Blackfoot River – Near Lincoln

August 23, 2008

The Blackfoot River was so much fun a couple weeks ago that I had to try it again. Over the past week, I’ve purchased 4 old bamboo rods through eBay and had to do something with my time while I’m awaiting their arrivals. As it turns out, the mailman tried to deliver one – probably the “Warren Mead – Missoula, MT” one of unknown parentage. More elsewhere on all this.

Despite some cool weather and storms earlier in the week, weather during this late August weekend has been gorgeous. I took the motorcycle again: Up over Flescher Pass and back through Avon. It’s about an hour either way. From the house, Lincoln was 55 miles via Flescher and then another 11 miles to the Ogden Mountain road. The return was about 65 miles. Darkness caught up to me on the way back and I spent the last half hour squinting into the heavy dusk through dark, polarized glasses coated with bugs since I lost my face shield on the previous trip. What fun!

Water

The river was maybe a bit lower than two weeks ago, but still full of cool water. Once again, I waded in motorcycle boots. It’s a handy way to go, but again my feet and legs got a bit numb over a couple hours. The river is much more clear than these pictures show. Simply beautiful.

The deadfall trees in these pictures are right in the middle of the river. There’s a ton – well, actually several tons – of downed trees in this area below the Ogden Mountain road bridge. The holes are big and deep in the midst of the particularly bad stretch shown. Unfortunately, it’s not particular easy or safe to get into them. After plucking off a few little brookies in the hole shown in the far right picture above, I turned around to see I had company. He was as surprised as I was!

Fishing

More little brookies and several beautiful cutthroats came out to play. The biggest was the cutthroat on the left – maybe 12-13”. I didn’t have much luck with one of Robert Klein’s hopper patterns, but did start to pick them off with a bead-head caddis emerger – in purple, no less. Go figure. The first picture below shows it a bit. A Yellow Sally with a bit of foam from some Third World country also produced a few early in the evening. I finished off the day with a Light Cahill/PED pattern of some sort.