We are finally seeing some hopper action on the Madison. The terrestrial bite was delayed a bit by a push of cooler than normal weather. In the past week our weather felt more like October than August.  The daytime highs plummeted to the low sixties and it rained almost every day.  The cloudy weather made for pretty good streamer fishing for those who were tough enough to fish in the rain.  We caught a lot of nice trout on the Madison river. The cooler days and nights dropped our water temps a lot, which has kept the big fish happy.  The biggest side effect of the rain was dirty water and rising fishing flows on some of the freestone rivers in the area.  The Yellowstone and Jefferson spiked and saw come muddy water but in the long run having a little more and cooler water will make for good fishing. 

We see a lot of wildlife on float trips.  I have never seen as many moose in a summer as I have this year.  The braids of the upper Madison river just south of Ennis Montana have been a hot spot for moose sightings.  This photo was taken on the Jefferson river, which is always a great place to see a moose because there are usually no other boats to scare them away.

The upper Madison is still fishing well.  Most days have been good for bigger fish on streamers.  The hopper thing has still not come together yet.  You can catch fish on hoppers but it is not  really consistent yet.  For those who are interested in dry fly action Ennis Lake is hard to beat.  Not much is better than seeing a fish chomp a size 8 foam grass hopper but sight fishing to a flat full of big rainbows audibly slurping mayflys is pretty fun too.  This time of year there are huge hatches of tricos and callabaetis in the mornings where the upper Madison river flows into Ennis lake.  The south end of the lake is shallow enough to wade and there are plenty of pods of risers to chase throughout the mornings.  Most of the fish are large...15-22inches but the water is flat and they are all pretty spooky.  If you make a nice cast and have some patience you can usually end up with good number of hook ups on big strong trout.  Keeping them out of the weeds long enough to get them to the net is another story.  It is not a fishery where you get a lot of freebies but it is great to have a place where we can consistently find big fish eating dries ten minutes from home.

We are starting to see more and more grass hoppers along the banks of the upper Madison river.  So far there are already more than I saw all of last year.  The fish are not really keyed in on them yet but as they see more hoppers in the water, the dry fly bite should get better.  For now, fishing has been pretty good on the Madison with streamers.  Most days we have been able to put a bunch of nice browns and bows in the boat.  The flows are great and having plenty of water in the Madison seems to have kept the fish from getting too shy to eat meat even in the sun.  The Yellowstone has been at a nice flow for awhile and should just get better and better on nocturnal stonefly and hopper patterns but with the Madison fishing well and not crowded it has been hard to leave. With good water levels on all of our rivers the crowds are spread out. Even a late start on the Madison near Ennis has not been a recipe for getting caught in a boat hatch.  In fact I have been hearing a lot of people say "I thought we would see more people than this...".