Why Unpressured Water Matters

The best fishing in Montana isn’t always on the river everyone is talking about. Sometimes it is exactly where they aren’t.

There is a temptation in fly fishing to chase what is famous: the river with the biggest fish, the stretch producing the highest numbers, the hatch everyone is talking about, or the photograph you’ve seen a hundred times before you ever arrive in Montana. We understand the temptation. We also built Montana Fly Fishing Lodge around a different idea. We would rather introduce our guests to a piece of Montana they may never have heard of.

Lincoln and I came to the words Unpressured Water. By Design. while working on our website and trying to explain what makes the experience here different. The words were new, but the philosophy wasn’t. We have never believed a great day of fly fishing should be measured solely by how many fish came to the net or whether you caught the largest trout of your life. There are certainly trophy fish in the waters we fish. Some of them may never have been caught before, and when one of those fish decides to eat, it will give you a fight worth telling about over dinner. We love those days, too.

They just aren’t the only days that matter.

What matters to us is giving people the opportunity to experience the Montana we know, and sometimes that means driving past the river everyone else came to fish.

Tomorrow’s Fishing Day Begins Today

Our guides don’t arrive in the morning, check the weather and decide where to go. Planning for tomorrow actually begins when they return from the river today.

At the guide shack, they debrief. What worked and what didn’t? What did they see? How did the river change during the day? What rig produced? What challenged the guest? They complete a guide log so what one guide learned today becomes useful to the rest of the team tomorrow. Later, they begin talking about stretches of water for the next day. The previous day’s experience matters, as do river conditions, weather and what each guest wants from their time on the water.

Then, at least an hour before guests are picked up the following morning, the conversation starts again. What changed overnight? What does the weather look like now? What are the rivers doing? What does this particular guest need today? During the height of the season, another question becomes increasingly important: how many boats are going to be there?

That last question can change the entire plan.

The Stillwater River is an extraordinary fishery and an important part of our home waters. It also deserves respect. When we have a larger group at the lodge, we work very hard not to put more than three of our boats on the same stretch of the river. Operationally, it would certainly be easier to do otherwise. A guide who fishes the same two or three stretches repeatedly learns every seam, productive hole and pattern. There is efficiency in that, and when a particular river is fishing exceptionally well, putting everyone there can produce some pretty impressive fish counts.

We ask our guides to do something harder. We ask them to spread out, learn more water, pay attention and find another way to create a great day.

One of our guides, Keenan, took that challenge particularly seriously. He began developing what has become a “round” of walk-and-wade opportunities around the upper Stillwater, where the water isn’t floatable. What came from that wasn’t simply another place to catch fish. Guests got out of the boat and worked on different skills. They saw a completely different landscape and encountered wildlife they might never have seen from a boat. They experienced parts of this country that most anglers floating the better-known stretches simply pass by.

Keenan also had to keep learning. I think that’s important.

We intentionally coach our guides away from measuring a successful day by fish count. That doesn’t mean catching fish isn’t important. We are, after all, a fly fishing lodge, and our guides take tremendous pride in using their knowledge to put guests on fish. We just don’t believe the number alone tells us whether we got the day right.

Lincoln has a fairly simple measure. Did the guest learn something new, and did the guide use everything he knew to help that guest get on fish? Even if it was only one fish, that can be a very good day.

My measure is a little different. I watch people when they come back to the lodge. Are they happy? Did they connect with their guide? Does it feel as though the care they experienced here at the lodge continued when they drove away with that guide in the morning? For us, the guide isn’t a separate part of someone’s stay. That relationship should feel like an extension of everything we are trying to do here.

One of my favorite examples involves a guest named Ted and his wife, Linda. Ted had been fly fishing for more than 30 years. Linda had never really gotten into it, although she decided she would give it a try on their trip to Montana. We paired them with Alex Hepworth, who had an interesting assignment: guide an experienced angler who wanted to improve while, at exactly the same time, teaching his wife how to fly fish.

They fished the Stillwater and the Yellowstone. Ted later described Alex as patient, funny and a gifted teacher who somehow managed to guide both of them at the same time. Ted refined his skills. Linda caught fish.

