Dreams and wanderings: Signs of spring draw a crowd to Bear Trap Canyon
Just before waking up on Sunday morning I had a dream about salmon flies. The big bugs were crawling from icy waters on the Madison River and the trout were feeding with abandon.
It’s not the first time I’ve dreamed of a hatch on the Madison.
And it certainly wasn’t the first time I’ve heard of an angler having such dreams.
A few years back my friend Mike Kallock headed north to Alaska to guide. It had been a dream of ours in college to cast for giant rainbows on the mythic rivers of The Last Frontier. I made it to Alaska in the summer of 2002, but I never did guided. Mike spent the following summer in a fish camp.
I’ll never forget an e-mail he sent me toward the end of the fishing season. He said he’d been having a recurring nightmare.
In his dream, giant nymphs – the juvenile stage of the mayflies and stoneflies that flutter over Montana’s rivers in the summertime – were crawling aboard his boat and attacking him and his clients.
It sounded horrifying.
My dream was strange, but it was far from fearful. It was unusual only to see salmon flies emerging as ice hung close to the banks.
Salmon flies, the largest of the stonefly species, typically hatch on the Madison in late June and early July when the sun is hot and the tall grasses along the river have just reached their height. The giant nymphs crawl from beneath the rocks en mass, emerge from their leathery exoskeletons, mate and die. It’s considered one of the West’s premier hatches. It’s the kind of stuff that fly-fishing dreams are made of.
I tend to dream of fishing when the first hints of spring are in the air, when the days begin to lengthen and I can leave the house without my jacket. Those signs draw me to the river to hike its banks, gaze over its churning surface and think of fishing.
I spent part of the weekend in Bear Trap Canyon where I first set eyes on a salmon fly more than a decade ago.
Warm temperatures had anglers and hikers out in force on Sunday. More than a dozen drift boats, catamarans and rafts dotted the Madison as we drove through the canyon. A number of wade fishermen cast in the warm sunshine from the banks. Hikers and dogs passed intermittently as we walked up the canyon along the river.
Near the first bend upriver from the Bear Trap Canyon trailhead we turned east and scaled the canyon wall. Looking down over the canyon from above, the low light set the river ablaze.
On the hike back we stopped and sat on a boulder beside the river. Tiny black midges tracked back and forth over the surface of the water in an eddy by our feet.
Predictably there were no salmon flies.
But there was sunshine.
And the promise of days to come.
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