I’ll poke around the images from my afternoon small stream trip to see if any other pictures float to the surface, though there’s no shortage of work (and rental house renovation) tasks on the to-do list.

Fortunately, the only real excitement on the drive was watching an 18-wheeler’s tire explode just in front of us; black rubber was flying everywhere, like a pipe bomb had gone off under the trailer.

We were 100 feet back but the noise still rocked the car; if I was in the car next to the trailer (like that white Ford), I’d have to get off at the next exit to scrape the car seat.

More to come from the Underground, Tom Chandler.

p.s. — My Val Atkinson interview on the CalTrout site drove the single highest traffic spike the CalTrout’s experienced. Thanks to the Undergrounders for reading it.

This morning it feels like half of me (the thinking half) is still covering ground somewhere between here and Missoula, a feeling eerily similar to my state of mind during the whole Montana Road Trip 2010.

It’s as if I never quite got my feet underneath me.

Today’s going to be spent unpacking, replying to emails, catching up… Basically, the long exhale that comes at the end of every fly fishing road trip.

More soon. Until then, see you anywhere but the road, Tom Chandler.

Still, you get to bring more stuff.

See you kids on the other side, Tom Chandler.

I’m packing for The Underground’s Monstrously Epic Montana Road Trip, which is expressly designed to be – as one wag said in an email after reading one too many “extreme fly fishing” articles – The Most Fucking Epic Fly Fishing Trip Since The Cretaceous Period.

That’s me.

Prehistoric and epic, and proud of it (you’ll see that in my music selections below).

From the 2009 Montana Fly Fishing Road Trip; More Pics Planned for 2010

Meanwhile, I’m on that pre-vacation treadmill – the one where you work yourself into an exhausted, hallucinatory fugue state trying to wrap up all the loose ends, thereby ensuring you won’t remember the first half of your vacation.

I guess it’s the second half we live for.

The Road Trip

The Subaru is prepped and ready for the trip, shod with a shiny black set of Continentals.

Unfortunately, packing is not going well, and even without the use of my advanced psychic powers, I can safely predict I’ll spend Thursday night basically shoveling random gear into the Subaru (some of you are nodding).

That means I’ll arrive in Missoula (approximately 14.5 hazy hours after leaving Mt. Shasta) with almost no knowledge about what I actually brought, and little ability to find any of it.

Instead, I’ll open the trunk, and – already woozy and roadburned – see little but a heaving, tangled mass of gear, some of which may not have seen light for a decade or more.

Fortunately, [Name Redacted] owns at least two of everything (yes, everything), and because he’s even more of a geezer than I am, a lot of it’s the killer older stuff that makes my naughty bits feel all tingly.

It’s the kind of thing you can get away with when you’re fishing with a gear-collecting buddy, but if you packed that way for a trip to the South Pole, they’d never find the body.

The Great Music Quiz

Through most of my life, I’ve driven beater cars – mechanically sound but lacking unneeded luxuries like air conditioning, working stereos or paint. I have a strong a preference for cars you can drive over 17 miles of potholed road without worrying about the glossy finish, and for the most part, the concept has served me well.

I made the trip to Montana three years ago in a battered, base-model 1987 Toyota pickup, and everything went perfectly (if you ignored 100+ heat).

Last year – with Little M’s arrival imminent – we bought Older Bro’s 2002 Subaru sedan, which came equipped with bourgeois items like low-profile tires, a tuned suspension, a/c and a stereo.

A great, big, finely tuned stereo that revealed every last delicate sliver of sound, and at (if necessary) great volume.

I could hear every whisper. Or bleed out my ears.

My choice.

Which creates a new problem.

What the hell do I play?

Road Tunes!

A five CD changer hides in the back and the player up front takes loose CDs, so my choices are essentially limitless, but the last thing I want to do is juggle CDs while driving through wildlife territory at 70 mph.

That means five key CDs and let’s say three changeable discs, and all have to hold up over a 14-hour drive (which means good enough for two plays each).

And yes, I know I could carry a bazillion songs on an MP3 player, but we don’t have a jack for the thing in the car.

So we’re back to these archaic CD things. Which could look something like…

Top Five In-Changer CDS

1. Dave Matthews/Under the Table & Dreaming
Obvious, but great, surprising stuff.

2. Paul Simon/Graceland
Music by a genius, lyrics by god…

3. Steely Dan/Aja
(Intentionally left blank)

4. Ricki Lee Jones/Flying Cowboys
Surprised? The lady at her [probably clean] peak, and so beautifully produced by Walter Becker that I am tearing up in an unmanly way just thinking about it.

5.U2/All That You Can’t Leave Behind
Sure, my tastes run to quieter stuff with what I’ll grandly term “sophisticated” production values, but every once in a while I need something to keep me awake (and help me exceed the speed limit). This is that CD.

Loose CDs

Heart/Dreamboat Annie
Brain cells are bursting everywhere, but this is seriously good stuff (one or two aside). Haven’t listened since the 70s? Shame on you…

Dire Straits/Love Over Gold
Never got over this CD, and see no reason to start now.

The Who/Quadrophenia
Sure, it’s a two-CD set, but it’s my blog, dammit.

