Those living in more Southern regions of the country (for that matter you could say those living nearer the Tropic of Cancer) simply cannot fathom the joy that long summer days bring to those of us anchored in the northern tier.
After grinding through December days with less than eight hours of daylight in the Flathead (Northwest Montana) the longest summer days made you want to rise with the sun (before 5 AM) and keep playing outside until you couldn’t see, which pushed you to about 11 PM this time of year.
When I was chained to an office running my business in Kalispell we had a partners’ meeting every Friday morning at 6 AM; during June there would be bright, direct light shining in the windows. It’s damned hard to make executive type decisions that early anyway, but when you’re wondering if the hatch de jour is coming off just then on the Middle Fork of the Flathead it’s nigh on impossible to keep your head in the game.
That said, it’s always been a come-hell-or-high-water target to be on the water for the June solstice.
Over the years one of my earliest fly fishing mentors and I used to make a run to the Green River below Flaming Gorge every solstice. The BWOs were long gone, but there were yellow sallies, PMDs, little black caddis, Golden Stones, a couple of sedges to match and more.
In the spirit of “hey, hold my beer and watch this” we even floated and fished the A Section from the dam to Little Hole three times in the same solstice day one June just because it was there and dammit, it needed to be done. We had enough guys to work the shuttles perfectly and I rowed everybody two runs each that day.
Another solstice found us camping outside of Jackson with friends (way back in the pre-children days); a couple of us (I’m ashamed now to say) hopped a posted fence and fished a little feeder stream just above it’s confluence with the Snake. It was chock full of little tan cased caddis, and as soon as the sun hit the water early that morning we caught little rainbows on swung chamois caddis like men possessed.
The biggest fish surely didn’t top 12 inches, though we giggled and guffawed for the next two hours, bringing more fish to hand than I’ve ever done or seen in my life in that short a time frame. I never speak (or write) the number because nobody would believe it. Then like clockwork it stopped and the day rolled into the history books before 930 AM.
I still get an email at least once a year from my partner in crime that morning asking “damn, do you remember that day in Jackson?” Yep, JL, I sure as hell do.
Probably my most memorable solstice run came a few years ago with Jake on the Firehole; we’d wandered to the Park to fish the afternoon and evening despite the call for thunderstorms. Sure enough it rained torrents, hailed, even spat slushy snow as we drove 191 from Bozeman to West, though there were big enough breaks in the weather we had shots at the upper Gibbon and then the Firehole.
We hit the Firehole (in hindsight) about an hour before the white miller caddis began to roll over, early enough that swung pre-emergent caddis attracted more attention from bigger fish (in retrospect must have been a cooler spring as the bigger fish hadn’t moved out yet) than we’d ever seen (or have seen since). Damn that was fun.
Here’s to your next solstice trip, it’s never to early to start planning next year’s today. Anybody have a good one this past weekend?
