What Visiting Writers Saw at Montana Fly Fishing Lodge

Every so often, someone spends time with us and writes about what they found here — not because we asked, but because they wanted to. In July, writer Andrew Steketee and photographer Tim Romano visited for a few days, fishing the Stillwater River and chasing mouse-eating browns on Rosebud Creek in the evenings, as part of a longer newsletter piece for Flylab. What they wrote wasn’t really about gear or hatch charts. It was about what this stretch of Montana still is: a working ranching community where the closest coffee is a truck stop, neighbors show up when you need them, and nobody’s in a hurry to be somewhere else.

One line from the piece has stuck with us since we read it — Andrew called us “warm and generous people,” then, more honestly, described a family still tending land, animals, and trucks alongside the guiding, all in the same breath.

We don’t think of ourselves that way day to day — the ranch work and the guiding just are what they are, all part of the same life. But it’s a good reminder of something worth saying plainly: this isn’t a resort built to look like Montana. It’s a family ranch that happens to also run a fly fishing lodge, and the two have never really been separate things.

You can read the full piece — including Tim’s notes on testing gear on location, and a good deal more on fly casting than we’re qualified to review ourselves — over on Flylab’s Substack: AT News: Alone in the Absarokas.

If you’d like to see the ranch, the Stillwater, and East Rosebud Creek for yourself, check current package dates — we’d be glad to have you.