The Yellowstone River

After my 14 hour day at Armstrong's we decided to forgo a second day on the Boulder and hit the upper Yellowstone. There was a mudslide yesterday that clouded the river last night and made the easier portions of the river un-fishable. This led us to move the day with Jessica and Kate to Friday. Fortunately for my casting arm the upper river cleared out by morning. The fishing was rather weird today. We stared off fishing dry flies and the fish were coming up consistently. The only thing was they would just peck at the fly and not take it all the way. I started off thinking that I was late in setting the hook due to my fatigue ( some of the time this was true) but there were so many fish that would not even take the fly under water. It became clear that the fish were part of the problem when we went to a dry and dropper and they hit the dropper the same way. all we could figure was that the mud put the fish into a weird feeding pattern. All that being said I had a really great time and at the end of the day the fish total was 2 dozen. I must say that catching wild Yellowstone cutthroat trout in the river they evolved in was pretty special. To top it all off the slightly less labor intensive fishing allowed my arm to not get totally blown out. By our best count I have caught 85 fish in 3 days fishing (86 if you count the cut I caught in the creek next to the cabin this evening), absolutely unbelievable! I'll shoot to break 100 tomorrow, not bad for 4 days fishing I'd say. As a side note I cant thank my guide Hank enough, he has been both an amazing person and a great guide. I have no doubt that tomorrow, even with two people that have never fished before, we will have a great day and everyone will catch some fish thanks to him.

On to the pictures!

Got some pretty red arms don't I? Can you guess what the shirt is from? I hate pictures of myself but I always seem to look good in that shirt.




“Don't tell me I'm burning the candle at both ends, tell me where to get more wax.”
~ TED