Fishing Montana's Remote
Blackfeet Reservation
by John Holt
Part of the rolling high plains of northwest Montana, the Blackfeet Indian Reservation is wild, unmarked country. To the west, the northern Rockies make for a steady supply of grizzly bear and stiff wind.
When that stubborn gale abates, the fly fishing here can be extraordinary (April and May are the best months). But, unlike the rest of Montana--once just as wild, now relentlessly outfitted--few locals have shown much interest in making the Blackfeet any easier to decipher. This is no guided float down the Yellowstone. Fishing the water is the work of the devoted.
With more than one-and-a-half million acres of coulees, bluffs, plateaus, lakes, and ragged mountains, the terrain here resists the uninitiated. Which is why it goes unremarked season after season: Roads prominent on the map have a tendency to vanish after even a brief squall; only a fraction of the streams and lakes are marked; the best have yet to be named at all. The Blackfeet themselves are, as guide Joe Kipp, himself a Blackfeet, puts it, "kind of reserved about outsiders."
Beyond the logistic difficulties--tribal and individual property rights to content with, Braille-like navigating that can burn half a day's fishing before you even see water--there is what might be called the reservation's spiritual component: In the winter of 1883, at the edge of what is now Ghost Ridge Lake, 600 Blackfeet starved and froze to death as government supply lines to the new reservation seized in the cold. Fishing the hundreds of miles of creekbed, you might come across a tumble of human bones--an old graveyard washed out in the runoff. It is a lonely place, a place with a past. And a place with politics: The outsider stands in the stream as a symbol. Luckily, this is a beautiful place to be a symbol.
On the days of rare abundance, you'll cast to visible trout: browns, brookies, 10-pound rainbows--a nerve-racking, wonderful experience. You might see a mountain lion, as I did one day as it stalked the foals of a Blackfeet remuda in the hills above my fishing hole. Then again, you might not see it; you'd do well to rent the eyes of a good guide. Joe Kipp's are some of the best.
Enlisting under Kipp means lurching over broken road and down obscure trail. It also means finding yourself on rarely fished water. Kipp has taken me far up narrow drainages to ancient petroglyphs done with elk blood and rendered fat, the walls rising hundreds of feet above an ice-cold stream and its small, silvery cutthroats. We've wandered onto the prairie, along the eastern edge of the reservation, to a lake clear and isolate. On one occasion there, to "clear our heads," we inhaled the fumes of a smoldering braid of sweet grass. The treatment must have taken: I tagged a fat rainbow on my third cast.
To fish the Blackfeet Reservation, take an eight-weight rod to cheat the wind, a six-weight for calm days, and a three- or four-weight for the creeks. You can cover most situations with a selection of streamers, hare's ear nymphs from number 8 to number 16, caddis, attractor dries, and some terrestrial patterns.
Delta, Northwest, United, and Horizon airlines fly into Great Falls, Montana, then it's about two hours to Joe Kipp's 640-acre ranch. Kipp's bunkhouse accommodates four; an all-inclusive package runs $290 per day for one person. $225 per person for two or more, $185/$135 without room and board. Contact Kipp's Morning Star Troutfitters at 406-338-2785. Further information is available from the Blackfeet Fish and Game Department at 406-338-7207 or from the Department of Commerce in Helena, 800-541-1447.
