Last week I made my first trip west to fish since I was working trail crew in Grand Teton National Park in the summer of 1983. We flew into Billings, got the cheapest weekly car rental ever ($90 for a Rav4 for 7 days, thank you Priceline!), and rented an efficiency apartment in Gardiner for the week.
The Beartooth Highway is not the quickest way from Billings to the park, but it's spectacular. We'll do it if we go again and maybe take a couple of days to explore the Beartooths, which have a bunch of lakes with trout.
Once into the park, I had what was probably my best fishing of the trip in about 90 minutes. My first cutt was a monster from small water on Pebble Creek.
But they got bigger when I got down to the confluence with Soda Butte.
One day we drove over to see Old Faithful and some of the other "thermal features".
I managed a brown and two smallish rainbows near the confluence of the Firehole and the Gibbon, which form the Madison when they join. (Sorry for the blurry fish photo.)
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Wildlife--everywhere.
Wolf--a long way away. Great job by Dee Dee with a telephoto lens and a lot of cropping!
These two almost took out our rental car when the bigger one pushed the smaller one across the road about 5 feet behind us.
Fire and Ice.
We had fires in the park all week, and a couple of days the smoke was pretty bad. Then a freak snowstorm put the fires out.
6+ inches of snow up high closed the road behind us, and the park rangers held us up for a couple of hours before they let us drive back down over the pass.
With the fires out, we were allowed into the lower meadow of Slough Creek on our last day.
Best fish of the trip.
Rainbow from the Lamar just above Slough Creek. I was standing on top of a grizzly bear track while casting to this fish.
Canyon water on the Lamar--piles of 10-14 inch cuttbows (hybrids of native Yellowstone cutthroat with introduced rainbow trout) here on buggers and nymphs.
Sunset
Never saw a grizzly bear, but we sure saw plenty of sign.
The Beartooth Highway is not the quickest way from Billings to the park, but it's spectacular. We'll do it if we go again and maybe take a couple of days to explore the Beartooths, which have a bunch of lakes with trout.
Once into the park, I had what was probably my best fishing of the trip in about 90 minutes. My first cutt was a monster from small water on Pebble Creek.
But they got bigger when I got down to the confluence with Soda Butte.
One day we drove over to see Old Faithful and some of the other "thermal features".
I managed a brown and two smallish rainbows near the confluence of the Firehole and the Gibbon, which form the Madison when they join. (Sorry for the blurry fish photo.)
]Wildlife--everywhere.
Wolf--a long way away. Great job by Dee Dee with a telephoto lens and a lot of cropping!
These two almost took out our rental car when the bigger one pushed the smaller one across the road about 5 feet behind us.
Fire and Ice.
We had fires in the park all week, and a couple of days the smoke was pretty bad. Then a freak snowstorm put the fires out.
6+ inches of snow up high closed the road behind us, and the park rangers held us up for a couple of hours before they let us drive back down over the pass.
With the fires out, we were allowed into the lower meadow of Slough Creek on our last day.
Best fish of the trip.
Rainbow from the Lamar just above Slough Creek. I was standing on top of a grizzly bear track while casting to this fish.
Canyon water on the Lamar--piles of 10-14 inch cuttbows (hybrids of native Yellowstone cutthroat with introduced rainbow trout) here on buggers and nymphs.
Sunset
Never saw a grizzly bear, but we sure saw plenty of sign.
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