We’ve had some calls in lately asking about floating the Yellowstone. Unless you are ready for the ice adventure of your life, it would be a lot safer to wait a few weeks. As you can see in the photo above, you might be able to get a boat through the slot in the ice, but it would be a real challenge to row much less fish effectively. Do yourself a favor and stick to wade fishing. This winter is a much different winter from last year. The river is completely frozen across from above Mill Creek past Mallard’s rest. The most open water is in town, but even town is too low and too dangerous to float right now. CFS is currently 1260 at Carter’s but dropped to around 700CFS last week, which means there’s a good chance your boat is going to hit bedrock behind the baseball field’s and also behind the golf course. We say stay safe, wait to float and wade fish for now. For the most fish try nymphing rubber legs, midge larva patterns, buggers, small beadheads, and eggs. The water clarity is finally starting to get less clear, so if you want to fish streamers you can start fishing patterns with more flash in them. The streamer bite is definitely slower than the nymph bite out there, although as water temperatures rise in April we will see some of the best streamer fishing of the year. Could be an interesting run off – snow water equivalent on the Upper Yellowstone is currently 145% – meaning we could be looking at another mid-late July clearing if precipitation keeps up. We should have a better guess in May once runoff starts as to how much snow pack is left and how quickly it will come out of the mountains. So far it looks like we’ll have a heathy water year to say the least, with plenty of water well into late August and September. Give us a call anytime for a fishing update as ice conditions are changing daily.