Alternates (could be subbed in at any time)

• Counting Crows/Films About Ghosts
• The Best of Pete Townsend
• Bruce Springsteen/Born to Run
• REM/Document
• Piles of other stuff…

Special Bonus Points For…

The Ultimate Geezer Mix CD. This could get messy, but yes, I’m building one as we speak. Probably not time to build another.

In truth, narrowing the avalanche of good music down to a tiny pile is a pointless exercise – most of the Undergrounders can name a band or album that I will immediately shuffle into the Top 5, leaving me with something more like a Top 50.

Naturally, the Undergrounders are encouraged to play along, and we promise not to snicker.

See you on the road, Tom Chandler.

[Name Redacted] and I found ourselves headed for Georgetown Lake – a large, shallow impoundment that’s heavily stocked, and where the fish grow quickly under the impetus of a staggering food chain.

Thunderstorms do have their advantages, but fishing isn't one of them.

Last year, my first cast on Georgetown produced a good sized fish, and a gratifying percentage of the subsequent casts did too.

Fly fishing Georgetown isn’t hard if you’re around at the right time. In truth, it’s a little like a visit to fly fishing’s red light district; the fish are easy, and too much self-congratulation over the result simply looks stupid.

Of course, with that mindset, the Undergrounders can already see into my Georgetown Lake future, which involves only a glimpse of the kind of fly fishing the lake offers.

Karma, it seems, it not the warm, fuzzy construct that some would have us believe.

The First Clue

After cruising the state campground once, [Name Redacted] and I seized a prime camping slot, and because I’m a seasoned outdoorsman, I began setting up my lightweight-but-sizable backpacking tent without even glancing at the directions.

For someone with my utter lack of spatial analysis skills, this, of course, is an act of hubris – a grandstand guaranteed to draw the attention of the gods.

And sure enough, no sooner had the tent gone up (only two do-overs) then “the flash” came. The very bright flash.

A thunderstorm had snuck in over the Pintar Range, and the flash was followed almost instantly by a loud crack of thunder – the kind of thunder that might send a fly fisher back to his just-erected tent for a clean pair of underwear.

Then, of course, it started raining.

No problem. Afternoon thunderstorms roll through here all the time, and we still had plenty of time before the much-anticipated evening caddis bite went off.

Problem was, one storm followed the next, and we finally found ourselves fishing a narrow 1.5 hour window in the evening between storms – the last chasing us right off the lake.

The rainbows would barely have a chance to form before the next storm rolled in.

Big Dries, Big Trout

The fishing – using #8 caddis dry flies – was spectacular… while it lasted.

You’d cast this enormous dry onto the relatively still lake surface (remember, this is between storms), then either twitch it or simply drag it back.

A surprisingly high percentage of the time, a trout would hammer it (in much the same way the Trout Underground hammers slaw dogs).

The take to hookup ratio is fairly low, and it took me a while to finally get a trout to the boat. That my hosts kept apologizing for the slow pace of the fishing only made me wonder more about what it’s supposed to be like.

I mean, we were getting big, splashy takes from good-sized trout, and a lot of them.

And it was slow?

Broken, Not Beaten

The fishing didn’t get any easier when I performed a long-distance hookset, and broke my Orvis Zero Gravity 9′ 6wt fly rod.

In truth, this was what we in the high-tech world called a “user problem,” and yes – I’d been expecting this. More than a year ago, a pair of us were fishing big streamers on this rod on a local river, and the bottom ferrule came a little loose, and neither of us noticed, and the inevitable happened.

After we picked up the pieces, I realized the Zero Gravity’s bottom ferrule hadn’t broken, but you could visible signs of stress on the female ferrule, and I figured this rod’s lifespan was limited.

I gave it another month, but I was off by more than a year.

Convenience Versus Breaking Shit

Ian Rutter warned that 4-piece rods require a lot more attention when you’re fishing big streamers and putting them under a lot of stress, which is why I started using ferrule wax on my travel rods.

I’ve paid special attention to the thinnest ferrule at the tip of the rod, which have simply cast off a pair of other four-piece rods, but clearly, I started using ferrule wax little too late to save this rod, and now it’s back to Orvis, who hopefully have a replacement section.

Simply put, my bad.

The Next Thing

We figured we’d fish the next day, but it rained at night, rained in the morning, and was going to rain (and storm) all day, and while I’ve got nothing against getting wet, I do have some questions about the concept of electrocution, so fly fishing during the long string of electrical storms was out.

We left, ate a warming breakfast at a nearby joint, then headed back to Missoula, and with work and home issues looming – and the forecast for more crummy weather – I headed home.

The long, long (boring, flat, hot, straight, featureless, high desert) road home.

The Wrapup

This Montana Road Trip was tougher than last years; my time on the little streams was just as gratifying, but the weather – cold and stormy – pushed the better fishing out just beyond the scope of my visit.

Still, I fished the Bitterroot twice, returned to the sites of last year’s small-stream nirvana moments, and – despite a long string of electrical storms – hammered trout for a sterling 90 minutes on Georgetown Lake.

