SHOWTIME ON THE BIGHORN : Anglers Say Fly Fishing Here Is Only Wade to Go

The sun surrenders the Big Sky country to dusk, and the river comes alive with blips and plops of brown trout rising for their supper. Mayflies skate downstream on the surface, their wings set upright like tiny little sails.

The game begins in earnest, man trying to fool fish with imitation insects. Rods bend. Here and there a whoop! is heard as an angler hooks a big one.

There doesn’t seem to be anything but big ones. It’s showtime on the Bighorn.

“This is incredible,” says Gardner Grout, waist-deep after arriving this day with a dozen members of the Pasadena Casting Club, serious fishermen all. “This is the greatest fishing I’ve ever seen.”

The game is fly fishing, and most who have fished the Bighorn say there is no better place in the continental United States to play it--not the Yellowstone, a little west of here; not the Madison, a little farther west, not any of the other wondrous waterways of the West.

For fly fishermen, a trip to the Bighorn is a pilgrimage. They come from coast to coast to wade in its waters, confirming their belief that fly fishing is the only pure fishing. After a day on the river, they wonder where it has been all their lives.

The fact is, it didn’t exist as a premier trout fishery until 1965 and only started to thrive in 1981. Before 1965, when the Yellowtail Dam above Fort Smith was completed, the Bighorn was at best an insignificant backwater, winding northeast out of Wyoming and through 45 miles of the Crow Indian reservation.

Paul Gordon, who works in the National Park Service visitor center at Fort Smith, said: “You weren’t going to bother fishing the Bighorn before the dam. In the spring it would come through like a freight train, and in the summer it would go dry.”

And the silty water, Gordon added, not only was “too thick to drink and too thin to plow, if you’ll excuse an old line,” but also was too warm for trout and fit only for carp and other species regarded by some anglers as trash fish.

All that changed when the dam came. The water cleared up, flowed constantly at a controlled level and, drawing off the bottom of the new Bighorn Lake, remained cold well into the blistering summers--producing an excellent habitat for trout.

It didn’t take long for the word to reach the fly fishermen working the nearby rivers, but in 1975 a new problem arose: The Crow Indians closed the river.

It wasn’t that the Indians wanted the fishing to themselves. They cared little for it and still don’t. Like the Sioux, who greeted Custer at the nearby Little Bighorn 112 years ago this month, they just didn’t like having intruders on their land.

But the fishermen weren’t about to give up. One, James Junior Finch, got himself arrested for trespassing on the reservation and, with the backing of the Billings Rod and Gun Club and the state of Montana, took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1981 ruled that the river was open to everybody.

“All the state wanted was the game management,” said Gordon, who sells handmade Indian trinkets for local Crow at the visitor center. “They didn’t want to own it. But the Supreme Court said, ‘You own the riverbed.’ ”

So the river was re-opened, amid some hard stares during a two-day standoff between unarmed Indians and federal marshals at the Two Leggin’s Bridge and a few intimidating shots fired near fishermen from the bluffs along the river.

As an uneasy peace settled, the river’s reputation grew. The Bighorn trout phenomenon was just an accident, an artificial river born of technology and turmoil to became a haven for guys casting bogus bugs.

The river has limited access by road and is best fished by boat. Non-Indians are not allowed to venture onto shore above the high-water mark, but few Indians are seen along the way.

Fort Smith is the base of operations. For a couple of years after the Civil War, it existed to offer protection to travelers on the Bozeman Trail. Now it’s a loose settlement of wood-frame tackle shops and stores with covered porches for lounging.

One is the Bighorn Angler, owned by outfitter Mike Brooks and his wife Holly.

She said, cheerfully: “When we lived in Denver, I thought I’d married a guy who went to work in a three-piece suit. Next thing I knew, here we were.”

Most anglers and guides use the rocker-shaped, double-ended McKenzie dories that must be controlled by oars in their drift downstream. In the first 13 miles, which form the heart of the river, motors and live bait are not allowed--unless you’re an Indian.

Ken Knapp, an outdoor writer who lives in nearby Sheridan, Wyo., has fished it often. After those 13 miles, he said, the fishing is still good but “the quality of the experience drops off.”

Handling the boats is not difficult because the flow is not swift and there is only one 200-yard stretch of mild rapids on the river.

The last light of day lingers until late evening, so fishermen eat late around the Bighorn, after the fish have fed. The few local non-Indian residents have their own favorite spots. Jack Sonnhalter, who used to live in Southern California, has led a few visitors to one of his.

A great blue heron with a 7-foot wingspan cruises the river. A pair of Canadian geese honk as they fly home. Muskrats go about their business, keeping their distance.

Other fishermen float by. A few anchor their boats and, wader clad, get out to try promising spots, especially when they notice fish rising to a hatch of insects.

“If I have a fish on the line when some other fishermen are going by, I’ll just drop my pole down and pretend nothing is happening,” Sonnhalter says.

He notes that the larger fish “feed in rhythm,” rising to scoop mayflies off the surface, then submerging and rising again in sequences of 12-to-15 seconds.

“The idea is to time your cast 3 or 4 seconds ahead of his next rise,” Sonnhalter says. “When you hit it, that’s the most exciting thing that can happen.”

