From The Field: Fly Fishing Montana's Rocky Mountain Front
By Greg Thomas
It seemed like the perfect equation. Hardly any wind. Overcast skies. And temperatures reaching toward the mid-50s. On Montana’s wind-blasted Rocky Mountain Front, you’ll take that forecast every time you can get it.
And it didn’t hurt that I’d received a text from Fred Telleen, who manages The Trout Shop in Craig, Montana, which said, “If the weather doesn’t change, we should meet up. There are more fish cruising the shorelines. Not a ton, but some really nice ones. It should be peaking this coming week.”
That’s why I had the truck pointed east Monday morning, headed up the Blackfoot corridor and on over the pass to those golden plains. I’d fished some of the region’s reservoirs a couple weeks earlier and managed a few solid rainbows, but not in numbers I’d hoped for. The winds had been severe, the water was muddied, and it seemed like the area’s oversized rainbows hadn’t quite made a commitment to the shallows. But that was two weeks ago and this was now, a short window to get some licks in on fish that average between four and five pounds. They aren’t, necessarily, the prettiest things in the world, but they often cruise the shorelines in marauding packs, and they’ll eat the hell out of a Balanced Leech. In the trout world, size trumps beauty any day of the week.
Telleen and I met up on rocky shoreline and compared flies, then waded in and started working the banks, casting at 45-degree angles, hoping to find those cruisers. And at first everything seemed right. Telleen hooked and landed a pair of five-pounders, and he was sure we would continue bumping into little wads of fish if we kept moving. But, over the course of a few hours something became clear: most of the fish had come and gone, or maybe they were never there in the first place.
I was leaning towad the former because the ice went off the reservoirs early this year and the fish may have been on the banks by early March. And the last time I’d visited, there was this one guy, who posted up on a particular point, and stuck one fish after the other . . . all day long. I watched, and watched, and waited and waited and waited, ready to fill in as soon as he called it quits. But I never saw him leave and thought, That’s where I’ll be next time. And that’s exactly where Tellen caught his first two fish. But there was no one-fish-after-the other experience for us. What we saw were a few cruisers, mostly singles, sometimes doubles, but very few compared to past years. Occasionally we’d see someone across the lake, knee-deep in the water with a landing net, but nobody was railing ‘em. Telleen finally said, “Yea, it’s weird. Maybe there are just so few fish left in the reservoir that the ones we’re seeing are all there is.” And maybe, I said, every fish in the lake was swimming right off that guy’s boot-tips last time I was here.
There was another fear. Last year I interviewed Katie Vivian, a fish biologist for Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, and she’d described some dire circumstances along the Front, due to a lack of water and overwintering pools that could barely sustain fisheries. In fact, Bynum Reservoir, a popular rainbow trout fishery near Choteau, had pretty much gone dry. The fishery failed and the fish that were left were eaten by birds and grizzly bears.
All of the reservoirs, she said, had nearly reached “dead-pool” levels and the outlook wasn’t good—2025 was shaping up to be a very challenging water year with yet another winter and spring of low snowpack. And, unfortunately, winter 2026 was worse; I live in Missoula, and I think I used the snow shovel twice this year; greenup in our area began in early March, about a month and a half before it should have. Vivian promised that trout numbers all along the Rocky Mountain Front would likely decline over the next few years. And that may have been exactly what Telleen and I experienced.
Still, Telleen caught a fish here and there, and I continued to be snakebit, totally shunned by whatever trout were out there. I tried shallow with leeches. I tried deep under an indicator. I cast at 45s. I cast at 90s. I kept moving. Sometimes I stayed put, daring the fish to swim to me. I tried pink, beadhead nymphs. I went Bam-Bam leech with a pink head. I went purple rabbbit-strip leech with a black bead head. To no avail. I did, however, spend a significant amount of time shooting scenics and documenting Telleen’s triumphs. In the end, there was nothing to really complain about. Fred and I enjoyed a beautiful day with swans whistling overhead and those rugged mountains parading in front.
Was the fishing as good as previous years? Probably not. Did we get some fish? Fred kind of got into them and after I'd headed back to Missoula Monday evening, he nailed two more, bringing his total to 10. He'd fished about six hours, averaging a fish or two per hour. They rangaed between five and eight pounds. Very steelhead-esque. Any of us would eagerly take those numbers on a metalhead stream. Fred's advice if you head to the Front or any lakes or reservoirs near where you live? Be determined, put in lots of casts, and you'll eventually connect.
I’m not saying I have all the answers on lake fishing along the Front, or anywhere else for that matter, but it’s safe to say that fishing earlier this year may have been the ticket. And if you haven’t fished yet, you best get on it.
That was Vivian’s advice last year when she told me, “If you are going to get out there, hit it early, especially when the ice comes off and before surface temperatures rise. April and May are usually good but by July it starts going downhill pretty fast.”
This year, downhill may have already begun.
Who knows, I may get back up to the Front for one more standoff, staying focussed, firing off those casts. Or I may just wait for next year and pray for heavy snowpack this coming winter. That’s all those lakes and reservoirs need. Vivian summed it up like this: “The good news is that the prairie ecosystem is highly productive. When we get water and we use the hatchery system to get fish back in, they'll grow fast and we'll see it all bounce back quickly.”