I grew up on a small dairy farm in central Massachusetts. A meadow extended from my grandparent’s farmhouse to a brook loaded with sunfish, largemouth bass, pickerel, and hornpout. I learned to fish there, casting gummy salamanders one year and whirligig bass lures the next. There were some great fish caught and to this day I still love warmwater fishing. The explosive takes and the sound of the strikes are forever burned in my memory.
Things changed for me, at least from an angling perspective, when my grandfather took me fly fishing. His name was Robert, but I never called him that. He was always grandpa to me. I only fished with him once, but I’ll never forget the day he took me out.
My grandfather fished with a cane rod. It wasn’t a fancy rod or one of much value, just the standard bamboo fishing pole you’d pick up at the hardware store in his day. He fixed it with a silk line that held a weight I could quite wrap my head around. The whole apparatus looked so loosey-goosey and completely foreign to the Zebco rod and spinning reel I was accustomed to. We drove west from the farm and away from the causeway where I’d fish for bass. The road curved a couple of times and then my grandfather pulled the car over by the side of the highway. We weren’t more than a couple miles from home. As I looked out from the window, I didn’t see a pond or a river or anything really, just dense, dark forest. My grandfather produced a small metal box that held a handful of flies. Some were rusty with matted feathers. He picked one from the bunch and rigged it to the end of the line. Then he led me across the highway and over the guardrail.
Through the trees I could see a tiny brook flowing silently through the inky blackness. We walked to the first pool, and he handed me the rod. I remember being mystified. The forest was so thick, and the rod was so long, it seemed impossible to cast. Somehow, I managed to plant the fly on the water. It was met almost immediately by the strike of a brook trout. The fish was tiny, maybe five inches in length, but it ate with the ferocity of a lion. I held it in the palm of my hand for a moment. In the dim light of the forest, it gleamed purple and pink and yellow and red and blue all in the same moment, as if it possessed a light of its own. I was thunderstruck. I remember thinking I’d never seen a fish so beautiful in all my life.
I spent countless hours in the coming years peddling my bicycle back to that brook, eventually catching a fish there that would be considered respectable by any brook trout angler anywhere, or so I thought. I also peddled that bike through the forest and along dirt roads and highways for the better part of grade school and high school in search of brookies. I caught more than a few, and I came to love them. Those brook trout held some wildness that the stocked rainbow and brown trout didn’t. The rainbows and browns seemed like pale shadows, complete with raceway fins. They weren’t even hardy enough to survive a season in my home waters.
By the time I was a teenager, fly fishing was calling me West. I arrived in Montana on a Greyhound bus after graduating high school. The idea was to study biology at Montana State University, but class just couldn’t compete with the water. I didn’t have money enough for a car, so I bought a mountain bike from a pawn shop on North 7th Avenue. I rode it to the river.
It took a while to get the hang of Western fly fishing. The skills I’d learned on the rivers back East didn’t seem to apply here, or perhaps they just weren’t sufficient. Before long I had the lay of the land. I started tentatively poking my head into the local fly shops to seek advice. I remember asking if there was anywhere to catch brookies. The fellow in the shop looked at me like I was crazy, as if to say: “Why would you want to catch brook trout?” He seemed honestly mystified. I tabled the matter and moved onto another subject.
Over the years I’d come to find that, at least in Montana, brook trout are a bit of a maligned species. They are invasive to Western waters, with no native habitat in Montana, but it seems because they are typically smaller size in comparison to rainbow and brown trout that anglers refrain from pursuing them. Many trout fishermen in Montana seem wholly possessed by catching big fish, particularly large brown trout, seemingly at the expense of every other joy a day of fishing can bring. So be it.
I’ve come across respectable brook trout in waters across the Western part of the Montana. Often, brook trout in Montana are found a bit off the beaten path, but they’ll occasionally show up in the big rivers. In 28 years of fly fishing here, I’ve caught two brook trout in the Yellowstone River, both on the same day. There’s a decent population of brookies in the Big Hole River south of Butte. For large rivers in southwest Montana, the Big Hole is probably your best bet of seeing one. If you really want to find brookies in Montana, you’ve got to do a little sleuthing. And that’s part of the appeal.
There are also a few private lakes in the area that hold big brookies. I’ve had the pleasure of fishing them on occasion. Montana Angler has access to some of these waters and can arrange a day for you. September and early October are great months to fish these waters when the brookies are colored-up in their seasonal splendor. They’ll crush a poorly presented hopper pattern and make you feel like a hero in the process. And they are every bit as beautiful here as the fish of my youth back East.
If your ambitions for brook trout include locations further afield, the sky is the limit. Labrador in Canada has some of the biggest brook trout on the planet, and Montana Angler offers backcountry trips to remote lodges there. To the south, Patagonia, and particularly Argentina, is the place to be. Some of the biggest brookies on the planet are there, and this region could present your best chance of catching one. Montana Angler works with several fishing lodges throughout Patagonia and can arrange a trip to catch the brook trout of your dreams.
While there are many small brook trout in Montana, often in overpopulated high mountain streams, there are a few places to catch legitimately large brookies here. And by legitimate, I’m talking fish over 20 inches.
This is the point in the story where you might imagine I’m going to spill the beans on where to fish for trophy brookies in Montana. Sorry, that’s not going to happen. Just know that the fish are here. Go have a look sometime.
Maybe I’ll see you there.
Words and Pictures by Ben Pierce @sidechannelproductions