Montana Road Trip 2009: Fly Fishing Tiny Alpine Meadows for 100 Year-Old Mussels?

It’s tempting to say you leave a little piece of you behind every time you fish someplace beautiful, but only a mad poet would buy it – unless, of course, you actually did leave something behind.

Lately, we’ve conducted a small stream festival here on the Underground, and on the Montana Road Trip 2009, that wasn’t about to change.

The tiny meadow stream carefully not mentioned by name here was one we fly fished last year, and the fly fishing was the same small stream festival I remembered from 12 months ago.

The trout were still small – though we eked out a handful in the 11″-12″ range – and the fishing itself was something even a purist could love.

To the uninitiated, it would seem easy; the casts are short, the flies are floating, and the takes a little greedy.

Then again, the fish are spooky, the casting needs to be accurate to the inch, and the drifts surprisingly difficult.

And yes, there are more fly eating shrubs, trees and grasses than trout, so the price for a bad cast might be more than a few choice swear words.

Even when retrieving a snagged fly, you step carefully on this stream; it’s home to a rare freshwater mussel (the Western Pearlshell) that can live in excess of 100 years.

And yes, grinding a small colony of 70 year-old mussels into oblivion under your wading boot is not the memory you want to take from a day of fly fishing.

It’s more than an “ooops” moment.

The (Uncelebrated) Grand Slam

Oddly – in the middle of cutthroat country – I found myself the owner of a Grand Slam: I caught a brown trout, a couple Brook trout, and many Westslope Cutthroats.

In some instances, that’s cause for celebration – but only you’re not concerned about finding so many non-natives in a tiny alpine meadow creek. If [Name Redacted] and I go back, we’re packing a cooler and taking the Brookies and brown trout home for dinner.

Catch and release has become something of a religion among fly fishermen, but sometimes the natives need a hand, and while the Brookie is still the Official Char of the Trout Underground, they simply don’t belong everywhere.

Plus they’re good to eat.

The Other Fishermen

Any time you stumble on a rarely fished stream, you assume complete and total ownership of it (at least in your head).

It may flow through public land and a (barely) drivable dirt road may cross it, but it’s yours, damnit.

So when you find a group of campers – including some who might even be fishermen – at the confluence of your tiny creek and the larger creek it feeds, you’re forgiven if your first thought is streak your face with mud, crawl down there through the brush, and go all Rambo on their camp.

It’s possible I accidentally vocalized some of that thinking, and [Name Redacted] gently reminded me I was standing on public land, and that the knee-high grasses on our tiny meadow stream looked undisturbed.

I mean, what fishermen wastes his time on a tiny meadow stream when a bigger version – with presumably bigger fish – runs right nearby?

Fair enough. Given all the trouble and worry that human greed has caused over the last 18 months, it’s refreshing to realize that wanton greed sometimes works in our favor.

Later – farther up the meadow – we’d stumble across a part of the meadow ripped up by ATV tracks (which also plowed through the stream at one point, which brought out that Rambo thing again), and sometimes you wonder why hopping on an otherwise useful ATV causes some people to immediately lose 30+ IQ points.

Enough said.

The Paragraph Where It Gets Mortal

Regular readers will recall my father’s death more than a year ago, despite the passage of time, a couple vials of his ashes sit perched on the shelf.

In truth, I didn’t know what to do with them.

My father was a big, gentle, quiet guy who took better care of us than he did himself – a guy who didn’t spend a lot of time “recreating” because that’s simply not what responsible, depression-era men did.

I’ve discovered you don’t get over a parent’s death as much as try to make peace with it, and while time and distance grant you a certain serenity, they don’t insulate you from the random thoughts that surprise you along the way.

It’s too late to drag dad along on my adventures – some of which he would have enjoyed – but I am perfectly capable of depositing a few of his ashes in a tiny meadow stream, which links to a bigger freestone stream, which runs to a much bigger stream, which flows eventually to the Clarks Fork, which flows eventually to the Columbia River, which ultimately flows into the ocean.

That he might someday occupy the whole of the Columbia Basin watershed puts a smile on my face.

It also makes sense that a small part of my quiet, patient father now occupies a stream populated by freshwater mussels – which may have been quietly doing whatever mussels do since before he was born.

A thought like that grants an almost totemic power to things like small streams and ashes, and you ignore the wonderful symmetry of it at all your own peril.

If there’s a moral here, maybe it’s this: maybe the mad poets among us know something we don’t.

More Montana

The Underground’s Montana Road Trip 2009 took a turn for the stormy after [Name Redacted] and I returned from our small stream odyssey, but that’s fodder for my next post.

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

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