The spring creeks have always been here but it wasn't until the late 1960s and early 1970s when interest in them really began to grow. When I first started guiding for the Yellowstone Angler I was maybe not quite a journeyman river guide yet, but at worst I was acceptably competent. I'd been a boat builder for a decade at that point. River fishing was what I knew best. I can't say the same for the first few weeks of my first season on the spring creeks. Fortunately I was working in one of the best possible places. As a guide at the Yellowstone Angler I was working with and learning from an amazing team of top-of-the-line spring creek guides. Those work-my-way-through school years as a forty year old were a special time.
The guides at the Yellowstone Angler regularly held group chats in the shop at 7:00am or so while waiting for our customers to show up. They were a bit like safety meetings on a construction site but we talked about riffles bugs and nymph runs rather than ladders safety belts and cranes. During the early season on the Yellowstone the river is dropping and clearing quickly. New riffles pop up every few days while last weeks best riffles become gravel bars. Where the hot spots on the spring creeks are changes from day to day too.
The first thing all the guys told me about fishing the creeks--from day one--was to change flies a lot. "Always start with your favorite fly--or your customer's favorite fly--but the minute a regularly rising fish refuses your best drift more than twice, change flies. And change to the most radically different fly profile you can, from what just got refused," they added. "If you had a dry fly on switch to a wet fly or a spent wing or a cripple."
Now that is interesting. After decades of reading books about mayfly theory and the holy grail quest for the perfect mayfly design, according to the more experienced guys I was suddenly working with, there was no such thing. Different from one minute to the next was what mattered most. More different was more powerful than a little different.
I can't say I swallowed that strategy without some skepticism at first. But not after I ran with it for a few weeks. Back in the days when Bob Auger ran the show at DePuy Spring Creek Bob made a point of visiting all the fishermen on the creek. All the guides too. Bob was a wealth of information on a daily basis. Bob's narrative and analysis basically followed what the Yellowstone Angler guides were telling me. The hot spots on the creek changed constantly so it helped to be near the top of the expert's gossip network. Which fly worked best changes constantly too. Bob also told me, more than once, those fishermen on the creek who paid for a guide on average caught close to three times as many fish. There were plenty of old-timers who didn't need a guide. But the average new comer benefitted a lot. Changing flies when the fish started to refuse was a big part of that story.
So if fly selection was somewhat arbitrary and moreover changed every twenty minutes, what does count the most? Utility and variety bubble up to the top quickly in that context. Is your current fly easy to cast or does it make your leader twist? Does the fly land upright (possibly a more human than piscatorial attribute)? Is it easy to see or hard to see? Does it float well and dry off quickly? Utilitarian attributes suddenly become primary concerns when the best pattern choice changes from moment to moment. Easy to tie becomes important too, at least for those of us who don't get their flies from fly shop bins in the morning.
The main Summer event on the creeks is the Pale Morning Dun hatch which used to start in late June peak in July and then peter out by early to mid-August. A late Summer rain storm could bring the bugs back overnight, like a magic wand. Alas it rains rarely in August in Montana. When it does rain it's always good news.
On a daily basis the hatch used to start pretty regularly at 11:30 and last hot and heavy until 2:00pm or so. If it was cloudy the hatch might last all afternoon. Once the bugs start to hatch an observant eye notices almost right away some of the real mayflies are bit smaller, more yellow and much more active. The active ones float on the surface for no more than a foot or two before flying off, often twisting and changing position left and right in the process. Those are the males. They also have bulging salmon colored eyes. Once the males have left the water they seldom contact it again. Not for the rest of that first day anyway. The males are hyper active. They fly constantly. The males are the ones you see all day long. It's all too easy for a casual eye to assume all PMDs are small and yellow.
The females are a bit larger, more olive than yellow and quite a bit more lethargic. The females often ride the surface for 20' feet or more before flying off to the willow bushes for the rest of the day. Unlike the males the females never leave the willow bushes once they get there. Not until mating and egg laying time. So you seldom see them. The yellow males are what you see. But it is the olive females that ride the water so gracefully for so long. And it is the females that make up the bulk of the feeding trout's off-the-surface dimpling food.
