FISHING not always equate angling excellence with a full cooler of dead fish. I take great pleasure in a cooler full of wellbled chrome or many coolers of tuna or halibut, lingcod and rockfish. But not all fish are best enjoyed with tartar sauce or other condiments. Some of my fondest memories involve watching wild fish slip back into mountain streams and creeks in the West’s wildest places.
That’s particularly true of times spent fishing dry flies, streamers and nymphs in the Bitterroot Mountains of North Idaho. Home to zero or at most the occasional nomadic grizzly bears and a place to enjoy restful nights in between days of tromping up trails and down rivers, memories of North Idaho fly fishing flood into my mind and make me long for the simpler times when I didn’t own 75 rods for
salmon, steelhead, bass, bottomfish, walleye, panfish and even tuna. For years my essentials fit into a vest or a small backpack: a couple of fly reels with spools of floating, sinktip and sinking lines; a few boxes of reliable fly patterns; leaders and spools of tippet; hemostats, line nippers and fly floatant; and a survival kit and a can or two of bear spray and bug spray each. These essentials – along with some calories and a water purifier or a good collection of water bottles – was all I needed to have the grandest of time catching and usually releasing cutthroat, rainbow, brook and brown trout, and the occasional bull trout.
YOU TOO CAN enjoy these simple-but-
A single fly box stuffed with the right patterns is all a person needs to do well in North Idaho’s cutthroat streams. Mike Beard of Orvis Northwest Outfitters (nwoutfitters.com) can get you stocked up on what you need. (PAUL ISHII) 120 Northwest Sportsman
JUNE 2022 | nwsportsmanmag.com
great times in the mountains of North Idaho – or perhaps mountains much closer to home – and you can outfit yourself for a relatively small expenditure of cash compared to the monstrosity of expensive gear I own to chase fish with advanced terminal tackle from an expensive fishing sled that I need a V8 to haul. A 5- or 6-weight flyrod, a reel with a spare spool or two, some fly line backing, a couple/few types of fly line, an assortment of leaders and tippets and flies, a pair of hemostats and nippers, and some fly floatant and maybe some strike indicators (think tiny bobbers) is about all that is needed to get in the game during summertime. Of course there is other gear I’d recommend – felt-soled wading boots especially (four-wheel-drive for your feet in streams), breathable waders, a small catch-and-release net and perhaps a small assortment of other stuff. But the point is, it’s not tough to outfit yourself for a great time. I cringe to bring up a film that is all-too-often referenced in fly fishing articles, A River Runs Through It, but I probably watched it 50 times in my younger years. Many Montanans and other locals in the Rockies credit its release with releasing hordes of cityslicker anglers on the landscape and the rivers that, well, run through
