Madison River, Montana

The first time I floated the Madison River, I shared a car ride with Dick Cheney. I was working for the US Forest Service, cutting trails and building log bridges up in the surrounding mountains of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. Cheney was an oil executive at the time, still several years away from the Oval Office. Even so it was an unlikely encounter. We were momentarily whisked into the same universe in our common pursuit of Montana’s most famous fishing event: the Madison’s salmon fly hatch.

As we drove the long ribbon of US 287 south of the cow town of Ennis, along the high grassy bluffs above the river, I ventured a hello to Cheney (who was packed in with two other fly fishermen in the back of his guide’s battered SUV). The future Vice President nodded slightly in my direction, gave his signature scowl and stared out the window.
Cheney’s guide had picked me up hitching back to Lyons Bridge. I had been dropping off a car so that it would be awaiting my friend Mark and I when we finished our float down the river. It was second nature for the guide to give me a lift, even if he was also ferrying an oil executive. This is the way the Madison works. It’s truly democratic, one of the few places in the world where an outdoor bum like me can hop a ride in a car with one of the world’s most powerful men.

I didn’t come to Montana to fish. I came to ski deep, unmolested powder hiking up the ridge of Bozeman’s Bridger Bowl. But I soon learned that in the Rockies, winter’s ski bums turn into summer’s trout bums. It makes sense really: The snowpack deep in the mountains is what feeds the streams come spring. And there’s the same sense of flow and timing and single-minded concentration on the movement whether you’re dropping into a telemark turn or casting a fly rod. So during the long winter nights of my first Montana ski season, I learned to tie flies.

In May, after Bridger Bowl had closed and the backcountry was filled with wet, sloughy snow, I was casting like an absolute novice on a stretch of the river near Ennis, pulling ratty woolly buggers across riffles that held no fish. And then the Madison’s other famed hatch, the Mother’s Day caddis, bloomed around me: Bugs filled the air like snow flurries; they landed on my jacket, in my mouth, flitted on the surface of the river. And right by the bank, just 20 feet away from me, I could see (and almost hear) the slurp of a fish rising to feed on them. I had never caught a fish on one of my own flies. It seemed impossible.

My hands shook as I tied on this fly of my own creation, an elk hair caddis, a tuft of spiky fur wrapped around a hook. I kept thinking the fish would stop feeding or spook, that the universe was about to torture me. But I rolled out a cast that, if not artistic, was at least adequate. For a moment, my elk hair caddis sat on the water’s surface, surrounded by flittering live caddis. I was still. Then the brown pounced. Slowly, I followed the hooked fish downstream, my rod bent, until I reeled it in. Then, I reached down and held a 20-inch brown trout, a beautiful creature of muscles and gills and bare instinct, just long enough to remove the hook—and returned it to the river. It was then that the Madison became part of me.

I’m not the only one. You can’t call yourself a fly angler and not want to fish this river (unless you’re a Montana native, in which case you’re apt to prefer waters less-know by out-of-staters). There’s a reason so many stockbrokers’ daughters are named Madison, and it’s not for the avenue in New York. Cheney (who is rumored to prefer his home state of Wyoming’s Snake River) isn’t the only bigwig you’ll drift by here. But heads of state aren’t the river’s sole addicts. Trout bums camp in their pick-up beds here. Retirees are reborn. The Madison has come to symbolize the classic, big Western trout stream, and it always finds some way to provide for disciples like me.

Something of the Madison’s egalitarian nature carries over to the river’s hub town of Ennis too. In the Claim Jumper bar, you’re just as likely to rub elbows with Hollywood actors (action star Steven Segal, who once owned a ranch on the Madison, filmed a movie here, although the locals couldn’t wait till he took his ponytail back to La-La Land) as you are with a dead drunk sheepherder (who’s usually better company). Fly fishing is the town’s lifeblood: There’s even a larger-than-life kitch-y metal statue of a flyfisherman in the center of town. And whether you’re a Rhodes scholar or a tow-truck driver, people here judge you by the art of your cast.

The Madison begins its life in Yellowstone National Park at the junction of the Gibbon and Firehole rivers, born from the volcanic depths of the park’s state-sized caldera. From there it runs into Montana and manmade Hebgen Lake and then on to Earthquake Lake, a chilling, dead tree-choked body of water created when a whole mountainside slid into the river during an earthquake in 1959. But it’s the next stretch of the river, the so-called “50-mile Riffle” between Earthquake Lake and Ennis Lake that is such stuff as fly fishing dreams are made on: Here the river runs fast through the big wide benches and ranchland of the valley, flanked by the seismically upthrust peaks of the Madison Range to the east and the rumpled Gravellys and their ancient sea-bottom fossils to the west. This is the legendary Madison—which truly is a giant riffle, a wide stream broken, but not buffeted, by underwater rocks that create perfect holding spots for feeding trout, and some of the highest catch rates in the state.

The rainbow trout of the Madison River serve as the wild fish management model for the entire US.

There is, of course, a logical reason why the river is so productive: It was made that way. In the late 60s a fisheries biologist named Dick Vincent theorized that the hatchery fish that were being introduced to these waters were actually degrading the fishery. These man-spawned trout were displacing the river’s natural population but then quickly dying out, since they had not been born into the system. Vincent asserted that managing the wild trout was the way to pump up the fishery. And when his theory proved correct, it became the model for all the West’s streams. But still, there’s something more than scientific planning that makes the river so mythic.

The salmon fly hatch didn’t pan out for me or for Dick Cheney the day we shared that car ride. There were big, dead, dried-out orange bugs floating on the river. The current carried them downstream, swirling them through eddies or beaching them in willow thickets on the banks. But no fish would rise to eat them—or the obscene-sized, fluorescent flies we were using to imitate them. We were too late, which is the essence of the hatch’s enduring mythology: You’re always either a day late or a bit early.

I have heard the stories from shell-shocked friends of hitting the salmon fly hatch perfectly and following it upstream for days: swollen brown trout spitting twitching flies from their mouths, a lunker at the end of every cast, beers and high-fives with complete strangers at the take-out. But as far as my experience goes, I’m like a Cubs fan watching the Red Sox win the World Series: It’s a moment of divine luck that belongs to someone else.

So we floated down the river, occasionally passing Cheney’s boat and watching him cast beautifully yet also come up empty. This is the democracy of the sport itself: Even if you run the world, you can’t control the natural inclinations of trout. So we switched to big stonefly nymphs, which possess all the romanticism of dragging a net across the bottom. But with summer in full bloom and the river moving and the occasional trout on the end of our line, it really didn’t matter.