Bad weather is good weather when you're fishing, I think that's so no matter what. No matter where you are. But it is especially so on the spring creeks. When the occasional hard steady rain blew through, when I was guiding, customers would sometimes cancel for the day. The creek fee was already paid so I usually went on a fishing holiday. In the rain. For at least a few hours anyway. On the Paradise Valley spring creeks you can start at the top of the creek in a steady rain and fish quickly downstream, fishing across and down with the biggest streamer you've got. Hogs come out of no where, especially so in the fast deep currents immediately below the various culverts. Small fly fishing during the hatches seldom encounters a fish over 20" inches long. Streamers in the rain or in a slow steady wet snowfall bring fish that big and bigger up all day long. I've had a few rain storm days when I caught one or two 20" inch plus fish at every culvert on the creek. Have you ever in your life caught six or seven brown trout in the 20" inch range, in a single day? I've done it in a three hour stretch. On the creeks. In a hard steady rain. When that does happen you usually have the whole place to yourself. You have to be half crazy to fish in a hard steady rain. That's never been a problem for me.
And if it is a dark lowering day with a cold whistling wind, it is good, for a dull day is far better on which to fish than a clear day. Dame Juliana. 1496
Drag free drifts are important, most of the time. Not with streamers but they are with drifting insect imitations. And a drag free drift may be easier to accomplish with 6x than 5x. But only marginallly better. At most. Back in the days when Bob Auger managed DePuy Spring Creek he interviewed all the guides every day and kept a diary. When Bob came to me with his open notebook and asked me a series of questions I interviewed him as well. It was reassuring to know I was usually in the mix. The very best guides on the creeks often caught a few more fish than I did. But not many more. None of them used 5x and I almost always did. Most of the guides I knew did use 6x but steered away from 7x. It's too hard to land a good fish on 7x and and it's not fair to the fish. One of the very best guides on the creeks, consistently so, called himself "6x Outfitters," for a reason.
Although I most often used 5x I didn't talk about it much. I got so much blowback about how ignoirant I was I mostly kept quiet aobut it. At least until now. I have a hunch I had the lowest lost fish rate on the creeks.
Where to fish on a spring creek does change from day to day and from season to season. But not that much. Most of Montana's spring creeks are not only good all-year-long habitats for resident fish they also serve as transient spawning nurseries for migratory fish swimming up from the main-stem rivers those spring creeks flow into. In March at O'Hair's Spring Creek south of Livingston Montana I usually try to find some slightly deeper, slicker water below a rifle. And then I might deep-drift a small white streamer or a #14 flashback numph of some kind. Later in the season you will need smaller flies. March is a special time. When the time for smaller flies does arrive, however, for most of the day I still fish in the same places: usually some version of slick water below a riffle. There are lots of exceptions but that's the general rule.
When you are a tourist fising new water you have to make the best of it. New water is exciting and frustrating at the same time. Experience matters. The first time I fished DePuy Spring Creek as a boy, with my dad, neither of us knew what we were doing. We fished with Royal Wulffs and Goofus Bugs (Humpies) and both of us got skunked. There are a few routines you have to learn on the creeks, for different times of day and different times of year. Once you've got those routines you can start to get creative. Bob Auger once told me that I-among the old hands on the creeks--caught more fish in unusual places with non-standard methods than any other guide he could think of. I think Bob's comment was a complement.
At the upper end of DePuy Spring Creek there used to be a long 12" inches wide meandering channel through the weeds, leeking out of an adjacent irrigation diversion. At the head of that 20'foot 12" inch wide channel lived a nice 18" inch brown trout. I must have caught that fish a dozen times during my last summer guiding. Nobody I knew fished that small holding spot. You had to lay your fly line down over 20' feet of weeds and lilly pads to get to it. There were many other such places. I loved the creeks. I had the routines down pat too but I especially liked all the oddball nooks and crannies everybody else overlooked.
At O'Hair's Spring Creek there is a large and deep main pool at the upper end where the main spring flow cascades down a steep bank, where half the creek suddenly appears out of nowhere. It's a tough place to fish because the water is uncharacteristically deep and fast, and because the only available back cast spots force to line the fish. Everybody tries that spot and most fail. There are some big boys that live there but they're not easy to catch.
What almost everybody overlooks are the small weed-locked open water pockets at the edges of that big pool. Some of those slick water openings in the weeds are less than three feet in diameter. To fish them you have to drop 20 or 30 feet of fly line over a thick weed bed, so your Pheasanttail Nymph or beatle or grasshopper plops gently into the open water. If you hook one of those fish getting it out of the weeds is the big challenge, but the fish often do it for you. Once hooked those fish usually head straight for the deeper main pool. Hold your rod tip as high as you can and gife it line as it goes. One of my most difficult customers, a massive almost four hundred pound and perpetually angry guy from New Jersey, hooked and landed a 23" inch rainbow there that way once. That fish transformed him from constantly complaining to a big fan. He even asked for me specifically the following year.
