Copperhead Road

One of the many awesome parts of being a fishing guide in Montana is that I get to meet some of the most fascinating people. This week I had the good fortune to fish with legendary singer and song writer, Steve Earl. By Steve's side was his good friend and local angler, Colleen "The Green Darner" Tretter. Steve and his band came to Bozeman for the 4th stop of an insanely long tour and found time for a couple of days of fishing. Unfortunately, my "go to" rivers in the area are completely trashed from the massive amounts of melting snow in the high country. The Madison, Yellowstone, and Gallatin rivers are all raging and absolutely puking mud. The water looks more like Yoohoo chocolate drink than the gin clear fisheries that keep fly anglers like me up at night. In past blogs, I've said, maybe even bragged, that I'm not at all afraid of high dirty water, but this is a bit much. Lucky for us, there's always someplace to fish in Montana. Even during run off season. For the first day I took Steve and Colleen to a private lake for a little still water fishing and a shot at true pig rainbow trout. As often is the case this time of the year, the weather man wasn't on our side. It rained, the wind blew, the sun shined, and then it rained again, the wind blew again, and the sun shined again. But even with the constantly changing weather we still managed to find a few fish willing to eat a fly and bend a rod or two. At the end of the day Steve walked away with more fish brought to hand, but Colleen was all about quality over quantity and put a slab of a rainbow trout in the boat. On day two we found ourselves on a small tail water that had enough clarity and was low enough to fish with out resorting to giant dirty water flies and two crap loads of lead. Heck, even the weather cooperated with us. Once again, Steve caught the bulk of the fish and Colleen went home with the big fish prize that she won with a dang nice brown trout.

Ty Webb