#troutbum

I wrote last summer about my visit to my old favorite honey hole on the Gardner river in Montana, and this year I decided to hike into the park from the North Gate in the Town of Gardiner. The old road through the park from Gardiner to Mammoth Village was destroyed by the flood of 2022, and the new road is way up on the hill above the river. The Old Stagecoach dirt road was quickly paved and is…

2024 was the ninth year that I’ve been a full-time RV’er and I have been looking to upgrade to a new model for the next ten years. My business has been good this last year, or rather you could say I worked more than I wanted. A happy result is that I’ve saved a substantial fund for a newer RV. The sad result is that I didn’t get to my favorite fly fishing waters until after the peak hatches had…

I’ve fished the Madison in Yellowstone 12 days total since September 22, and this is the first legit lake-run fish that I’ve caught. It has been so bright and sunny, some of the willows along the bank think it is spring and have started to bud! But what a fish, just look at that orange belly! It ate an olive Zirdle Bug at Bakers Hole in the afternoon. Olive Zirdle Bug with tungsten bead Two…

I’ve managed to break my weekly posting streak here at travelingwithtools.com, which started back around this time last October. I’d committed myself to a regular writing schedule (more or less) with the goal of making this website into something more useful. Well, two weeks ago, I set up on the Madison River at Bakers Hole campground to chase the Fall run fish, a pursuit that I’ve undertaken…

I left California on July 20 so I’m now about five weeks into this year’s western road trip. I’ve got a campsite booked at Baker’s Hole on the Madison River for the last week of September, to hunt for the traveling browns that move upriver, so about five more weeks until you can reliably expect it to snow at any point. I’ll have to decide then whether or not to stay deeper into…

I was really hoping to find a creek full of wild and colorful cutthroat trout, and to have a day perhaps like that one years ago on Long Draw in Colorado. I’d watched some YouTube videos of guys fishing small creeks up in the boonies of southwestern Wyoming, and I pinned a couple of rivers that looked promising. A cutthroat from Long Draw creek, Colorado. My first stop at the Ham’s Fork…

My spot on the Green River at the Slate Creek campground just didn’t look very fishy. A few smaller fish would rise erratically, eating bugs that remained unidentified. Sure, there were some trico spinners in the morning, and some tiny PMDs in the afternoon, but I never saw either bug on the water in numbers that would get fish to rise consistently. There was that one huge disturbance in the…