That nifty rainbow had four small flies broken off and stuck in its mouth, on its head and in one fin. Bending the barbs down in heavily fished waters is a good idea. We caught that fish because I had my guy rigged up with 5x. The four flies I plucked out of that fish before I released him were left by 7x guys. That rainbow story is a pretty specific place example but it's also generic. Oddball places on the spring creeks are greatly overlooked resource. Nooks and crannies require an observant eye to fihd. They are all over the place, on every spring creek I've ever fished.
Brown trout and Cutthroats on the creeks usually have unchanging holding spots they call home all summer long. Brown trout love the shade. If there is a log, undercut bank or a wad of surface weeds close to an adjacent current they will hide there. The Cutties tend to like the same shady holding spots but they have to play second fiddle, and are usually found a few slots further downstream from the heads of pools than the browns.
At the upper end of the O'Hair property on Armstrong Spring creek there is a rickety bridge with fast water underneath. Immediately upstream of that bridge are a few good feeding lanes with still pockets fish can lie in. They were and probably still are all taken by larger than average brown trout. They were almost impossible to catch. You could see them from the bridge above which caught everyone's attention. But tricky currents and an extra-steep bank made anything resembling a drag free drift hard to accomplish and those fish all had advanced degrees in water flogging. When ever a bad cast came their way they instantly scooted underneath the bridge and stayed there until the danger passed. I mention it because it was clear they were the same threee or four individual brown trout, all summer long. Brown trout are not social. They might tolerate eachother but they do have territories they defend and use. They are predictable, and yet still hard to catch.
The rainbows are more group oriented. They often travel around from spot to spot visiting and revisiting the same areas repeatedly, as a group, with each one falling in line with a well-defined pecking order featuring the biggest fish almost always at the upstream edge of the group. They are also far more likely to be found in open water, away from shady cover. A few yards above what we used to call the "Blue Gate" pool the same bunch of rainbows could be found every day, all summer long. Sometimes they were at the bottom of tha pool where an old cottonwood stump split the current left and right. Sometimes they were a bit further up, but it was always the same dozen or so fish and they were never very far from that territory. Further up and further down the creek was a different group--or community--of raindbows. The browns and the cutthroaqts seldom moved at all.
My favorite trout fishing--even though I'm now too old to actually do it anymore--is to hike up onto the Beartooth Plateau to various highly secret shallow swampy lagoons at the outlets to un-named lakes. Most of the lakes up on the Beartooth are over populated with stunted brook trout exhibiting large old-growth heads and mouths attached to short stumpy bodies. Many of those same lakes, if you know where to go, also have huge rainbows and cutthroats in shallow dragonfly lagoons, often but not always at their outlets. The key habitat is shallow with a weed covered bottom. Like spring creek fish those high mountain fish are hard to catch too. They are vulnerable in shallow water and super spooky about anything that moves. To catch them you have start early, hike six miles and then crouch down and approach slowly. If you manage to get a fly into the water without sending them off to their hiding places they'll eat anything you throw at them. That is the kind of trout fishing I like best.
I'm not denigrating the heavily fished spring creek and tail water experience. Fishing is fun no matter how you do it. Skiing is a bit like fishing. The best skiers know how to ski on crusty rotten spring time snow, on ice, on groomed snow or on fluffy freshly fallen powder. You have to go with the flow and make the best of what ever happens next. To the extent choice is involved I like wild fish best. Bonefish out on the Southwest side of Andros Island in the Bahamas are like that. The bigger bonefish near Moxeytown on the East side of the island can be almost impossible to catch. Out on the West side, South of the South Bight the fish are wild and hungry. Getting there isn't easy. It's a long arduous and expensive proposition usually involving tents and sleeping bags and uncommonly adventurous Bahamian fishing guides. It sure is fun once you get there.
I often dream about fishing. On particularly rapturous nights I dream about flying. Sometimes I dream about both. I have a recurrent dream that involves suddenly discovering I can fly. Low to the ground at first but then suddenly soaring over the tops of high altitude aspen trees were I discover a hidden spring creek nobody else knows about, with schools of giant steelhead sized fish slowly finning in clear, slightly tea colored currents.
Spring creeks are special places.