This trip has been in the works (at least in my brain) for almost two years. A few years back my son and I started fishing some roadless stretches of our new home water and we fell in love with it. That was also about the time I got exposed to backpack hunting. It kicked off a phase of my life where spending time in remote places was all I could think about. I was and still am looking for any excuse to put on a pack and disappear for a week. After our second trip up there I started poking around on OnX to see how much roadless or remote fishing there was available on our new home river. Based on the maps it looked like there was around Twenty five to twenty seven miles of river that was either totally roadless or very little road access. I had no idea how much of it held fish but I really wanted to find out and I didn't want to piece it together one stretch at a time over three or four summers...I wanted to fish it all in one shot.
Over the course of the next few months I started asking anyone who had spent a lot of time up there, if they had ever fished the entire length in one trip or had they ever heard of anyone doing it. The consensus amongst the people I checked with was, they had never considered it themselves, never heard of anyone doing it, and most asked why I would want to. Many warned me that the trail leaves the river for long sections or that the trail was really high above the river and some of the upper sections didn’t have a trail at all. Trails, or lack of trails, was totally irrelevant to me. I had no intention of using any trails. My plan was always to stay in the river and fish it all. Lots of folks questioned wether or not you could walk/wade/fish effectively with a pack the size that would be required for a six day trip. I had already decided I was going to do this trip. The more people implied I was crazy, the more excited I became. All I needed was a partner for this trip and I knew who I wanted.
I called my son in the fall of last year and laid out the plan. It took him five seconds to say yes. All we had left was to find the time in his schedule. He’s getting married in early July and moving to Arizona in early August. We had a two week window to fit it in but that window would have been my first choice anyway so we chose June 2nd as our launch date! One of the fun parts of a big trip is the discussion and planning in the months leading up to the actual trip. My son and I were talking weekly about our plan, it was awesome. I had a couple of big hunting trips this spring and many days I found myself sitting behind my glass dreaming of this trip when I should have been focused on bears.
Finally June 1st arrives, the day we shuttle a rig and actually find out if all of the planning has a shot of working. I was pretty anxious as we left for the three hour drive. The plan was to leave a rig as close as we could to our intended ending point. It looked like we could get a rig within a mile or two of that spot but neither of us had ever been up there and maps can be wrong. There were a few things things that could have derailed the plan and the big one was getting a rig close to the end point. We were going to be dropped off at the launch point on Monday morning so there wasn’t any rig to come back to. We had to get to the end and there had to be a vehicle there when we arrived.
We made our way to the pin I dropped on OnX with zero problems! One stress relieved. On Saturday night I decided I would stash a cooler with some sausage, tortillas and a stick of butter at one of the two places the road crossed the river. I assumed we would arrive there late day two or early day three and something fresh with high calories might be nice. I hate freeze dried meals! On the way back we stopped at that spot and found a good hiding place for the small Yeti. All we had left to do was to was get home, double check packs and attempt to sleep. The stoke level was on 100.
There was one more variable to this trip that I had never dealt with and that was a cinematographer. My son and I had planned on documenting this trip ourselves. We have the equipment to do it and my son is a really good film editor but during the planning process I decided that I didn’t want to fuss with that part. There is a chance we won’t get to do something like this for quite a while and I really wanted to focus on fishing with my boy. There were already some new variables to deal with and I didn’t want more but I wanted our experience captured. I had met Jeff a year ago when I was a guest on a podcast that he filmed. The podcast is hosted by a good friend so I contacted him about hiring Jeff when I had the idea of contracting the filming. Jeff’s work is awesome, he has filmed lots of hunts in brutal conditions and he spent some years as a fishing guide in Bozeman so he seemed like the right guy for this kind of trip. He turned out to be the perfect guy for us!
Over the course of the next few months I started asking anyone who had spent a lot of time up there, if they had ever fished the entire length in one trip or had they ever heard of anyone doing it. The consensus amongst the people I checked with was, they had never considered it themselves, never heard of anyone doing it, and most asked why I would want to. Many warned me that the trail leaves the river for long sections or that the trail was really high above the river and some of the upper sections didn’t have a trail at all. Trails, or lack of trails, was totally irrelevant to me. I had no intention of using any trails. My plan was always to stay in the river and fish it all. Lots of folks questioned wether or not you could walk/wade/fish effectively with a pack the size that would be required for a six day trip. I had already decided I was going to do this trip. The more people implied I was crazy, the more excited I became. All I needed was a partner for this trip and I knew who I wanted.
I called my son in the fall of last year and laid out the plan. It took him five seconds to say yes. All we had left was to find the time in his schedule. He’s getting married in early July and moving to Arizona in early August. We had a two week window to fit it in but that window would have been my first choice anyway so we chose June 2nd as our launch date! One of the fun parts of a big trip is the discussion and planning in the months leading up to the actual trip. My son and I were talking weekly about our plan, it was awesome. I had a couple of big hunting trips this spring and many days I found myself sitting behind my glass dreaming of this trip when I should have been focused on bears.
Finally June 1st arrives, the day we shuttle a rig and actually find out if all of the planning has a shot of working. I was pretty anxious as we left for the three hour drive. The plan was to leave a rig as close as we could to our intended ending point. It looked like we could get a rig within a mile or two of that spot but neither of us had ever been up there and maps can be wrong. There were a few things things that could have derailed the plan and the big one was getting a rig close to the end point. We were going to be dropped off at the launch point on Monday morning so there wasn’t any rig to come back to. We had to get to the end and there had to be a vehicle there when we arrived.
We made our way to the pin I dropped on OnX with zero problems! One stress relieved. On Saturday night I decided I would stash a cooler with some sausage, tortillas and a stick of butter at one of the two places the road crossed the river. I assumed we would arrive there late day two or early day three and something fresh with high calories might be nice. I hate freeze dried meals! On the way back we stopped at that spot and found a good hiding place for the small Yeti. All we had left to do was to was get home, double check packs and attempt to sleep. The stoke level was on 100.
There was one more variable to this trip that I had never dealt with and that was a cinematographer. My son and I had planned on documenting this trip ourselves. We have the equipment to do it and my son is a really good film editor but during the planning process I decided that I didn’t want to fuss with that part. There is a chance we won’t get to do something like this for quite a while and I really wanted to focus on fishing with my boy. There were already some new variables to deal with and I didn’t want more but I wanted our experience captured. I had met Jeff a year ago when I was a guest on a podcast that he filmed. The podcast is hosted by a good friend so I contacted him about hiring Jeff when I had the idea of contracting the filming. Jeff’s work is awesome, he has filmed lots of hunts in brutal conditions and he spent some years as a fishing guide in Bozeman so he seemed like the right guy for this kind of trip. He turned out to be the perfect guy for us!
