I ever expected. Most weeks involved twenty or thirty hours of writing squeezed around guiding, travel and family commitments. Chapters were written late at night after long days on the water, during quiet afternoons between trips and in motel rooms scattered across Australia, New Zealand and the United States. There was never a dramatic moment where it suddenly felt finished. Instead, it grew slowly, one page and one season at a time.

As I worked through the final manuscript this autumn, something else began to dawn on me. Some of the earliest pieces had been written so long ago that they almost felt as though they belonged to somebody else. One chapter contains an observation about surgeon clients being accustomed to commanding operating theatres full of nurses rather than taking instruction from somebody half their age wearing sandals. I smiled when I read it again. Not because the observation was wrong, but because it inadvertently revealed when it had been written. Next month I turn fifty-four. The person who wrote those words was still in his twenties or early thirties. Reading some of those passages felt a little like opening an old photograph album and discovering details you had forgotten were there.

Throughout the editing process I kept encountering moments like that. A phrase here. An opinion there. A reference to a river that no longer fishes quite the same way. The book gradually became more than a collection of stories. It became a conversation across time between different versions of myself. Life moved on while the pages remained where they had always been, waiting to be revisited.

When I finally sat down and attempted to tally the hours, the figure surprised even me. Since last July, I estimate I have devoted somewhere between twelve hundred and twelve hundred and fifty hours to the manuscript. Spread across the calendar, that works out to roughly twenty-five hours every week for almost a year, the equivalent of about thirty full-time working weeks.

What the figure does not capture is the opportunity cost. During the first half of the fishing season, I deliberately turned down a number of guiding weeks so I could stay home and write. For the first time in thirty years, I found myself saying no to days on the river so I could spend time at a keyboard writing about them. That was not always an easy decision. Guiding is what I do. It is how the business operates and, in many respects, how I have organised much of my adult life. Yet there came a point where the book would either remain a project I talked about on drifts, or it would finally become a project I finished. Somewhere along the way, it ceased to be simply a business project and became a personal obligation.

Most of those twelve hundred hours will never be visible to a reader. They exist in deleted paragraphs, rewritten chapters, abandoned introductions and countless small decisions that nobody else will ever notice. They are hidden in late nights after long guiding days, quiet winter mornings, motel rooms, airport lounges and stolen hours between family commitments.

The illustrations are now underway, and the layout process will begin shortly. If all goes according to plan, the finished book should appear around Father’s Day. For the first time, the finish line is beginning to come into view. Reaching that point has prompted me to consider the path that led here and the surprisingly central role rivers have played in shaping it.

In a few days we will leave Australia and head for the American West. For the first time in many years, this trip is not primarily about fishing or hosting clients. It is first and foremost a family adventure. We will begin in California before travelling through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. There will be deserts and canyons, mountain ranges and national parks, small towns and long stretches of open road. My wife and children will experience much of it for the first time, and I suspect seeing familiar places through their eyes will be every bit as rewarding as visiting the places themselves.

It occurred to me that almost every major chapter of my life has been shaped in some way by rivers. Businesses were built beside them. Friendships emerged from them. Journeys began because of them. Some of our most memorable family holidays eventually found their way back to water. Even many of the people who now occupy important places in our lives first entered through a shared interest in rivers. Sometimes that feels deliberate. More often, it simply feels inevitable.

That thought has caused me to consider how much of my life has been spent following water. Not consciously at first, and certainly not according to any grand plan. Yet when I think about the major turning points in my life, waterways seem to appear with surprising regularity. The Goulburn. The Rubicon. The Delatite. The Jamieson. The Mataura. The Oreti. The Missouri. The Madison. The Yellowstone. Different countries, different landscapes and different cultures, yet somehow connected.

Most people divide their lives into decades, jobs, houses or cities. Increasingly, I find myself remembering periods of life through rivers. A flood. A drought. My first drift boat. The first season in New Zealand. The first Montana trip. Particular clients who became lifelong friends.

When I think about those periods, I rarely begin with the year itself. Instead, I begin with the water. I remember the drought years on the Goulburn. The seasons when willow grubs seemed to fall in their thousands from every tree. The first years rowing a drift boat when every day felt like an experiment. The early New Zealand seasons when we were still learning which valleys held fish and which simply held hope. Even family milestones seem attached to rivers. Places, journeys and memories gradually blur together until it becomes difficult to separate one from the other.

Years later, I still find those memories anchored to surprisingly small details. A bend where an evening hatch suddenly appeared. A gravel bar where an important conversation took place. A valley where a river turned unexpectedly from calm to whitewater. A quiet backwater where somebody finally landed a trout they had dreamed about for years. The details themselves may seem insignificant, but they become markers in time.

The longer I spend around rivers, the more similarities I notice between them. Current behaves the same way whether it is flowing beneath a willow tree in Victoria or a cottonwood in Montana. Trout still seek comfort, security and food. A seam remains a seam. An eddy remains an eddy. Good water still looks like good water. The details change, but the underlying language remains remarkably familiar.

