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.

Kind of ironic, I think, that the first two fish I caught in Montana were brookies. Brook trout are my number one quarry in Maine, but out there my beautiful brookies are classified by Montanans as "invasive" and undesirable. The brookies compete for space and sustenance with the native bull trout and cutthroats, and anglers are encouraged in some waters to catch and keep as many as they like. The two I caught were in the Swan River, which was high and murky, and let's just say they were not keepers.

That brief bit of angling came during an overnight stay at Tom and Melanie Parker's Northwest Connections environmental education facility in the Swan Valley (Northwest Connections), as part of my High Country Expedition with the Institutes for Journalism & Natural Resources (IJNR). When the nine-day expedition ended, and IJNR leaders Frank and Maggie Allen graciously extended their hospitality to me in their lovely home south of Missoula, I got to explore a couple of better-known Montana trout streams, Rock Creek and the West Fork of the Bitterroot.

My introduction to Rock Creek was a cloud of cigar smoke, behind which sat Doug Persico, relaxing in a plastic chair on the front porch of his fly shop at the head of the road which follows the "creek" 47 miles up into the mountains. "Howdy," said Doug, in the manner of a transplanted San Franciscan, as I settled into an empty chair beside him to ask for advice. "Our motto is over the register," he said. "'Advice freely given. Good advice given after purchase.'" Rain was falling steadily, and one item I hadn't brought to Montana was my old rubberized rain jacket. What the heck, I rationalized, I was going to get a good wading jacket anyway, so I bought one from Doug. "Head upstream," he said after ringing up the purchase, "until you start to see bugs the size of helicopters. Those are salmon flies. Start fishing there."

I also purchased a few of the shop's salmon fly imitations, honkin' big bushy flies with orange bodies, and the 3X tippet needed for casting them. Thus armed, I headed upriver.

Rock Creek is not anything like what we in the Mysterious East would call a creek. It's a big piece of water, especially in mid-June, and it barrels down the valley in a rush. It doesn't meander, it doesn't pause here and there to form pools -- it's more like one of those water slides at a "family fun" park. Step off the rocky bank and you're immediately in four feet of fast water. Needless to say, I did not step off the rocky bank in very many places.

The day poured rain and the water was high and wide, but not handsome. Struggling to find entry points where I wouldn't be swept away, I managed to land three species of trout -- rainbow, brown and cutthroat. Nothing about it was easy. I learned something about fishing in Montana, though: don't wade. Just about everyone else floats the rivers in inflatable rafts, casting to the banks as they go ripping down the whitewater. Maybe later in the season, when the snowmelt has slowed to a trickle and the creeks are not in such a rush, wading would be a good option. That day on Rock Creek, it was not.

More to come.