Ok, so I know that I am taking liberties in that Montana is officially Big Sky State, but Wyoming is right next door and Clark’s Fork flows from Wyoming into Montana so I’m claiming poetic license. And it sure is a big sky…a big country too. Around each bend, as we rumbled along in the company of Lance, our guide for the morning, a vista opened up as though cut and pasted straight out of a John Houston western and I expected The Duke himself to mosey on over ta see if we reckoned we could catch a mess a fish fer the bunkhouse. Best of all, there are no windfarms…

Ever since reading John Gierach’s “Trout Bum” I have wanted to fish in a wild, western, freestone river for wild, western, freestone rainbows. A holiday visit to Yellowstone Park with my youngest son, Scott, gave me just such an opportunity and I wasn’t going to pass it up. Scotty is not a lover of flyfishing but he did agree to come along if it was only for half a day. The flyshop in Cody fixed us up with waders and rods for a very reasonable fee and paired us up with our guide Lance, because all of the other guides were booked. Lance picked Clarke’s Fork solely because he’d fished it before once or twice, and that snippet of information told me all I needed to know: Lance was very probably the new kid in town. Still, it was holiday fishing and there was no pressure…if all there was was Lance then Lance it would have to be.

The road north from Cody is quite simply breathtaking. Come to that the road anywhere from or to Cody is simply breathtaking. Towering mountains with stunning geological features set in a high altitude desert, dry as dust, with sky blue rivers of Rocky Mountain meltwater burbling and gurgling through it all.

I’d read of course about the shy and wily rainbows and cut-throats; the huge prolific hatches of flies; the need for stealthy approaches and technical casting and I relished the prospect of pitting my rather limited skills against all of it.

Clarke’s Fork is about the size of the River Clyde where I used to fish as a boy so it wasn’t at all intimidating to me. Lance said it flowed into the Missouri but consultation with my World Atlas back home showed that it joins the Yellowstone River first and, indeed, its full name is Clarke’s Fork of the Yellowstone. Lance also assured me that there were “hundreds” of wild rainbows and browns in the stretch that we were set to fish so I was pretty pumped as we strung up the loaner 5 weight rods. He rigged the flies for us: a large stonefly imitation with a dropper attached to the bend of the hook (as opposed to how I do it attached to the line) with a goldhead nymph. The leader was therefore on the long side but I could handle it.

Scotty went off for a casting lesson with Lance and I stepped into a nice looking glide with instructions to cast along the edge of the slack water. I was slightly non-plussed at that as the edge of the slack water was only about 5 feet out from the bank – hardly a challenging cast. However I flicked it out and after a few flicks the stonefly shot under like a float (bobber) and I struck into a wee fishy. It wasn’t big at about 6 inches but it was my first and so I was a little pleased that we weren’t going to get skunked. Lance however was over-pleased which increased my fears that the lad was a newbie, but there’s nothing like an enthusiastic guide to keep you going. I guess.

And so the next hour passed with me flicking out a maximum of 20ft casts and watching the stonefly like a coarse fisherman watches his float. Every so often it would duck down and I’d strike into a small fish or miss one completely. Scotty had similar results but at least he caught a few little ones which kept him from total boredom. Then in one drift a nice rainbow launched out of the water and grabbed the stonefly itself. At last – a wild rainbow on a dry fly! It wasn’t big, Lance said 14”, but it did fight really spiritedly and with the majestic setting of the Rockies shimmering in the distance I felt I had finally stepped into Mr Gierach’s shoes.

And then that was that. We worked our way upstream for another 100yards and Lance finally said “I coulda swore we would have caught lots more in there. I suppose we could drive upstream and see if we can get into another place I have heard about…” That sealed it. Lance was out of ideas after one pool. We headed back to the car to have some water and a bite to eat. Once there, Lance had a look at a sign on the fence next to where we had parked and decided that we could go downstream onto the land beyond. Seemed like a plan as we were running out of time to move terribly far elsewhere. Anyway, the pools below did look pretty.

Although the river was the same size as The Clyde there the resemblance ends: it is boulder strewn, some huge ones at that, with deep channels swirling through them. The fish lie in and around these boulders and channels so it is more like fishing pocket water than classic dry fly. Long casts inevitably mean that the fly is dragged about through all of the different channels with differing current speeds. Oh I know, I only fished one small fork for a morning so I can’t for a moment say with any authority that this is what dry fly fishing is like in The Rockies, but it was a little different from what I imagined. Apart from the close-up and personal casting, I was disappointed not to see a full blown hatch of flies. For sure one or two drifted off hear and there, but not the blizzards I’d been used to on the Spey or Clyde at home. Maybe I just got it on an off day. Mind you, I did, as you would expect, stand beside every piece of water that I drove past and look for tell-tale activity but to be honest I rarely if ever saw a fish rise and nor did I see any hatches. But don’t quote me…

I left Scotty with Lance to potter about and went below them to fish back upstream. After about an hour the fish came back on the take and I took another couple of medium sized rainbows plus two whitefish, which are called trashfish by the locals, but which I quite liked to be honest.

Watch this space…I’m going back!