The day after the rains, Rock Creek was blown out. I tried fishing it, but the highlights of the day were close encounters with bighorn sheep, herds of them on the creek road. In several places vast rockslides came down right to the road's edge, fields of scree so steep and jagged I wouldn't have even attempted a climb. The sheep, and they are fairly chunky critters, dashed up the slope with amazing nimbleness, as though they were trotting up a staircase.

The next day I headed south to Darby, nearly in Idaho, and followed the West Fork of the Bitterroot a few miles to a campground that IJNR's Chris Bryant had told me about. I parked my borrowed truck at the farthest campsite, got into my waders and followed a trail to the stream. It was beautiful -- at last, wadeable water. The West Fork actually has pools, runs and riffles like a trout stream should. I stepped into the clear, cold water and started casting.

"On your left!"

I turned to see a bright blue inflatable coming at me, with a guide at the oars and anglers fore and aft, casting big salmon flies toward the banks as they drifted on the current. This moment was repeated so often I felt like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Because Rock Creek and some of the other prime fishing waters had been blown out by the rains, every fishing guide in western Montana had brought his anglers to the West Fork. Or at least it seemed that way. The one time I had a nice run to myself for a few minutes, I hooked a pretty brown trout, but as I was bringing the fish in, yet another blue boat went sailing by and one of its anglers tied into an even bigger fish, a rainbow, just below me.

That was one frustration. The other was the selectivity of the trout in the West Fork. They'd seen it all. Time and again, my fly would drift over a good lie and a dark shadow would rise to inspect it, reject it, and sink back to invisibility. The only successful approach was to make a perfect, drag-free drift with a bushy salmon fly, with a small nymph on a dropper riding along a foot or so below.

I'd love to go back to Montana to fish, but next time I'll be in one of those bright blue boats.