And Linda became a fisherman.

Ted told us afterward that she was hooked. I love that story because there is no fish count that adequately measures what happened. Someone who had spent decades alongside a husband who loved fly fishing discovered that she loved it, too. That’s a pretty great fishing day in our book.

This Side of the Beartooths

Where we are makes much of this possible. This is the quieter side of Montana. The nearest town doesn’t have a traffic light. The Beartooths, home to the highest peaks in Montana, rise above cattle fields, and you dodge deer on the way to a boat ramp. Eagles are common enough that we sometimes have to remind ourselves they aren’t ordinary everywhere. Our cool nights and mornings help keep the water cold, and the geography around us gives our guides an unusual number of choices.

There is a little irony in what happens during certain conditions elsewhere in Montana. Anglers who came to fish some of the famous rivers around Bozeman and Ennis sometimes end up over here. You can see it at the boat ramps when most of the license plates aren’t local. They have discovered what we’ve known for a long time: this side of the Beartooths has an extraordinary amount of water.

Living beside East Rosebud has probably shaped the way Lincoln and I think about all of this more than we realize. We cross the old bridge over it every day. We hear the river from the property. The deer, eagles and trout have become part of the rhythm of our lives here, and the fish aren’t inventory to us. They are part of our world in much the same way as everything else that lives along this river. We want people to catch them, certainly, but we also want them treated with respect, and we want the places they live to remain places worth coming to.

That’s part of why “By Design” matters to us. It means there are choices we make that aren’t necessarily the easiest or even the most profitable. If demand for Montana Fly Fishing Lodge doubled tomorrow, our answer wouldn’t be to double the number of rooms. We wouldn’t fill the property with more people or put twice as many boats on the river. There will always be days when weather, river conditions or a guest’s needs force us to make a compromise. Fishing is too dependent on nature to pretend otherwise. What we won’t do is allow growth itself to become the reason we compromise what we decided to create here.

I asked Lincoln recently what he wants to preserve for our guests. His answer takes him back long before there was a lodge here:

“The feeling that I hold in my heart about growing up in rural Montana, laying in the field that is now the south lawn, watching the stars and listening to the river.”

Mine is the peace and serenity.

Those things don’t scale particularly well, and we’re comfortable with that.

Maybe the Water Is Only Part of It

There is another meaning to “unpressured” that I hadn’t really thought about until recently.

Most of our guests arrive from lives that take energy from them every day: work, family, phones, calendars, decisions and all of the responsibilities that don’t simply disappear because you’ve come to Montana. One guest told us that in his entire adult life he could not remember truly disconnecting from work. A few days into his stay, he realized he had left his phone beside the bed.

He hadn’t announced a digital detox or made some grand decision to unplug. He had simply stopped thinking about it.

That story has stayed with me.

Perhaps the real luxury isn’t having more things available to us. Maybe it is reaching a point where, for a little while, we don’t need them. A river can do that. So can a guide who gives you his full attention, a dinner where no one seems particularly interested in leaving the table, or sitting outside at the end of the day with someone you’ve known for forty years and realizing there is nowhere else you’re supposed to be.

Maybe what we are really trying to create isn’t only an unpressured fishery. Maybe it is an unpressured person.

When I strip away all of the language we’ve developed to describe Montana Fly Fishing Lodge, I think that’s much closer to why Lincoln and I run this place the way we do.

Of course we want people to continue to love fishing. We want them to experience this quieter side of Montana, where the land still gets to lead instead of someone’s idea of what Montana is supposed to look like. We want to protect the peace and serenity we have here, and the feeling Lincoln has carried with him since he was a boy lying in that field beside the river.

But ultimately, we do it because of the people who come through our doors.

Fathers and sons. Brothers. Husbands and wives. Friends who have known one another most of their lives. They come here to fish, but somewhere along the way they eat together, laugh together, meet people they would never otherwise have met and have conversations they might not have had at home.

Then every once in a while, we watch them leave a little closer to one another, a little more energized and a little more connected than when they arrived.

We got to play a small part in that.

For Lincoln and me, that’s enough.

Unpressured Water. By Design.

Maybe the water is only the beginning.