A week on the Yellowstone!

Sounds crazy to some of you I know, but for us a week is a long stay.  Yeah, we spend 4 months in Florida in the winter, and 5 weeks usually in Durango in the fall, but those are unique.  For people like us who normally only stay somewhere for 1-4 days, at first a week seems long.  Well, we found out we really like the Paradise Valley in Montana.  There are several routes or corridors from I-90 which runs east-west in Montana, south to Yellowstone National Park that run along rivers.  89 that we are on now that follows the Yellowstone River and is referred to as Paradise Valley, 191 that follows the Gallatin River through Big Sky, and 287 that follows the Madison River through Ennis.  All 3 are beautiful drives in lush valleys surrounded by mountains along very famous trout rivers.  We have used all 3 in past years either going to or coming out of YNP, but have never stopped along the way until now.  And we are glad we did.  First of all we are at a very nice campground right on the Yellowstone River, Yellowstone's Edge RV Park.  It is run by a very nice couple that keep in in tip top shape, clean, spacious, and really beautiful, although no amenities, but when you are 30 miles from YNP, who needs amenities?  Hint, less kids too....

We had several goals in mind here, running errands in Bozeman, Jan getting her hair cut, going into the park, exploring the area, doing some fishing, and taking another float trip on the Yellowstone.  We did well and accomplished most of it.  We had been to Bozeman many years ago, and our obviously misguided memory had led us to believe Bozeman was not very nice.  Man, were we wrong.  Bozeman is a very cool town, big enough for almost everything you can think of, and has a vibrant historic downtown teeming with restaurants and shops.  Interesting architecture abounded both in and around town, and you could catch a glance of some of the huge ranches and homes that looked like lodges here and there.  Very, very nice until you start thinking about the winter season:-)  We ran in for Jan's appointment, did a couple errands and had a delicious lunch of sushi in a very popular and busy place called Dave's, yes, sushi in the middle of Montana! 

Then it was up at 4am to head into the park!  Yes that early, we wanted to be in Lamar Valley by sunrise to see if we could catch a glimpse of some wolves, and beat the crowds, it is the middle of the summer season after all.  From our campground it is a 70 mile drive with about half of it in the park.  We hit the north entrance just as the sky was lightening and made our way to Lamar Valley just as the sun was rising, perfect!

Morning fog over  Soda Butte Creek

The sun just catching the hillside in Lamar Valley

An antelope coming over a hill in the fog

We were hopeful to see wolves as there was a buffalo kill in the valley, but over the several hours we were there we only saw birds feeding.  But of course we saw bison, tons of them and really in their prime, lots of food in the middle of summer.

A "couple" crossing the road

Hmmm, I think I'll stop traffic for a bit

Pretty imposing creatures

The bison rule the highways, when they want to cross they do, and you stay out of their way, but there are always, "those people".  The ones who try to pose with the animals, walk over closer to bears, and generally act stupid.  In fact we had one family in the midst of a herd crossing the road, stop their car right on the road, and dad and one kid crawl out and sit on the roof as the bison veer around them, to say nothing of the cars trying to get around them as they sat there for at least 15 minutes.  Amazing, it is no wonder that people are hurt in the park every year.

Okay, I'm off my soapbox now.  We spent about 4 hours in the park, had coffee and breakfast and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.  It is hard to describe how much Jan and I love this park.  It is so diverse, with mountains, canyons, geothermal features, rivers, streams, meadows, and of course the wildlife.  It is our favorite.

A lone coyote looking for breakfast

We then headed out of the park into Gardiner, the town right at the north entrance where we wanted to talk to a famous fly shop, Park's Fly Shop about a float trip.  They said they thought they could accommodate us on Monday and would let us know in a few hours.  So sure enough they called and said we were all set and that the guide would contact us with details.

