Great Expectations

It's not often that the third Saturday in May finds me highly optimistic about fly fishing in Montana, but May 21, 2011 was different. The third Saturday of the month is opening day of the state's general fishing season, it's also a date that typically finds the state's streams and rivers swollen with snowmelt.

My optimism for this year's opening day was twofold: runoff was lagging behind schedule, and a friend and I had plans to fish a mysterious little creek in a high elevation mountain valley. The fishery has intrigued me over the years, it's a stream that piques my curiosity more so than any other in Montana. The location is not well known and is shrouded in secrecy. A combination of hearsay and first hand experiences (failures) have taught me that timing is everything on this stream. Time it right and you might catch the biggest cutthroat of your life, mistime it and you'll be left wondering what could have been.

With a week of cool weather preceding this year's opener, we hoped that stream flows would be dropping and clearing, creating ideal fishing conditions. Above all else, we hoped that the creek's phantom cutthroat would be present.

Opening morning found us with miles of stream all to our lonesome, save for the grizzlies and moose that roamed the dense streamside willows. The creek wasn't gin clear, but it had enough visibility to provide us with a bit of confidence as we worked the water with big streamers.

The cutthroat were there, they were big, they were plentiful and they were not pushovers - everything we could have hoped for. Between the two of us we landed just three cutts, but it was enough - the legend lives on.