Milesnick Spring Creeks
Thompson Spring Creek
Like Benhart, Thompson Spring Creek is a meandering meadow creek with only a few bushes to snag your backcast. But its bright green weeds and undercut banks provide more widespread holding water than Benhart. It’s a dry-fly delight that holds more rainbows than browns. In summer, you can usually find a fish rising to Pale Morning Duns (PMDs), beetles, or ants.
Bud Lilly remembers fishing Thompson Spring Creek in 1935. “I was ten or eleven and caught fish with worms without too much trouble, but to tell you the truth, it’s better fishing now. It was beat down by the cows even then. Later, when I started fly fishing, my mother would take me over (I couldn’t drive yet) and sit and wait for me. I was using snelled Sandy Mites from Potts Flies in Hamilton, Montana, which sold for 35 cents apiece or three for a dollar, a lot of money in those days. I kept catching them in the bushes and breaking them off. There were more bushes then. My mother would say, ‘Can’t you use something a little less expensive than those 35-cent flies?’”
In July 1999, I took two members of the board of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to Thompson and got them into a few fat 14- to 16-inch trout that took PMD spinners. Unlike the surface feeders in the shallow Benhart riffles, the fish in Thompson keep sipping and give you more chances to catch them, as long as you don’t line them or scare them with sloppy casts or startling movements on the bank. Because there are so many weeds in Thompson’s narrow confines, weighted nymphs are tough to use. Dries or emergers are the way to go on Thompson.
The stream does not originate on the MZ Bar, but it flows into the East Gallatin on the ranch. Its hatches are similar to those on Benhart.
East Gallatin River
Dave Kumlien, former owner of the Montana Troutfitters Shop in Bozeman and now development director of the Whirling Disease Foundation, sings the praises of the East Gallatin River on the MZ Bar Ranch.
“I’ve fished Milesnicks’s since 1975 and guided on it since the early ’90s,” he says. “I always liked to bounce my clients over to the river as a relief from the one-fish intensity of the spring creeks. Because the creeks empty into the East Gallatin there, it’s a rich and productive stretch with good hatches, some great riffles, fast banks you can throw streamers at, and at times some great dry-fly fishing to caddis, Baetis, Tricos, and some PMDs. It fishes almost like a big spring creek, and it’s on a par with the creeks once it clears up by about July 1. There’s always the chance you could get a really big one, too, especially with a streamer.”
The East Gallatin is much bigger water than the spring creeks, with hat-floater holes of 8 to 12 feet deep or more. The bottom is often silty clay and slippery. The water is almost always slightly turbid, even before and after runoff, which can be an advantage when you find rising fish; they’re less spooky than fish in the crystal-clear spring-creek water. Fish can move freely between the East Gallatin and the spring creeks. If there is no surface activity on the East Gallatin, try bouncing weighted streamers and nymphs into the heads of the holes or swinging the flies along the undercut banks.
Access to Public Water
The East Gallatin flows through private land for almost its entire length. The Milesnicks allow free access, with their daily written permission (stop at their house), on about two miles of the East Gallatin at Dry Creek Road. The public-access water extends upstream and downstream from the road, and signs mark its boundaries. There is also a public-access area at the north end of N. 7th Avenue at the edge of Bozeman, about 15 miles upstream from the Milesnick property. You can also get on the river at its highway bridges. Ask for details at the local fly shops.
Copyright © 2012 Intermedia Outdoors
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