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| Mount Powell and the upper Clark Fork |
The Clark Fork above the Little Blackfoot is running big and clear, and is fishing well. It looks like it would be a great float and I didn't even see one boat.
I fished from below the spillway, all the way down to Galen over two days. The fishing slows down as you go downstream but you won't see another person for miles. It was too windy to mess with the ponds.
A green Matuka or JJ Special worked great in the mornings and the large browns were pissed and came out of the shadows. Nymhing worked best in the afternoon. A firebead Ray Charles with a Little Green Machine or Rainbow Lightning Bug dropper killed it. There are some huge rainbows which show up on my line up there every so often. The common belief is that they've flushed over the spillway from the ponds. I like to think they swam up there from the lower river.
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| Copper salts percolating out of soil |
Something important for folks to witness is the toxic, metal laden soils which line the banks and floodplain. The majority of the contamination came in 1908 when a 100 year flood turned the entire Clark Fork Valley into a massive toxic mudslide. The flood waters flushed decades worth of industrial scale mine waste out of Butte and Anaconda and deposited it over 90 miles of floodplain. A bunch of the sediment from the flood filled in the brand-spanking-new Milltown Reservoir. The stumps are dead willows which could not grow in the toxic soil. We call them "ghost willows."
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| Copper salts up close |
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| Overly friendly brown cows |
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