Milesnick Spring Creeks
Spring-creek junkies have a new playground in Bozeman, Montana. Benhart and Thompson spring creeks on Tom and Mary Kay Milesnick’s MZ Bar Ranch near Bozeman are now managed as limited-access fee fisheries and provide better fishing than they have in many years.
Local anglers and a few visiting fly fishers have known about the waters for years, but the streams received little attention because they lacked quality fishing. They couldn’t compete with the fishing available at the Livingston/Paradise Valley area spring creeks—DePuy’s, Armstrong’s, and Nelson’s—less than an hour away.
All that has changed thanks to the Milesnicks, who began an extensive stream restoration project in 1992. Now both creeks offer quality trout fishing and have become great additions to any spring creek aficionado’s itinerary.
In 1998, for a variety of reasons, including increased angler pressure and the need to pay for improvements, the Milesnicks established a fee for access to the streams and set a limit on the number of rods per day. The fishing is strictly catch-and-release, fly-fishing-only.
The 1,400-acre MZ Bar Ranch, which has been in the Milesnick family since 1936, has 31/2 miles of Benhart Spring Creek, 1 mile of Thompson Spring Creek, and 5 1/2 miles of the East Gallatin River. Eight of these ten miles of streams are shared by no more than six anglers per day. Each stream has unique character and challenges, and some anglers have spent an entire day on just one small section of one stream.
In April 1992, Tom Milesnick bought an excavator and used it to dig silt out of the streams. He created deeper water and narrowed the streams to speed the flow and keep the streambed cleared of silt. Milesnick has used the excavator on different sections of the streams every April since 1992, and between Aprils he reads about stream improvement practices and talks with stream habitat experts such as Dick Vincent of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and stream consultants Inter-Fluve and Buddy Drake. He also installed more fences and began using a rotational grazing program to limit how long the cattle have access to the streams. This keeps the streambanks stable.
The stream restoration efforts paid off, and word began to spread that the streams offered good fishing. For the past three years, the Milesnicks have given permission to as many as 30 rods a day for a total of more than 1,500 rods each year. They say they had to set
limits. Besides, the cattle market has declined in recent years, and a supplementary income was needed. Beginning in 1999, the Milesnicks set the daily fishing fee at $50 per rod, with a daily maximum of six individual rods. Reservations are required.
Benhart Spring Creek
I first heard about Benhart Spring Creek in the late 1970s through Mary Brooks, wife of the late outdoor writer Joe Brooks. After getting permission at the Milesnick home, I crawled along Benhart’s banks eyeballing trout in the bright sun. All my casts were futile. Whenever the shadow of my fly line hit the shallow currents, the fish panicked and raced about, looking for nonexistent cover. The fishing was made especially tough by the poor, shallow stream conditions. It was so tough anglers said the trout would spook when you opened your car door. The fish are still spooky, but now they have deeper water in which to hide.
Benhart has a higher flow than Thompson, but it is only about half the size of the Paradise Valley spring creeks. It has more browns than rainbows, and the fish usually hold in the obvious deep holes and feed around their edges. Sometimes they feed in the riffles between holes. Most of the riffles are so shallow that when the fish feed, their dorsal fins and half their tails stick out of the water. Your first cast either catches one of those fish or sends them all scurrying back into the deeper water.
Benhart can be as tough as you choose to make it. The easiest way to fish it, and the method most likely to produce, is to cast a nymph into the end of the riffle and let it bounce over the shelf and into the deep water. Use a #6-#8 black Woolly Bugger or red San Juan Worm, a #14 bead-head Prince or Pheasant-tail Nymph, or a #14 Soft Hackle Pheasant Tail or Hare’s Ear with a mini-split-shot. I fished Benhart this way with friends one afternoon in June 1999 and we had spectacular results. Together we caught and released three browns pushing 20 inches, four browns and six rainbows measuring about 17 inches, and several smaller fish.
Copyright © 2012 Intermedia Outdoors
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