Back from West Yellowstone

[jeffnles1]

Hi all,
This is going to be a multi part post. My son, Daniel, and I just returned from West Yellowstone. We spent 7 days fishing and just being tourists.

We started the day floating the Madison with our guide Scott Clark out of Blue Ribbon Fly Shop. I can highly recommend both Scott and Blue Ribbon Fly Shop. We went to every fly shop in town the week we were there. We had fun and spent some money in all of them, but Blue Ribbon was by far the best shop. Not the largest but the most friendly and had the best fishing information of the bunch.

On our float trip, we caught a few of these:




And one of these:


I don't know why whitefish seem to get such a bad rap. This fellow put up an epic fight.

[jeffnles1]

The Madison River was running strong but quite fishable:


The water temp in the morning was in the mid 50's and warmed to 62 by about 4:00pm. It was slightly colored (not gin clear) but just about perfect for fishing.

While there, these guys started hatching:




We got a few strikes and one really big one hooked up on salmon fly drys but most of the action was on the big rubber leggs nymphs.

My son had a very large fish on that took off down stream like a bullet. Just as abruptly as it took off down stream, it came back at us and shot under the boat. I thought for sure my son's rod was going to break when the fish took him unexpectedly under the boat. Luckily (I guess) his 3X tippet broke off before his rod snapped.

[jeffnles1]

We Hiked up to Greebe Lake and caught one little rainbow. We were hoping for Grayling but that was not in the cards:


We spent a little time just hiking and exploring. We went to the old cemetary up on the hill behind the cabins at Mammouth:


We had a Snowball fight in the middle of July:


And pretty much just enjoyed some father / son time when driving around the park looking at the wildlife. We saw Golden Eagles, Bald Eagles, Ospry, buffalo, elk, a bear, countless whistle pigs, and enough airplane sized mosquitos to drain the blood from a horse.

[jeffnles1]

We hiked up a little ways on Blacktail Deer Creek and caught a few of these:



Then we caught an evening caddis hatch on the Firehole River:

[jeffnles1]

We fished up Nez Perce Creek right along some "thermal features" (Paul, a thermal feature is Nature's "water feature". Tell Linda you want to move to Yellowstone and nature will take care of the great pyramid building project )


While on Nez Perce, we caught several of these:

[jeffnles1]

This was a boys only trip. Because mom stayed at home, our room looked like this most of the time:




We were able to get away with doing this in the bathroom:

[jeffnles1]

While mom/wife was not around to set us straight, we ended up eating a lot of this:



And after a long day of fishing and eating junk food, we looked a lot like this:

[jeffnles1]

After lugging around all of this junk all day:


And wet wading boots, we had no choice but to try and dry them out for the next day's fun. What better way than to allow the hot dry Montana wind and sun take care of the drying task?

[jeffnles1]

We went to see the headwaters of the Henry's Fork:

[jeffnles1]

To help me remember this wonderful trip with my son, I just had to come home with a new one of these: