Posts by Anthony VonRuden

The goose is getting fat Winter is here for now — our first real snow filling up the driftboats guides haven’t put away yet.  In addition to watching our snowpack pile up for 2018, another pleasant endeavor is sitting with a bowl of elk stew and paging through the photo album from the fall. It’s […]

Missoula Fishing Report Finally, fall is here, and we can all exhale (and inhale too).  After some good cold rains, the forest fire smoke has all but disappeared–and the mayflies have begun to pop.  Tricos, BWOs, Mahoganies, and tiny psuedos have blanketed the Clark Fork, ‘Root, and Blackfoot over the past several days. That’s right, the real reasons […]

Missoula Fishing Report After a long, hot August full of fire-smoke and threat, the first cool September morning feels about perfect. You need a fleece out there at the boat ramp in the morning, and maybe even a knit cap for an hour or so until the sun crests the trees. If you’re wet wading, […]

  The spruce moth fishing on the upper drainages has been good enough, steady enough, that we haven’t been calling on too many wild card floats. But we took a lark the other day and called the shuttle guy, who told us that the otherwise well-trafficked SUCH-AND-SUCH to SO-AND-SO hadn’t been floated in over two weeks–and, man, […]

Summer Fly Fishing in Missoula Late July is always an interesting fishing window around Missoula. Some years a long-lasting PMD and golden game carries us through, while other years our spruce moths and hoppers arrive early, providing big meals for dry-fly hungry trout. This year seems to be serving up some mixture of the above — good dry […]

  It’s amazing how fast the Salmonflies burn off the Blackfoot and the color turns from olive to deep blue on the lower Clark Fork — suddenly it’s mid-summer and the fishing has been stellar. Even over the scorching weekend we were able to put on the water early and enjoy bent rods from ramp […]

  After some far better early June fishing than we’d expected, a colossal rainstorm bumped our waters back over their original peak and, after staring at flow charts for a couple of days, we spent a week on the Missouri and West Fork. The audibles were more than serviceable (see pics below) but it took the […]

  Most years the Salmonflies start on Rock Creek’s lower end on Memorial Day weekend with flows around 1600 CFS. The bugs have kept with the calendar this year, where they’re hatching in fair numbers and mating flights have started on warm afternoons. What else will keep to the chalk? Flow wise, the answer is […]

  Missoula Fly Fishing — Runoff Report If you’re a relative newcomer to Western Montana, you may be wondering what just happened to our rivers and when they’ll be fishable again.  If so, keep wondering — you’ll have at least a few weeks to figure it out. While the past couple of runoffs have subsided […]

  By all accounts, it’s been one of the cooler springs in recent memory — but that’s set to change by the end of the week. Thursday’s temps are predicted in the high seventies, and Friday’s too. Yes, that should kick the final spring hatches — second-wave skwallas and caddis — into gear, but it […]