Sonnhalter offers Bill Smith of the Pasadena group an elk hair caddis from his pocket.

“We’ll try to make ‘em think it’s July,” Sonnhalter says.

On his second or third cast, Smith has a strike.

Sonnhalter was the principal of Arcadia High School when he started coming to the Bighorn in 1981. His wife Terry was the boys’ and girls’ tennis coach.

Three years ago, they decided to retire and move here permanently. Now they offer lodging and meals to small groups. Already, their living room is decorated with mounted fish, ducks, a Canada goose and a pheasant, preening itself on the coffee table.

“The first winter was the worst they’d had here in years,” Sonn- halter said. “The average temperature was 20 below, and some days it was 40 below.

“Afterward, I asked Terry, ‘Well, what do you think?’ We’d only rented at first, so we could have gone back.”

Terry: “I said, ‘No way.’ I haven’t been back since we left. Our friends come up here to see us.”

Jack: “Every once in a while I’ll go to the Madison or some other place to fish--and wonder why.”

Like most locals, Sonnhalter has a fly-tying table set up in his house. He tells of the anxiety of finishing one, then rushing down to the river to see if it works.

“About 10% of them do,” he said.

But the ones that do . . .

Dan Reed, organizer of the Pasadena exhibition, asked if could have one of Sonnhalter’s special flies, or borrow it to copy.

Sonnhalter replied, thoughtfully, “Probably not.”

The Bighorn is no longer a secret. Knapp, for one, has written about it in several publications. On this day he is serving as a guide for two of Pasadena’s experts, Bob Brooks and Bob Moore.

“You guys can start fishing right now if you want,” Knapp says after rowing his new fiberglass dory out to midstream near the afterbay spillway a couple of miles below the dam.

As they drift, Brooks tries a dry fly, Moore uses a nymph below the surface.

“This 13-mile stretch is probably the finest fly fishing in the U.S., outside Alaska,” Knapp said.

Calculations of the fish population from the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks’ fish-counting devices along the shore are from 7,000 to 9,000 a mile, contrasted with about 2,000 for the Madison.

Brooks and Moore are not yet convinced, but soon will be.

“One of the nice features of this river is its consistency,” Knapp continues. “Most western rivers have feeder streams coming into them to muddy them up. Also, with the water coming off the bottom of the lake, it’s very cold most of the year.”

So cold in May--40 degrees--that even in waders and wading boots, anglers’ feet often go numb if they stand around too long. But the better the fishing, the less they worry about it.

The daily limit is five fish, only one of which may be 18 inches or longer--common size on the Bighorn where experts say the browns run slightly bigger than on the Madison. Rainbows, outnumbered 9 to 1 by the browns, must be released.

To most anglers, the limit is irrelevant because, as on most fly streams, catch and release is the custom. There are a few spin fishers, who may use artificial lures, but the vast majority are fly fishers using very small flies with barbless hooks--the ultimate reach, they reason, in making it a sporting proposition.

Later, estimates are that in parts of five days, the Pasadena dozen caught up to 600 fish. They went home with nothing at all to show for it, except a few hasty photos. Every fish was released to be caught again.

“Fly fishermen are also conservationists,” Knapp says. “They don’t take what they don’t want to eat.”

Bob Moore makes fun of the opposite fishing philosophy: “ ‘Hook ‘em and cook ‘em!’ They call us the elitists because we don’t believe in keeping fish. Others may think fishing is for catching fish to eat. We think fishing is for the fun of catching.”

Not one night at the Sonnhalters’ do they dine on trout.

Grout says that other anglers sometimes accuse fly fishers of just “ripping lips” in their practice of repeatedly catching and releasing the same fish.

“They’re tired of catching fish with worn-out lips,” Brooks says.

Smith says, “Catching your limit is not our goal.”

Reed: “I saw one guy who caught his limit and cleaned ‘em right there in the stream. But he wasn’t a fly fisherman.”

Moore: “There are fly fishermen and there are fly fishermen.”

Moore may be the most avid of those from Pasadena. He makes a living repairing microscopes but really lives for fly fishing. At home most evenings, while his wife watches television in one room, Moore is in another, tying flies.

“To most fishermen, fishing is a hobby,” he says. “It’s all I do or think about.”

Some fly fishers are so scientific that they will use a fish “stomach pump,” which resembles a turkey baster, to find out what insects the fish are eating. The fish is then returned to the water, no doubt very hungry.

Moore doesn’t go that far.

“I bought one of those, but I couldn’t bring myself to use it,” he says.

On the Bighorn, there are so many fish that it’s not really necessary.

Guide Gael Larr has worked the other famous rivers and says: “This is better (because of) the concentration of fish, not as many fishermen and it’s easier to float. (Also,) the only reason to come here is to fish, so we get a more serious type of fisherman.”

Every day is a good day on the Bighorn. Some are just better than others.

Says Larr: “If I could control the conditions, the temperature would be 65 degrees every day, with a slight overcast (so the sun’s glare won’t intimidate the browns from rising), or even a little drizzle (so the insects, their wings wet, will stick to the surface).”

The Pasadenans, though, will take it any time, any way they can get it.

“This river will spoil you for anyplace else,” Brooks says.

Moore agrees. “This is like fishing for the first time all over again,” he says.