My trip home – in the Underground’s new, air-conditioned Subaru sedan – was a breeze, though a meeting with a client put me on the road late.

I got home at 3 AM after 14 hours of driving, and the only real glitch was my brain’s increasingly inability to process the data my eyes were sending it the last hour of the drive.

Sometimes, things just get weird that way.

John Gierach once told me that his readers had essentially turned him from a fly fishing essayist into a fly fishing travel writer, and in a sense, I can see how that happens.

You can write volumes about your home waters – and the Undergrounders read that stuff with interest – but there’s something about applying the same perspective to new places that wakes us all up just a bit.

We are creatures of routine, but even the sniff of adventure is enough to get the grey matter engaged, calculating fuel costs and available vacation time against the risk of divorce and the chance to see something new.

See you on the road (at least once in a while), Tom Chandler.

Unfortunately, I won’t make I90 West until 1:00 pm, which means – even if I stayed awake and drove straight through – I wouldn’t reach the loving embrace of the L&T and the Wonderdog until 3:00 am.

I’m not at all sure that’s going to happen – long drives through remote areas can lead to hairy eyeball moments with roadside deer, any one of which can end a trip – so the Undergrounders may not see a post until late Wednesday.

Still, never underestimate the power of the word “home.”

It exerts a powerful draw on all of us, regardless of where the word leads you.

Still to come from the Montana Road Trip?

We’ve got photos and a report from the coolest little meadow stream in the world.

And a handful of photographs from Georgetown Lake – where one thunderstorm after another finally sent us packing – though not before we squeezed in a couple hours of the lake’s famous Monster Caddis Hatch (Monster CADDIS PULL! Be There! Torque Torque! Torque!!!).

With the Underground’s faithful photographic companion (the much-abused Pentax Optio W10) wobbling on unsteady legs, the picture count is a little short, and with a new camera not really in the immediate budget, we’ll see what we can do to get it back in the ring for future adventures.

What are those? Life is about to take on a more hectic pace, but there are still a host of unvisited alpine lakes sprinkled around Underground/Man Cave World Headquarters, plus all the usual suspects.

In any case, the Montana Road Trip 2009 pictures are already taken, the experiences have already been lived, and the duffel already packed.

See you on the long road home, Tom Chandler.

See you on the road (all 14 hours of it), Tom Chandler.

Last year’s trip produced a handful of reports which recorded exceptionally high readership numbers, clearly suggesting my readers secretly wish me dead for rubbing their noses in my little fly fishing adventures.

And I’m down with that; if I inflict a little pain and suffering during the day, I sleep better at night.

A highlight of last year's trip? Only if you like beauty, solitude, and trout.

For those who missed last year’s reports:

The Great Montana Upper Radiator Hose Massacre

The Underground’s Montana Road Trip Continues to Rock Creek

The Montana Road Trip Continues: Georgetown Lake, and Culinary Breakthroughs

The Montana Fly Fishing Road Trip Continues: This Time an Even Smaller Stream

The Montana Fly Fishing Road Trip Continues: Last Casts, and a Gripping Action Sequence

Much has to happen between now and Monday, which means no fly fishing for the Underground before The Big Drive. Last year, the 14 hours went by pretty quickly – despite the fact I was driving a 1987 Toyota pickup relying largely on duct tape for molecular cohesion.

This year we’ve acquired a road car; a 2002 Subaru Legacy with (and we know this is shocking in this day and age) a working air conditioner and stereo.

I’ll be far more comfortable, but I can’t help but feel I’ve robbed this trip of a sizable (and romantic) element of risk. Is this an improvement, or am I simply flying too close to the sun?

Other questions loom.

Will [name redacted] willingly reveal his identity? Will the fishing be great? Will the L&T forgive me after I’ve slopped the between-bread contents of a mega-death-burger (cheese, chili, ketchup & produce) onto the passenger seat?

Stay tuned – these questions and others will be answered.

See you in Montana (starting sometime next week), Tom Chandler.

With 100+ degree temps forecast for Wednesday, I’m heading home Tuesday to spare myself the extra 5 degrees (14 hours in a truck without air conditioning forces you to think like a trout; too much heat kills).

Lots more Montana fly fishing to come. See you on the (hot, sticky) road, Tom Chandler.

Though I’d love to describe the effort in terms that elevate it to the level of crossing the prarie in a Conestoga wagon, the truth is rather simpler; I just drove a lot.

In the west — where things are rather far apart — that’s how you get from Point A to Point B.

I’m at the house of the Underground’s Anonymous Fly Fishing Benefactor in Missoula, and we’re throwing gear in the car for a camping trip on Rock Creek.

The stones are still coming off, the creek’s coming down, and for once, it looks like the Underground’s timing is damn near perfect.

Naturally, expecting big fish on top of the perfect timing represents a kind of hubris that can only lead to trouble, so I’m only going to say it’s beautiful up here, The Benefactor’s fun to hang with, and if we catch a few small fish, well, that’s just icing (looks around furtively).

I’ll likely be out of touch for a couple days. But don’t cry for me, Undergrounders. It’s the kind of out-of-touch fly fishermen live for.

See you in Montana, Tom Chandler.