Having fished the run earlier in the day with success, we approached the head of the run casually with our main focus on the holding water below. The riffle was a wide sweeping 75 yards of shin-deep water with a narrow slot of knee-deep water with some coloration changes on the bottom that gave the illusion of being deeper than it really was.

The Yellowstone River is one of the legendary trout streams of the west and over the years it has produced some very nice Brown Trout during the fall. As by way of definition the time period in question, it runs from approximately mid-September to Late October. The best fishing times may vary slightly from year to year based on general over-all weather cycles. In 2018 the fall was more normal, or what we in Montana consider normal. The weather began to cool and the water temperatures began to drop, The Brown Trout leave their normal holding lies and begin to gather in the pool to begin their annual movement to their spawning grounds. In 2018 this cooler water temperatures appeared in mid-September.

Those were halcyon days; summer days without end, no cares or concerns beyond whether or not a red worm threaded on a size 10 hook could be used to fool the brook trout living under the undercut bank. There was a sense of tremendous importance as to exactly how the worm was threaded on the hook and precisely how many split shot sinkers were necessary to get the worm to bounce along the bottom into the darkness under the bank. Once the worm was bouncing along the bottom it was necessary to watch the line with great intensity, watching for any momentary hesitation in the drift which could indicate something had taken the bait. At that moment, suspended between the present and the future, time did not seem to exist.

The rain had has slowed down enough that I was able to get to one of my favorite ponds. I lost my normal access and now I must haul the canoe about 0.5 miles to get to the pond.

It has been a weird year for fishing here. We had some very hot weather in the end of May and then it rained enough I thought there was another flood coming.