Big catch up

We moved from Ennis up to Anaconda, home of a large copper smelting plant and in 1919 built the highest, 585' masonry smokestack in the world, which is still there today.  The smelter was shut down in 1980 by the Atlantic Richfield Company.  It is only a few miles from Butte.  We arrived at the Fairmont RV Park and after a mixup with sites got it all straightened out and got into a decent pull through with nice views.  We had been told about a neat fishing area near Warm Springs so we went over to check it out.  Then went into Butte for a good lunch at Sparky's Garage.  Ran around a bit, went grocery shopping, and called it a day.

The next day we went over and fished in Warm Springs with no luck, said enough and went and had a great lunch in Anaconda at Donivan's recommended to us by Dave and Lingky, very good!

Decided to drive down to the Big Hole River, beautiful drive only interrupted by a 45 minute delay for construction, we were very glad we didn't have the motorhome as we were led for miles by a pilot car on rough, dirty, wet construction roads.  But we got there   and found a beautiful river with trout jumping!  We found an access and started fishing immediately, and what a time we had.  Caught many fish right from the bank, it was fantastic. 

The Big Hole River

Fish on!

My whitefish

Jan's trout

We moved up the river a bit, found a nice spot for a picnic.

Our picnic view

The scenery is awesome

We continued up the river a bit after lunch and found a cool access with campsites right on the river.  We scoped it out and although no hookups, some of the sites are big enough to accommodate us.  We giving it some thought to coming back here after our month in Missoula.  Then we drove up the Wise River, but it didn't have a lot of access and was very small so we didn't try to fish, instead we went back along the Big Hole for coffee and fished for awhile, then headed back.

What a gorgeous place

Jan managed to get her hair cut in Butte, and we were able to walk on a nice paved path near the campground out through the meadows.  Next we wanted to check out the Missouri River for fishing.

We had heard and read quite a bit about this river, all of it good.  There is a 30 mile section of river below the Holter Lake dam that supposedly holds a ton of fish, more than 5000/mile, and more than that they are supposed to be mostly large fish.  You hear a lot of stories like this along the way, so we wanted to go and see for ourselves.  We moved to the Prewett Creek RV Park near Cascade, MT.  It is right along the river in a very interesting topographical area, lots of rocky cliffs with the river meandering through. Up closer to the dam, upstream, but south of here, meadows are the predominant feature, with the hills and mountains in the background.  

The view from our site
We would watch eagles soar around the cliffs

View the other way with a storm coming in

We were surprised by the river, it is slow running, very shallow, very weedy, and not at all what we expected.  Our campground is about 50 miles north of Helena and 30 miles south of Great Falls, and we can attest to the fact there is not much here in this area, no grocery stores even, in fact other than fly shops and bars, not much else.  But we found the fishermen flock to this area, particularly in June and July for amazing dry fly fishing.  

First we took a drive to Helena, poked around, had a so so lunch at a pizza place there, made a Costco run, did some grocery shopping, and came back to check out a fly shop and drive along the river.  We had done some further research online and found that this time of year was usually pretty slow as the river tended to be warm in late summer, and the weeds were overwhelming.  We talked to a fly shop and asked about it and they confirmed that was usually true, and the fishing was slower than normal, but this year wasn't like most years, they had had more rain, cooler days, and for August the fishing was pretty good.  Not a glowing report.  Back to the campground where we were visited by 25 or so bighorn sheep!  The owner of the park said the ewes and the young ones come down out of the mountains most every day, meander through the campground, cross the road, go down to the river and then make their way back up for the night, meanwhile the rams stay up there.

We were also visited by several mule deer and their fawns, and our neighbor saw a black bear swim across the river and climb over a hill.  Pretty neat stuff!

We also wanted to make a run up to Great Falls, look around a bit although we had been there before, and found a neat place to have lunch, the Roadhouse Diner.  It is only open 4 days a week, everything fresh made, basically a hamburger joint.  Friendly, hopping, and very good.

Over our tasty lunch we discussed whether to take a float trip or not.  It seemed we weren't here at the optimum time, but for this time, things looked about as good as they could be.  We couldn't figure a way to come back easily at the best time, so we finally decided to just go book a trip if we could.  We also looked at the weather, especially for the wind report to try to find the best day with mostly calm winds, and picked Tuesday our last day here.  They were able to accommodate us.  On Sunday, the winds showed us what it was all about!  They roared in with a rain shower here and there, enough that the coach was rocking and a rollin.  It was awful and all we could envision was being out on the river trying to put up with it.  So we kept our fingers crossed until Tuesday, and sure enough the morning looked great, we met our guide at 7am with not a cloud in the sky and not a breath of wind.  ALL RIGHT!

Our guide rigging up getting ready for our day

We started right under the dam, nymphing, and were told there were rarely any weeds way up there.  We found that to be true, and just as we started our first drift, pow I caught a nice rainbow!

First fish of the day

Well that just started it, we caught fish after fish, our guide would row back up so we could drift back down, and fish after fish.  And, for us, they were big fish, and fighters.  Our guide kept saying these were small compared to what the river offered.  We had heard that story before as well.

Jan with perhaps the smallest fish she caught all day

We caught fish all morning long.  We pulled into a little spot for our lunch, then switched up to fish hoppers, grasshopper imitations on the surface, dry fly fishing, most every fly fisher's choice.  Also the weeds were getting prolific, so fishing a dry fly kept us out of most of the weeds.  As we drifted along with the sun high in the sky, and the water crystal clear, we could actually see the fish in the river, and now that we've seen them with our own eyes, they are huge!  And the river is teeming with them, but since they are fished so hard and they didn't get this big by being stupid, it is hard to catch them.  We gave it a gallant effort, each of us had a few strikes, but we never boated a fish that afternoon.  It was difficult, but really exciting to watch an enormous fish come up and eat your hopper, and yank like you couldn't believe.  If we hadn't been able to see the fish, we might have thought it was all a crap story, but I can tell you, somehow we will come back to this river.  Now we understand why many fishermen only fish this river, it sure spoils you bad, even if we didn't get one all afternoon.  We ended up not caring too much for our guide, but we will say he certainly put us on the fish.

You can see here how shallow most of the river is,
with the wader way out from shore

Pretty day

Some white pelicans taking a break

So today we move over to Missoula for a month, very unusual for us.  Last year we spent 3 weeks here and we wanted to go back.  We hope to do at least one more float trip there, although we both admit we are kind of spoiled now.