A Quality Angling Experience

This area is restricted to catch-and-release fishing with artificial flies and single, barbless hooks in order to protect native cutthroat trout that inhabit these waters and to guarantee all park visitors a quality angling experience. —sign in Yellowstone Park, circa 1974

The Buffalo Ford on the Yellowstone River is not listed by name on the free maps that visitors receive when they pay their $10 entry fee at Gardiner or West Yellowstone, but most anglers know where it is. It is a flat section of water that passes through the meadows between Fishing Bridge and Inspiration Point, just downstream from LeHardy Rapids. Though I have been there only three times, the memories I have of the place and its fish are like a core sample of my adult life. At the Buffalo Ford, I caught my first big, wild trout on a fly. It was also the place where I learned about barbless hooks and releasing fish unharmed. It has now become a place where I try to pass these lessons on to my children.

My first trip to Yellowstone Park was in conjunction with a voyage of discovery in the early 1970s. Torn between seminary and law school, I did what any red-blooded American male would have done at the time and “lit out for the territory” by spending the summer on the road. Since I couldn’t afford Europe, I decided to explore the American West. My guide and erstwhile traveling companion was an Oregon native named Ol’ Norm who promised excitement, adventure, and trout “as big as your leg.” To someone who’d barely been west of the Mississippi, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

So we started out for San Francisco, Ol’ Norm in the role of Dean Moriarty and me as the reticent Sal Paradise. Besides the fact that he was an experienced fly fisherman, there were several other things that made Ol’ Norm a passable if not ideal traveling companion. Among them was a red 1969 Jaguar XKE convertible and road trip skills like the uncanny ability to piss in an empty beer bottle while driving 85 mile an hour through the Wyoming desert. There are some things you just don’t learn in seminary.

The trip was an eventful one for me, an odyssey of sorts. Though I’ve long since lost the notes I was saving for the great American novel I hoped to write upon our return, I still recall one of the highlights that occurred on our journey homeward. Low on money but still high on enthusiasm, we stopped at Dan Bailey’s fabled fly shop across the street from the train station in Livingston, Montana.

I could hardly believe I was actually walking through the front door of a place I’d only read about in fishing magazines. Despite our road-weary appearance and lack of spare cash, the man behind the counter was most helpful. When we asked him to recommend a place to fish, he responded without hesitation. “If you’ve never fished the park before, you really ought to try the Buffalo Ford on the Yellowstone. You can get by with a few patterns and the license is free.”

The next morning, we got up early in order to make the drive south from Livingston through the Paradise Valley to the Park. It was a beautiful morning in late July and we were soon fishing the few #16 Royal Wulffs that we’d been able to afford. My inexperience and a used, ten-dollar, fiberglass fly pole made for inept presentation of the small dry flies but the trout were forgiving. And what marvelous trout they were; fat bronze Yellowstone cutthroats with a trademark red slash under their jaws. The smallest were 14 inches while the largest were well over 20. They were the biggest trout I’d ever seen.

This area is restricted to catch-and-release fishing with artificial flies and single, barbless hooks in order to protect native cutthroat trout that inhabit these waters and to guarantee all park visitors a quality angling experience. —sign in Yellowstone Park, circa 1974

When we finally quit fishing late in the afternoon, our arms were too sore to cast and we’d broken off the last or our flies. Seeing the sign posted next to the parking lot, we could only laugh and agree that ours had truly been “a quality angling experience.”

My next trip to the Ford was a decade later under decidedly different circumstances. A beautiful pair of blondes—my wife and our three-month old daughter, Liv—had replaced Ol’ Norm as my fellow travelers. The Jaguar convertible and empty beer bottles had given way to a Toyota mini-van and disposable diapers. Instead of heading back east, we were headed west to our new home—a parsonage in Olympia, Washington.

One thing hadn’t changed, however, and that was the fishing. Using a pattern similar to the one I’d fished with Ol’ Norm ten years earlier, the big cutthroats proved every bit as cooperative as they had a decade earlier. With my wife and daughter asleep on a blanket under the shade of a Ponderosa pine on the riverbank, I remember sipping a beer, watching trout hungrily rising to a mid-afternoon hatch and thinking that I must be the luckiest man on earth. Once again, the Buffalo Ford had provided a quality angling experience.

The last time I visited the Buffalo Ford, it was also with my family, though by this time a second daughter, Britt, had joined us. We were on our way back to Wisconsin for a family reunion. Due to a combination of circumstances including unfortunate timing, our trip through the park took place a week prior to the opening of the fishing season on the Yellowstone. Undeterred, I asked the girls if they wanted to stop off at a special place. After overcoming their initial disappointment at not being able to actually do some fishing, they agreed—much as I had 16 years earlier—that an opportunity to see trout “as big as your leg” sounded too good to pass up.  Under the shade of the same pine tree that my ten-year old had slept as an infant, the four of us enjoyed lunch and watched the wild cutthroats of the Yellowstone enjoying theirs. Though we never wet a line, we experienced yet another quality experience on the river.

When I think of places like the Buffalo Ford, it is with a combination of gratitude and hope. On the surface, my life has certainly changed since my first visit almost half a lifetime ago. Yet in important ways, it really hasn’t changed that much at all. I’m still attracted by wild trout “as big as your leg” (who isn’t?) and the places where they live continue to fire my imagination. So, too, the people with whom I’ve experienced those places. Ol’ Norm and I occasionally meet up for a beer and to relive our memories. Liv and Britt, my two daughters, have indicated that a fly rod under the Christmas tree is not an inappropriate gift for a girl. (“After all, dad, this is the nineties!”) I still feel like the luckiest person on earth. And every so often, I find myself whispering a prayer of thanks for the Buffalo Ford and the memories I have of it.

May wild trout and the places where they live that carry the promise of “a quality angling experience” be part of the world our children inherit from us.

[This piece was published in the Angler’s Club of Portland in January of 1991. Ol’ Norm died several years later. He was 50.]