Perhaps that familiarity explains why anglers travel. We often speak about chasing something different, but I suspect we are equally drawn by what feels recognisable. There is comfort in standing beside a river on the other side of the world and understanding what you are looking at. The same currents. The same possibilities. The same small mysteries. Geography changes. The fundamentals do not.

As I get older, I find that reassuring. The destinations change. The people change. The seasons change. Yet rivers continue flowing quietly through the background of our lives, connecting one chapter to the next. A river fished twenty years ago can suddenly return to memory because of a smell, a photograph or a familiar piece of water somewhere else. The thread is never entirely broken.

Over the coming weeks our attention will gradually shift from Australian rivers to American ones. There will be photographs, stories and, hopefully, a few observations worth sharing along the way. Beyond that, another New Zealand season waits on the horizon, followed by the familiar cycle beginning once again.

For now, though, the Goulburn is quiet. The boats are out of the water. The trout are moving upstream. Winter has arrived.

And somewhere beyond the horizon, another river is already beginning to call.

It always does.

Anthony Boliancu
Drift Boat Guide

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I’m writing this from the porch of a cabin in Montana.

The sun has long since dropped behind the hills. A few swallows are still working the evening air. Somewhere downstream, somebody is probably tying on one last fly before dark. The river keeps moving through the valley the same way it did yesterday and the same way it will tomorrow.

It’s a scene I’ve been fortunate enough to witness many times.

For nearly a month we’ve been travelling across Montana’s trout country, fishing the Missouri, the Madison, the Yellowstone and a handful of smaller waters in between. The days develop their own rhythm. Coffee before daylight. Long drifts. Late lunches. Stories over dinner. Then the familiar conversation each evening about where to fish tomorrow.

I’ve been making this journey for years. Not as a guide. The local guides here do an outstanding job of that, and besides, I’d rather avoid testing American immigration law. I simply organise the logistics and share the experience with a small group of anglers who return year after year. Over time many have become friends.

What began as a fishing trip has evolved into something else entirely; a seasonal pilgrimage of sorts. An Australian winter exchanged for an American summer. A chance to spend time on remarkable rivers with good people. And, strangely enough, a chance to think more clearly about home.

I’ve noticed this before. The further I travel from Australia, the more I seem to think about it. Perhaps distance sharpens perspective. Perhaps it simply slows life down enough to notice things that are easy to miss when you’re busy paying bills, answering emails and rushing from one commitment to the next. Whatever the reason, Montana often leaves me reflecting on Australia.

Not in the loud political sense that dominates television panels and social media arguments. Something quieter than that. Something closer to affection.

I grew up in an Australia that felt different from today’s version. Not perfect — no sensible person would claim that — but there was a certain confidence to it. A sense that most people were broadly pulling in the same direction. Communities felt more connected. Institutions seemed more trusted. The future felt less uncertain.

Maybe every generation eventually says something similar. Maybe that’s simply what ageing looks like. But over the past few years I’ve found myself having the same conversation repeatedly with people from very different backgrounds. Doctors. Tradesmen. Farmers. Teachers. Business owners. Retirees.

The details vary. The underlying feeling rarely does.

Something feels different.

Not necessarily worse in every respect. Just different. And perhaps that uncertainty is what so many people struggle to articulate.

Rivers teach an interesting lesson about change. Most rivers don’t transform overnight. A bank collapses here. A gravel bar forms there. One flood moves a little more timber downstream. Year by year the alterations appear minor. Yet return after a decade and the river may be almost unrecognisable.

Countries can feel the same.

The changes arrive gradually enough that we barely notice them while they’re occurring. Then one day, often from a distance, we find ourselves looking back and wondering exactly when things began to feel different.

The older I get, the less interested I become in pretending to have answers. Guiding has cured me of that. Spend enough time on rivers and you develop a healthy respect for complexity. Conditions change. Fish behave unexpectedly. Predictions fail. Certainty becomes harder to maintain.

What remains useful is observation.

Paying attention.

Listening carefully.

Trying to understand what you’re seeing before rushing to conclusions.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I started this blog. Not to tell people what to think. Not to win arguments. Certainly not to lecture anyone. Simply to create a small space for reflection.

Some posts will be about fishing. Some will be about travel. Some will be about rivers, history, books, people and places. And occasionally they may wander into larger questions about the country we live in and the society we’re creating together.

After thirty years spent guiding, I’ve come to believe that thoughtful conversations still matter. So does curiosity. So does the willingness to listen to people whose experiences differ from our own.

The river has taught me that as well.

For now, the light has almost disappeared from the valley. Tomorrow we’ll launch the boats again before sunrise. The trout won’t care about politics, economics or the direction of modern society. They never do.

The river will simply continue flowing downstream as it always has.

And somewhere between here and home, I’ll probably keep thinking about Australia.

Ant

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Author Bio

Anthony Boliancu is the owner of Goulburn Valley Fly Fishing Centre and one of Australia’s most experienced Drift Boat Guides. He has spent more than three decades guiding anglers across Victoria, New Zealand and North America. Through Between Casts, he explores fly fishing, travel, history, philosophy and the larger currents shaping the world around us.