Fishing the Gallatin River during Lightning

The Gallatin River is one of the three rivers that create the Missouri River near a town appropriately named Three Forks, Montana. The other two rivers are the Jefferson and Madison. All three rivers were named by Lewis and Clark. I have already fished the Madison in several places. The Jefferson is not on my Top 100 list, but two of its tributaries are. So the Gallatin, which is about 125 miles long, was entirely new to me and I wanted to scout it before fishing it.

As it turned out, our journey to Henry's Fork, the Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks took us along the Gallatin River. So I got to see it from a roaring large stream near Bozeman to a small stream near the park entrance town of West Yellowstone.

I fished the Gallatin in three spots on our way back from the Tetons. The first spot I picked was in the canyon area where the river is about 25 feet wide. The wind was blowing hard through the canyon making fly fishing difficult. I fished about a 200 foot section without a bite. The stream was beautiful and I was the lone fisherman as far as I could see in either direction.

Carol took this picture from our RoadTrek parked along highway 191. That's me in the river in the center of the photo.

 I decided to try another location downstream and just out of the canyon and south of the the town of Big Sky. This time I did a little better. This section is wider and I saw a few trout rising to take aquatic insects. The trout seemed to be taking nymphs near the surface so I rigged with a surface caddis fly and a dropper fly (a dropper is a fly tied to the shank of the floating dry fly by a one to two foot long small section of leader called tippet)  that imitates an emerging caddis larva. After numerous casts I finally hooked one trout who almost immediately got off. In the process of  getting off, that trout put all others off their feeding. I moved downstream but did not see any more rising trout.

This is the second fishing spot on the Gallatin River. Again, there were no other trout fishers in sight.

It was late afternoon so Carol and I headed downstream to an RV site along the lower part of the Gallatin. After settling in I immediately headed over to the river to see if any trout were rising. To my pleasant surprise trout were rising along the entire length of tailwater from a heavy rapid upstream. This is big water and we passed many rafting outfitters upstream. Fortunately it was late in the day and no rafters were on the river. It was also overcast and overcast evenings are the conditions that caddis love, to emerge from their larval state into a winged sex-crazy flying insect. I caught three rainbow trout on surface using caddis flies. The trout ranged in size from 7 to 10 inches. Carol came down and snapped my picture just as I was about to land one. Carol stayed for awhile and then told me she saw lightning and suggested I get out of the river. Now this placed me in a dilemma. It is very hard for a fly fisherman to leave waters when trout are rising. So I easily reasoned that I had a fiberglass rod that could not conduct electricity so I could continue fishing. Which I did. Still it made me wonder about fly fisherman who use the new graphite rods. Anyway, it started pouring rain and the engineer in me started saying you know that holding a wet rod while standing in the water is setting yourself up for a shocking experience. So I got out of the water and headed back to the RoadTrek. Carol got a good laugh out of it because I didn't have my rain jacket on. Still I wonder, had I had my rain jacket on, would I have left all those rising trout, or just chanced it?

The stream here is about 150 feet wide. I waded out about 15 feet so I could cast where the trout were rising. The trout I have on is about 10 inches and fighting like wild rainbow trout do.

Before we left the next morning, I got up early and headed back over to the stream. It had stopped raining and I managed to catch three more rainbow trout. By the way, graphite fly rods do conduct electricity and so does a wet fiberglass rod. Still, the chances of getting killed are much higher every time we drive a car or our RoadTrek...