"jeff" wrote

....it would be great to finally meet you and to
observe a bit of your efforts in solving the great mystery.



"solve the great mystery" !!! crap now ya got me nervous ... let's be
clear here .... I SUK as a fly fisherman



fwiw, "your" time frame is often one when the always tough and technical
Ranch gets very slow to boot. The Flavs are over, the callibaetis and
ants ain't arrived yet, the weather is too "good" to make the PMDs a
reliable hatch and only the spinner falls and some caddis can be "counted
on." Without bugs, and the right bugs in the right quantity, the Ranch
is nearly hopeless. If we get together, the Madison or a trip into the
Park probably makes more predictable sense .... I "don't mind" getting
skunked a few days in a row on the Ranch but I'm not on a two week vacation

I'm actually toying with the idea of moving to the Missouri about mid-July
for two weeks .... I understand it's starting to fade and fall out of
popularity, which would be a great improvement for the place. The few
times I've fished there it had incredible numbers of rising fish and only
slightly greater numbers of drift boats, each with a full load of "count and
whoop" style fishermen. And the "rest of the day" ain't much there as
it runs by a freeway and there is little in the way of "pretty" near by ....
but it does have lots of very big trout ... lots.


Anyway, the Ranch is what it is and a sparse few of us genuinely love it.
But most people I meet are just there "place name collecting" The North
Fork of the Snake aka, Henry's Fork, has provided me with more truly great
fishing memories AND more days being soundly defeated than any river I've
fished ... and I've been to the majority of the more popular Western
'destinations" It's not a place to spend a single day taking hero pictures
to show around the office, rather one to patiently study and treasure over
time.