Excepting our tropical flats loving brethren, and those living full time in the South (say everything south of lower-third Colorado), those of us standing today on the cusp of another long, dark, cold winter know deep in our collective guts that winter-season fly fishing has arrived.
Numb fingers and toes, iced-up guides, shore and slush ice will more often intrude. Deepening snow will make river access more of an adventure; Jake and Shane are headed out this morning somewhere around Bozeman with several inches of new, wet snow down and more falling as I write.
Bring it on. At least for the northern Rockies flock of fishers we hang around with, winter offers a slice of the fly fishing world that few ever take the time to enjoy.
Winter’s heavy cold sweeps away the vast majority of fishers; the riverscape morphs into a world dominated by a mantle of snow and ice. Flows are lower concentrating fish and fishers; summer’s smoke belching fires are but a memory. And it’s quiet, almost startlingly so.
That said, the often foul transitional weather of late fall and spring is probably the fishiest of all.
The lion’s share of the very best fish days logged in my book happened when a cold rain / sleet / snow was falling in the neighborhood. Most of those days were spent chasing BWOs on favorite waters, though one most haunting day Jake and I caught a white miller caddis hatch on the Firehole on the tail of a late spring thunder-snow storm; we don’t talk about it much as no one would believe what happened for a couple of hours that day.
Like everyone else who’s been out chasing fish during the transition seasons we have our collection of weather stories. From dodging golf ball sized hail under a friend’s raft on the Missouri to a days so windy we blew upstream on the mainstem of the Flathead and the Snake under the Tetons to an ice-storm day on the South Fork of the Snake in Idaho.
And steelheaders understand the game all too well. Many make a pilgrimage to Forks on the Olympic Peninsula, a berg who’s average rainfall is a tad over 120 inches per year – with a mind-boggling 45 inches of rain coming in the steelhead intensive first quarter. Makes you wonder why they just don’t fish in wet suits and scuba gear?
There is something damned mesmerizing about the plink of rain or the tinkle of sleet on my rain jacket hood; if the snow’s falling hard enough you can hear it too…
Foul weather fly fishing rules.
Gear up and get out there.
