Angler’s High Fish Always Biting In Beartooths
Everyone calls this place The Beartooths. That’s the first stumbling block. “Shouldn’t it be The Bearteeth?” asked backpacking partner Jim Kershner.
Diction, however, became secondary to the larger stumbling blocks. We found them shortly after the trip began in this wild niche of Montana and Wyoming. The car-size hunks of granite on the Beartooth Plateau can chew and swallow a backpacker without so much as a belch.
Rock litters the lake-studded landscape. Talus and boulders are your friend and enemy, your shelter from the storm, your nemesis. Also, your path to larger trout.
Off-trail hiking is the essence of exploring this section in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. The next best fishing hole isn’t up the trail. It’s through the rubble that can wobble, teeter or topple without notice.
Wildness is abundant here. Oxygen is not.
Kershner and I were feeling light-headed and weak as we sputtered to an elevation of 9,600 feet. Unfortunately, that’s where we had to park the car and start hiking.
“I feel high,” Kershner said.
That was just the beginning.
The Beartooth Mountains, and the neighboring Absaroka Range, have a reputation for killer thunderstorms, blood-letting clouds of mosquitoes and marauding grizzly bears. None of this seems to inhibit the flow of hikers bound for the 943,377-acre wilderness.
High-profile because of its proximity to Yellowstone National Park, The Beartooths are the most heavily used wilderness from Idaho through Wyoming.
The high elevations of the Absaroka and Beartooth ranges were given status as “primitive areas” in 1932 to protect their natural state.
Official wilderness protection was formalized in 1975. The wilderness attracted 514,000 recreational visitor days in 1995. That compares with 218,000 visitor days in the 1.2-million-acre Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness the same year.
Indeed, the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness is smaller than either the Bob Marshall or Selway-Bitterroot wilderness areas, but gets more visitors than The Bob and Selway combined.
None of this should deter a hiker looking for solitude.
The Beartooths absorb people better than most mountains. Visitors aren’t confined to valleys or ridges. The Beartooth Plateau allows campers to spread out from the trails.
You might start from a trailhead jammed with cars, and hike miles without seeing a soul.
About 58 percent of the use on the popular Beartooth District is by people who go in and come out the same day.
Most of the visitors are hikers. Only 8 percent go in by horse.
Those numbers are significant to anglers. They indicate that if you hike in six miles or so and make a camp near a lake or stream, you’re likely to to have the evening rise to yourself.
Roughly 350 of the 944 lakes in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness are stocked with brook trout, cutthroats, golden trout, rainbows or grayling.
That, more than anything, was our calling.
The first part of our hike was over slick mud churned by horse hooves. We skidded past mounds of hail from the previous evening, eerie reminders of the Beartooth’s notorious thunderstorms.
Our spirits perked when the trail climbed higher toward timberline, where the trees were thinner, trails firmer and the sparkle of lakes emerged in rock basins.
Kershner, one of the more literary and articulate writers at the newspaper, seemed like a choice companion for a trek into backcountry of such stunning beauty.
I’ve often fumbled for words to adequately describe the wilderness experience. I knew Jim would wax poetic with insight and observation.
After several miles in which our lungs could barely muster sufficient oxygen for hiking, much less talking, we finally came to our first overlook of a jewel lake. The water surface was a perfect mirror except for the occasional rings of rising trout.
I flipped open my notebook and anxiously awaited Jim’s observations.
He leaned against a boulder, mopped sweat off his brow with a forearm, scanned the scene with bulging eyes and said, “Oh yeah.”
That was all.
The first day’s biggest test was passing these trail-side lakes without casting a line. Kershner’s right arm would go into violent false-casting tremors as fish dimpled the surface of lake after lake.
We pressed on, lured by the promise of bigger trout.
As per plan, we made a base camp from which we would romp with daypacks in successive days to adventure beyond the trails.
The sky is the limit in the Beartooths. The wilderness includes 12,799-foot Granite Peak, Montana’s tallest. Here also is the state’s highest lake at 11,200 feet, and the Big Sky’s loftiest fishing lake at 10,870 feet.
Our camp was in the perfect place for a month of exploring. But we had only a few days. I pored over a map trying to plot the first foray. Kershner got right to business.
Within minutes, he had educated a dozen of the small brook trout rising a few hundred feet from our tent.
“There, I got that out of my system,” he said back in camp. “Let’s eat.”
I admit to being a little miffed when Kershner stepped up to his turn as cook with little more than two small packages of Lipton fettuccine Alfredo.
“I’m hungry as a bear,” I commented. “Don’t you have anything to add to that, like a can of chicken or a fresh leg of marmot?”
“I’ve got better than that,” he said, motioning for me to peer into the bubbling pot on the stove.
With graceful spoon strokes, he folded into the noodles a pound or so of mosquito carcasses that had succumbed in the steam rising from the pot.
The man is a master.
“The first step to thinking like a trout is eating like one,” I said.
We fought over the last bug in the pot.
The fishing did not disappoint us in successive days, even though trout aren’t native in this harsh, high environment.
“Oh yeah!” said Kershner, as I reeled in a 20-incher that fell for my Elk Hair Caddis.
My father tells me of the great fishing in Beartooth lakes in 1935, when he worked with crews building the fabulously scenic Beartooth Highway 212. Today, the fish may be smaller, but just as widely distributed.
Federal law prohibits expanding trout fishing to lakes that had not been planted with fish prior to wilderness designation.
We had made inquiries before our trip to avoid wasting time at fishless lakes. By the end of the third day, even Kershner was admitting to having his fill of fishing.
“Actually, I’m not tired of catching fish,” he said. “I’m just weary of releasing them.”
The next morning he complained about having fish nightmares. “Every time I’d look up, I’d see trout swimming through the sky,” he said.
We began spending more time appreciating the marmots and pikas and stalking the sure-footed mountain goat, until we realized it was stalking us.
One day was a marvel of timing.
We climbed high from base camp in the cool morning, scouted a basin of lakes to noon, and fished a cutthroat creek linking two lakes as a mayfly hatch came into full bloom.
By 3 p.m., when the daily thunderheads were billowing into the Big Sky, we were beginning our descent. Our pockets were filled with threadbare flies ravaged by trout, but we still made a cast or two at the lakes we passed until the sky was nearly black.
We picked up the pace and trotted into camp with the first claps of thunder. As the rain scratched at the tent, Kershner and I watched gape-jawed while the storm rumbled in.
Rifle shots of thunder ricocheted off the surrounding cliffs. Lightning scorched the rock and streaked through the sky in shades ranging from blue and white to pink and orange.
We had a seat that couldn’t have been any closer to the action than sitting in a light bulb while a kid fiddled with the switch.
A good book wasn’t necessary for that storm-bound evening.
Two days after we got back to the routine of the newspaper, I noticed Kershner staring blankly into his computer monitor. He had a familiar look on his face, and I suspected he was seeing trout swim through the screen of words before him.
The hunch was confirmed seconds later when I saw his lips whisper, “Oh yeah.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 4 Photos (3 color) Map of area
MEMO: See related story under the headline: If columnist falls in woods, does he make a sound?