The
Gallatin River flows from its source
at Gallatin Lake in Yellowstone
National Park to a place called
Three Forks, where it meets the
Jefferson and Madison rivers,
creating the headwaters of the
Missouri River. When
Mike and I visited Montana last
August, one of our goals was to
spend a day fishing this famous
trout stream. As a kid, I’d fished
the Gallatin, walking along the
banks near the
Elkhorn Ranch, about 30 miles
north of West Yellowstone.
Elkhorn is a well-known “dude ranch”
founded by Ernie and Grace Miller in
the 1920’s. I met Grace for the
first time in New York City in 1968.
She was an old friend of my mother’s
family and when my parents, my
brother and I went to stay at
Elkhorn the following summer, Grace
fussed over us madly. It wasn’t
until some years later that I
realized that Grace had been just as
affectionate with and as attentive
to each and every one of her other
guests from the East. That level of
consideration was passed on to her
daughter Barb, who once admonished
her daughter, “No, you can’t hit the
dudes, Kate - no matter what”.
The “dude” in question, who had so
vexed young Kate to a point of
violent rage, was me. Kate and I
worked things out and I managed to
avoid getting the snot beaten out of
me on subsequent visits to the ranch
in ’71 and ’72, although I’m sure I
sorely tested the patience of many,
if not all of the ranch hands while
I was there.
There was a pool on the Gallatin
River, just at the southeastern edge
of where the ranch’s fence ran that
I would fish almost every night
after dinner. It was filled with
rainbow trout and whitefish and I
caught dozens of them there on a $15
fiberglass fly rod my parents had
bought for me out of an Abercrombie
& Fitch catalog. My goal, for over
thirty years, since my last visit to
Montana, was to return to that same
pool and catch a trout out of it.
Mike and I waded into the Gallatin
one August morning, but sure as hell
didn’t feel like it though. Even
though it was well after nine
o’clock, the temperature still
hadn’t broken 60 degrees, maybe not
even 50 for that matter. There was a
damp mist in the air too, so we put
on our waders and rain gear, just to
keep dry, and hopefully stay a bit
warmer as well. We started at a car
pullover, across Highway 191 from
the entrance to Elkhorn Ranch. I’d
spotted the pool I’d been dreaming
of for 35 years as we drove along
the road and suggested that we fish
upstream to it, scooping up as many
loose fish as we could before
settling into to what I was sure
would be “The Main Event”.
We didn’t get a single strike. Not
one! By the time we reached “my
pool”, the temperature had warmed up
enough that I shed my waders and
jacket. I waded bare legged into the
Gallatin and made my first cast into
the lower flat of the pool. Well, I
worked the living hell out of that
pool, using a dazzling array of
terrestrials and attractor patterns
with no result. Mike caught up with
me and he watched in mock shock as I
abandoned my fly rod and pulled out
the dreaded ultralight-spinning rod
and tied on a gold Phoebe lure. I
flipped a cast into the middle of
the pool and immediately hooked into
a foot-long rainbow. I brought it
in, revived it and released it. A
few casts later, a much larger trout
smacked at my lure, but I was unable
to set the hook.
I lost another fish before noon,
which was when we’d decided to break
for lunch. My father’s brother and
his family were all staying at
Elkhorn and they’d asked us to join
them there for a few beers and a
bite to eat. Wandering into the
compound was pretty weird. With the
exception of the facts that the new
owner had buried the power lines and
tightened up the cabins where the
“dudes” all stayed, the place looked
almost exactly the same as it had in
1972. Meeting up with my uncle, aunt
and cousins was a great time – but
the biggest thrill was to come right
after lunch. My aunt put her arm
around my shoulders and steered me
over to a guy who was sitting on the
edge of a post.
It was Dwight Minton, the guy who’d
taught me pretty much everything I
learned about fly fishing for trout
back in the summer of 1969. I
remember him desperately trying to
show me how to tie a nail knot one
night at his cabin at the ranch. The
fact that he did so to the extremely
dim shine of an oil lantern probably
had something to do with the
relative failure of the effort – but
his good humor more than made up for
it. Dwight and his wife and kids
spent damn near every summer out at
Elkhorn back then. He liked it so
much that when Grace Miller’s
daughter Barb had decided enough was
enough, he’d bought into the place.
I peppered him with questions about
the river and he responded simply
that ever since the 1992 release of
Robert Redford’s film,
A
River Runs Through It,
the Gallatin had become overrun with
“over educated trout”. That’ll
happen, he said, given that every
angler east of the Mississippi had
arrived the following summer, armed
with a fly rod and determined to
catch a trout from the waters where
that movie had been shot. Those poor
trout in the Gallatin had seen just
about every fly pattern in
Art Flick’s book.
He also told me how he and his son
Brewster had gone out fishing the
Gallatin on a recent summer
afternoon. They’d come to a deep
pool, with several very nice looking
trout holding along the bottom,
flicking back and forth in an
unhurried manner. They’d seen
thousands of grasshoppers along the
shoreline and so the two of them
tossed an endless parade of hand
tied hopper imitations at the pool,
without so much as even a refusal by
way of a reaction from the fish.
Finally, Dwight and Brewster tramped
a few dozen paces away from the bank
and began driving the grasshoppers
in front of them, towards the river,
creating an insect stampede. They
scattered in panic, but most of them
eventually hurled themselves into
the water as they tried to escape.
Father and son stood on the bank and
cursed at the trout as they boiled
on the water’s surface, gorging
themselves on the bounty that the
two men had provided them.
I decided
not to tell Dwight about the
spinning rod.
Copyright 2008 by Peter Cammann