We wanted to do some wade fishing also, so we drove around looking for wadable water along the Yellowstone, and even the campground warned us not to wade in their area as, believe it or not, the Yellowstone is still quite high from runoff!  So we got to explore a bit, but bottom line we never did find a place to wade.  So we decided to go back into the park, this time to see the sunrise from Jan and my favorite viewpoint, again about 70 miles, so another even earlier launch.  But it was worth it, very few people are moving around the park at those early hours, but surprisingly, by 7am, it is getting a little busy.

Watching the sun rise from our spot:-)

We did a bigger loop this time, saw a bunch of animals, and still left the park around 11am after 5 1/2 hours.  Our preferred way of doing it.

We even saw 2 small black bears, teenagers we think

The hillsides were alive with flowers 

A group of bison crossing a stream

So as we left the park we noticed that the Yellowstone River was full of mud, chocolate colored, so we stopped into the fly shop on the way by to see what's what.  There had been several hard rainstorms in the afternoons that muddied the upper feeders to the river, primarily the Lamar and the Gardiner Rivers.  The shop said that if the river was still muddy, we wouldn't be going fishing but they were confident that it would clear.  Jan and I were very disappointed as we noticed the river was muddy all the way back the 30 miles or so to our campground, and we couldn't believe that there was any chance it would clear as we had also seen the muddied rivers up in the park that caused it.  We talked to our guide, Don, who said he was cautiously optimistic, and would call us first thing in the morning to let us know if if was a go.  He said they get these "mud plugs" on a somewhat regular basis when hard rain hits the upper rivers, but with the high flows they usually clear fairly quickly.

I walked out to the river in the morning at the campground about 630am and was amazed to see the river looked clear, wow.  And Don called about 7am and said he drove up to look at the river where we were going to fish and said it looked great, amazing, so Jan and I jumped into the truck and went to meet Don at the launch site 35 miles away.

Now I should explain, Jan and I are neophytes when it come to float boat fishing, our first trip was a few weeks ago on the North Platte river in Wyoming, and there we fished with nymphs, also something we had never done.  It was a half day trip in WY, and when you nymph fish it is much like bait fishing with a bobber.  We would cast where the guide recommended and then constantly keep your eye on the "bobber' for any sign of a fish.  You used a lot of concentration, but only casted every few minutes or so.  This trip was dry flies which I much prefer, this is real fly fishing in my book, cast the fly, it floats on the surface, make it drift as naturally as possible, recast and repeat.  My point is, this was an all day trip, we started on the water about 9am, broke for an hour for lunch, then back in until we pulled out at 6pm.  On this trip we casted about every 30 seconds.  Get the idea?  We were TIRED at the end of the day, smiling, having had a blast, but wow so tired, then we had to wait while Don loaded up the boat on his trailer and took us back to our truck where we started.  It was a long, but wonderful day, we left the motorhome about 8am, and got back about 730pm!

Don putting the boat in the raging water

Our limo for the day

Don was a great guy with lots of experience and was very patient with us, gave us pointers, and delivered a great trip.  He was originally from PA as we are, and has lived in Montana for 20 years or so, living, breathing, eating fishing, so he was an absolute wealth of info and very entertaining.  We highly recommend Don McCue as a guide if you ever get a chance to do a trip like this.

A gorgeous day on a gorgeous river!

What scenery!

We don't have a lot of fish pictures this time.  This was a much more hectic paced trip than the other one.  The river is high enough and technical enough that Don had to man the oars for our safety, so Jan and I would take the fish off the hook more often than not.  We between the 2 of us caught a bunch of fish including new ones for us, including Yellowstone Cutthroats, a nice Brown, a bunch of Rainbows, and numerous Whitefish.

Some of our wild water

We were even pampered with a nice lunch riverside with chairs and a table!

How about this for roughing it!

It was a fantastic day and we had such a good time.

One of the many fish

We even caught this guy watching us

So this morning we leave this area and head farther west to Anaconda, MT, near Butte for a few days, hopefully we'll find some wadable fishing water there.  Even if not, we are sure enjoying Montana, in fact we are thinking seriously of coming back to Paradise Valley for a longer period next year???