Fly Fishing Western Trout Streams

Foreword by Leigh H. Perkins  

Published in 2003, this book describes the fly fishing methods that have developed in the Rocky Mountain west over the last 40 years.  It includes information on reading water, and on dry fly, nymph and streamer fishing for both driftboat and wading anglers. There are hatch charts for western streams, and additional chapters on fly patterns, as well as information on conservation and fishing etiquette for western waters.

Chapter titles:  Western Trout (and Some Relatives); Western Trout Streams; Fly Tackle for the West; Western Casting and Line Control; Reading Western Streams; Western Methods for the Wading Angler; Western Methods for the Drift Boat Angler; Western Trout Stream Seasons; Western Hatches and Other Trout Food; Favorite Western Fly Patterns; Leftovers.

Price $18.95 (Cdn) plus GST / $16.95 (U.S.)

Fly-Fishing Western Trout Streams
An Excerpt from The Introduction

          The first western fly fishers were probably homesteaders who put a fly rod in the trunk when they moved west to settle a new land. They wouldn't have known what to expect, but what they found, along with dry air, plains grizzlies and elk, was an astonishingly beautiful and harsh landscape. They quickly learned that the West is a place where Mother Nature's grip is firm and compassionless. The extremes of winter weather and spring flooding were often more than just an inconvenience, and occasionally extracted a toll in livestock, homes, and human lives. 

           The former easterners would have met and been impressed by the strength and power of two forces birthed in the loins of the Rocky Mountains: The rivers and the wind. Those few fly fishers among the early homesteaders found new fish - cutthroats, rainbows and giant bull trout - that may have helped them overcome melancholic memories of their favorites from back home.

             Just where, when and for whom this first happened is available to speculation only, for fly fishing was surely a novelty during the early settling of the West. The earliest migrants had other things on their minds and precious little time for recreation.

             But later, in the early to mid-20th century, more people came west, seeking economic opportunity, and some of them liked to fly fish. Western fly fishing began to grow and take on an identity. It developed more or less simultaneously on several fronts, and each area had its godfather figure.  In Wyoming's Jackson Hole country, curmudgeonly Bob Carmichael was the guru of the Snake River with its fine-spotted cutthroats, while Dan Bailey held forth from behind the counter of his soon-to-be-famous fly shop in Livingston, Montana.

             Casting clubs in San Francisco and Pasadena fueled interest in fly fishing on the west coast, and farther north, on Canada's Vancouver Island, Roderick Haig-Brown began his quest to articulate the ethics and esthetics of the sport.  

             But perhaps the best perspective on western fly fishing at that time was provided, surprisingly, by an outdoor writer from New York named Ray Bergman. He wrote compelling stories of his experiences on western trout waters, particularly those inYellowstone Park, in the best-selling fishing book, Trout, first published in 1938. 

             The first fly fishing methods used in the west were the methods that worked in eastern North America.  They worked in a general way in the West, and they still do, but the differences between eastern and western watersheds and between eastern and western trout are substantial, and the development of distinctively western approaches to fly fishing was inevitable. Those differences and those approaches are the subject of this book.

             As fishing pressure increases, western trout are becoming every bit as skeptical and selective as their eastern counterparts. Versatility is now the major pre-requisite for consistent success on western streams. The skilled western fly fisher possesses the finely-tuned finesse and hatch-matching abilities demanded by eastern streams, plus the casting, wading, and water-reading skills that western rivers require. Throw in an experimental, yet pragmatic attitude and you have the type of angler that every western guide looks forward to taking out. The best of these fishermen are not only comfortable with everything from double streamer rigs and sinking-tip lines to midges and 7X tippets, but they know when to use which.

           Western trout streams are best characterized by the words abundant and diverse. I recently made a business trip through Montana and Wyoming. I kept track of the named trout streams that I crossed along the way. Beginning with the Sheep River a few blocks from my home in southern Alberta, and concluding with the North Platte in Wyoming a few days later, I counted over 70 streams, ranging from rivers large and famous to creeks small and unknown. This number does not count those that I came near, but didn’t cross, nor the ones I crossed but didn’t notice because I was dozing behind the wheel. I saw big freestone rivers, tailwaters, spring creeks, mountain brooks. I saw streams with dozens of anglers and streams that seemed abandoned by humans. The intent of this book is to identify and explain the methods required to fish the abundant and diverse trout streams of the West; to help experienced fly fishers who plan to, but have not yet fished there yet; and to help new fly fishers who live in the West.

What Folks Say!
Book Review by Chris Marshall, from The Canadian Fly Fisher

            There are a good number of fly-fishing writers who are skilled at communicating their extensive expertise and experience.  But there are few who also have the gift of communicating it with style.  Jim McLennan is one of this rare breed.  Drawing on his over thirty years of fishing and guiding in the Canadian and American West, his newest book, Fly-Fishing Western Trout Streams,is packed with information about western rivers, how to read them, how and when to fish them, and the species of fish which inhabit them.  But it is more than just a mine of information; it is also supercharged with Jim’s passion for these rivers and the landscape which creates and nurtures them.

            At the beginning of the second chapter, which introduces each of the various categories of river found in the western mountains, Jim takes us on a lyrical journey from the birth of a river in the April snow-melt at 9,000 feet, through a multitude of transformations over the miles, as it swells and flows into the prairie far to the east.  At the end of the journey he summarizes:

            “The connections that lie within the ecosystem of a trout stream are not simply the obvious liquid links between the upper and lower river, between tributaries and main stem, but also the more visceral links that reach in every other direction.  There are upward connections between sky, cloud, sun and wind that both remove and provide water.  There are downward connections with the earth, to springs and bedrock.  There are horizontal connections with plants and animals that live in and along the waterway, and contribute nutrients, shade, and stability to the river.  There are the inevitable outward connections with man and his increasing ability to both wound and heal.”

            This sets the tone for the whole book.  Practical information, on everything from how to cast in the teeth of a raging western wind to how to match specific hatches, is encapsulated in lyrical, passionate prose which fires the reader’s imagination and breathes life into the rivers of the West.

            The eleven chapters cover all the essentials of western trout streams: the fish, the categories of streams, tackle, casting, line control, reading the water, methods for wading and driftboating, seasons, hatches, fly patterns, guides, and conservation.  Most are well-illustrated with black and white line drawings and photographs, as well as two color plates of popular Western flies.  While Fly-Fishing Western Trout Streams is focused on the rivers of the Canadian and American West, it has much to offer fly fishers wherever they might pursue trout, for trout behave the same way in rivers no matter where those rivers flow.  For this reason alone, fly fishers should pick up a copy.  However, those who do will gain more than ideas on how to fish more effectively, they will also find an eloquent confirmation of all those things which lie at the very heart of fly-fishing.  The final paragraph of the epilogue says it all: