After a long drive, Mary and I rolled into our isolated headquarters—the U.S. Forest Service’s Kelly Forks Campground in northwest Idaho—and snapped up one of the few remaining campsites. The next morning, my ambitious, early-rising wife did a fresh campground reconnaissance and discovered the best streamside site had just been vacated. She threw her pack on the picnic table, raced back to our site, and rousted me out of my cozy sleeping bag, where I was still recovering from celebratory campfire doses of bourbon: “Dude, get up! You won’t believe the campsite I just scored.”
We quickly registered, moved, and settled in for a wonderful five-day stay.
Cutthroat bums roaming the American West know the marquee waters like teenagers touting their favorite bands. For Yellowstone cutthroat fans, the primary pilgrimage destination is the trout’s expansive, namesake watershed in Wyoming and Montana. Back from the brink of extinction, Lahontans inhabiting Nevada’s Pyramid Lake rank among the planet’s largest cutts, creating the odd spectacle of shoreline fly anglers using stepladders as casting platforms. The Bear River, wobbling in an indecisive, severely inebriated fashion between Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho, remains a stronghold for beautiful Bonneville cutts. Headwaters of the Colorado and Green Rivers still shelter brightly painted Colorado River cutthroat. The upper Rio Grande basin in Colorado and New Mexico holds its own unique, eponymous subspecies, as does Wyoming’s Snake River.
For fly-fishing vagabonds chasing westslope cutts, some of the best waters include Montana’s upper Flathead and Blackfoot River systems, along with Idaho’s exquisite Selway, Lochsa, Saint Joe, Middle Fork Salmon, and North Fork Clearwater Rivers, along with the latter’s legendary tributary, Kelly Creek.
Exploring a Primitive Landscape
Kelly Creek has long been a magnet for intrepid cutt cultists from across the country and even the world. Anglers don’t just wash up here on a whim, on the wild west slope of the Bitterroot Mountains, separating Idaho and Montana. It takes a dashboard of maps, coolers full of food and beverages, and a fondness for miles of dusty, labyrinthine gravel roads.
From the picnic table in our prime campsite, Mary and I surveyed Kelly, a short hike from a crystalline run. On warm, lazy summer afternoons we luxuriated in a perfect shoreline bathing pool, no doubt constructed by busy-beaver kids. When cutts were hunkered down under the high sun, we read, sipped IPAs, and watched birds and butterflies flit past, in a spectacular setting framed by spruce, fir, cedars, and mountain silhouettes.
But today’s splendor belies previous devastation. The Kelly Creek and North Fork watersheds were scorched by the 1910 “Big Burn,” the largest forest fire in American history, with soaring, skyscraper-high walls of flames, dozens of miles wide. Thunderous lightning strikes, searing heat, extreme aridity, and hurricane-force winds ignited a roaring inferno that incinerated 3.2 million acres in Idaho, Montana, and Washington, killing more than 70 firefighters. Timothy Egan’s compelling, 2009 National Book Award–winning The Big Burn, describes how desperate forest rangers reported the apocalypse to supervisors in Washington, D.C.: “They wrote of giant blowtorches flaming from treetop to treetop, of house-size fireballs rolling through canyons, pushed by winds of seventy miles an hour. They told of trees swelling, sweating hot sap, and then exploding; of horses dying in seconds; of small creeks boiling, full of dead trout, their white bellies up; of bear cubs clinging to flaming trees, wailing like children.” The scenario echoes what’s occurring with increasing frequency across the West today.
Depending on where a drop of water falls on the nearby, now revitalized, revegetated, and wildlife-rich Bitterroot Divide, it flows either east into Montana’s Clark Fork River drainage, or west into Kelly Creek and the North Fork Clearwater River. The Kelly headwaters fracture into three forks and tiny, tendril-like mountain creeks in Clearwater National Forest, punctuated by scattered lakes, mainly accessible by hiking and horse trails, or bushwhacking. One notable Kelly tributary is Cayuse Creek, excellent cutt water reached by hiking trail and a rough jeep trail ending at Never Again Flats. In Fly Fishing Idaho’s Secret Waters, Chris Hunt describes Cayuse’s niche in the Kelly watershed, explaining, “If there are secrets to be unlocked in this drainage—and because it’s so remote, I believe there are many—Cayuse Creek is easily among the best. While the fishing in Cayuse Creek is truly incredible, the real magic occurs when you lift your head from the water and take a look around. … There might not be a better place to be on a bluebird summer day than miles away from the road on the banks of Cayuse Creek. For an avid backcountry fly fisher, there’s no doubt.”
Another significant feeder, Moose Creek, enters Kelly along the backcountry edge, at the Kelly Creek Trailhead and Old Kelly Creek Ranger Station. Between the junction of Moose Creek and the Kelly Forks Campground, Forest Road (FR) 255 follows about 10 miles of the main stem, making access easy for anglers who are tolerant of narrow gravel roads but not up for long wilderness hikes. Deep, inviting pools can be scouted from the roadside turnouts, requiring only a scramble down to the creek; some pools are broken by tank-size boulders, creating holes that cutts covet.
Kelly Forks is the watershed’s one developed campground, although the nearby North Fork Clearwater offers other tempting options. One advantage of camping here is that you can easily walk to both Kelly Creek and the North Fork, with many angling options. It’s a pleasant place to stay, and the adjacent ranger station sells ice, if you can catch a Forest Service employee who’s not out doing maintenance, conducting wildlife surveys, or fighting forest fires. And if you have to wait, there’s a mesmerizing hummingbird feeder and a wildflower garden.
Two routes reach Kelly Creek; both are great back road drives and navigable by ordinary cars under normal conditions. First, travelers can take Diamond Road southwest out of Superior, Montana; upon reaching the Lolo National Forest boundary, the road becomes Trout Creek Road (FR 250) and soon turns from pavement to gravel. The road winds over the Bitterroot Divide, then drops down into the inviting upper North Fork, becoming Deception Saddle Road, before hitting the Kelly Forks Campground (54 miles from Superior). Fill the tank and stock up on supplies before leaving Superior.
Approaching from the west on US Highway 12, turn east onto State Route 11 at Greer and follow it 29 miles to the hamlet of Pierce; then take twisting FR 250 about 34 miles to the North Fork. Then turn east, upstream, staying on FR 250 for 18 miles to Kelly Forks Campground (if you can resist fishing inviting reaches along the way).
A Cutthroat Environment Inhabited by Ghosts
In addition to westslopes, Kelly Creek is home to native mountain whitefish and threatened native bull trout. While cutts are the main attraction, nonnative brook and rainbow trout also inhabit the greater North Fork watershed. Kelly Creek and the North Fork historically supported prodigious runs of chinook salmon and some of Idaho’s mightiest steelhead. The salmon and steelhead migrations from the Pacific Ocean and Snake River ceased when Dworshak Dam was constructed on the North Fork between 1966 and 1973.
The 717-foot-high barrier was erected without a fish ladder, an environmental disaster that altered the ecology of both Kelly Creek and the North Fork. Postspawn chinooks added important nutrients to the system, providing meals for bears and other wildlife; dislodged salmon eggs supplied food for trout. Conversely, the lack of smolts may now offer westslopes less competition for food and space. Poignantly, the last chinook and steelhead smolts drifted downstream through the construction site in 1970, never returning to their ancestral spawning grounds. Anadromous runs continue below Dworshak and up the Clearwater’s South and Middle Forks, but these beleaguered fish must negotiate a challenging obstacle course of downstream dams.
Fortunately, westslope cutts maintain a tenacious, albeit reduced, hold on their native territory west of the Continental Divide, including in Idaho, where they have survived since the end of the last ice age. The name “westslope” is misleading, as they reside on both sides of the Continental Divide. According to Dr. Robert Behnke, westslopes were originally the most abundant and widely distributed of the original 14 cutthroat subspecies. Their primary territory included northern Idaho, western and central Montana, the Gallatin and Madison River headwaters in Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park, and southern Alberta and British Columbia. Additionally, isolated populations persist farther west in the John Day River basin in central Oregon and along the east slope of Washington’s Cascade Range.
In contrast to Idaho, the westslope story has played out differently east of the divide in Montana, where the species has been listed as a species of special concern since 1972. When Lewis and Clark first scientifically noted (then eagerly devoured) 16- to 23-inch westslopes below the Great Falls of Montana’s Missouri River in 1805, the fish were prolific and widespread in the basin, which they cohabited with arctic grayling and mountain whitefish. Pure-strain westslopes eventually dropped to less than 5 percent of their original habitat in the upper Missouri basin, although Montana has aggressively worked to improve their situation for years, with notable successes.
Historic causes for reductions on both sides of the divide are multifaceted, including overharvest, and habitat destruction from mining, logging, agriculture, road building, and development. Cutts readily hybridize with rainbows, diluting genetic integrity and jeopardizing stream-specific evolutionary adaptations. Westslopes are outcompeted by nonnatives such as brook trout, which can quickly dominate. Climate change is affecting stream temperatures and flows, sometimes improving conditions for exotics but harming westslopes, which require cold, pure water. Often, especially in Montana, westslopes have been relegated to short, small headwater reaches, sometimes only a few miles long, with less than a thousand trout, disconnected from other populations and with diminished genetic variation.
West of the divide, westslopes have been better able to move and intermingle more freely through large river systems like the Kelly Creek–North Fork complex (Dworshak Dam notwithstanding). This has helped them battle challenges that have more severely diminished their numbers elsewhere. Additionally, Idaho Fish and Game mandated catch-and-release regulations for cutthroat on Kelly Creek in 1970, well before such rules were common, significantly increasing both the number and the size of the trout in the creek. Prior to that, they suffered from overharvest. The special regulations also mandate barbless hooks and prohibit bait.
Navigating a Narrow Window
Kelly Creek prime time is July through September, to avoid dicey roads, torrents of mountain spring runoff, and the first bite of early winter. Many of the stream’s cutthroat migrate downstream toward the North Fork and Dworshak in September, or even late August, to overwinter in larger, deeper, more secure water. The closer you get to autumn, the fewer westslopes remain, although September days are tough to beat: conflagrant fall color and big October Caddises, trout candy drawing cutts to the surface. The fish return to the headwaters to spawn in spring, but angling options are limited until the water drops.
Kelly Creek cutts crave attractors and terrestrials: Trudes, Stimulators, Wulffs, and Humpies, mixed with ant, beetle, cricket, and hopper variants. Rattle piscatorial cages with Fat Alberts, Chubby Chernobyls, Madam X’s, and Turck’s Tarantulas, perhaps paired with beadhead nymph droppers. More precision may be required with emergences of Pale Morning Duns, Blue-Winged Olives, Green Drakes, Golden Stoneflies, Yellow Sallies, or caddisflies. Weighted stonefly nymph imitations bounced along the rubble are productive, as are old-school facsimiles like Girdle Bugs. Streamers stripped through pools and runs can stimulate aggressive strikes, possibly also provoking sizable bull trout, which must be released.
A typical Kelly Creek cutt runs about a foot long, though fish up to 20 inches long inhabit the stream. Cutts generally don’t hold in riffles or white water, where you might find rainbows. Probe slower water around logjams and massive boulders, and target current seams, slick runs, deep pools, and willow-lined undercut banks. If you hit it right, the fish consistently rise through the transparent depths like graceful, famished ballerinas, but drifting along while studiously inspecting your offering. If you’re lucky, good, or both, they’ll flash the white inside of their mouths, as if slyly grinning at you. Just don’t make the mistake of striking too soon, before the trout has definitively grabbed your bug. Recite a nerve-calming mantra to hold back overeager reactions, like “Celebrate diversity,” “Peace on earth,” or even “Not all those who wander are lost.” “Fish on!” sometimes works too.
The Road Goes On Forever
On any real road trip, sojourners inevitably confront and accept the good with the bad. One day, Mary commandeered a midstream boulder as a casting platform. When she was ready to move on, she slipped, fell, and busted the tip off her mid-1990s-era 5-weight, the fast-action stick I have long, greedily coveted, perhaps my favorite in our large rod quiver. The silver lining? Mary was fine and—as she found out later—the rod company still had replacement tips.
Later, we drove to the end of the road, at the Kelly Creek Trailhead. While Mary rigged up her backup tenkara rod, I headed upstream to work some risers. Once satiated, I headed back and was confronted by a joyous scene: Mary was surrounded by a gregarious herd of pack goats—some bearded billies, sporting saber-like horns—while they curiously sniffed her, gently nipped her pack, and enjoyed being petted. Their owner said he was getting ready to load them up and hike into the roadless Kelly Creek headwaters to fish for cutts.
Reading by campfire on our final night, I contrasted our green, peaceful setting with Egan’s description of the deadly, hellish landscape that would have enveloped us during the late summer of 1910: “After racing through the Clearwater and Nez Perce forests, leveling nearly all living things in the Kelly Creek region, the fire swept up trees at the highest elevations. At this altitude, along the spine of the Bitterroots, the wind moved without obstruction, and the fire itself threw brands ten miles or more ahead of the flame front.”
I also pondered the salmon and steelhead that once pulsed past our campsite. But Kelly Creek was still purring nearby under infinite stars, and all felt reasonably right and resurgent amidst the creative destruction and resurrection in an ever-changing world. For the first time since 1946, long-lost grizzly bears have reappeared in the area. And one day, Dworshak will be demolished.
Sad to leave our Kelly Creek paradise after six days, Mary and I reluctantly broke camp and headed back to our Helena, Montana, home. We wound up the increasingly small North Fork toward Hoodoo Pass, listening to Robert Earl Keen. After carefully negotiating a landslide, then returning to my bliss, Mary suddenly shouted, “Watch out!”
I slammed the brakes as a large wolf crossed the road in front us, glared menacingly, then disappeared ghostlike into the thick, dark forest. Like the jewel-like cutthroat we tangled with and the iridescent Kelly Forks hummingbirds, the wolf was emblematic of the wild country we were fortunate to enjoy, a world away from the crazy, kinetic, hyper-wired 21st century. As we crested Hoodoo—painted with swaying wildflowers—I riffed on the quintessential lines from Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken”:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Jeff Erickson is a Montana-based writer and photographer and a longtime contributor to American Fly Fishing magazine.
Turck’s Tarantula
Hook: TMC 5262, sizes 6‒12
Thread: Tan, size 3/0
Tail: Amherst peasant tippets
Body: Hare’s mask or similar dubbing (colors of choice)
Legs: Rubber
Wing: White calf tail topped with pearlescent Accent or Krystal Flash
Collar: Natural deer hair
Head: Natural deer hair, spun and trimmed
Kelly Creek
NOTEBOOK
When: Prime season runs from July into September or October.
Where: North-central ID, on the west slope of the Bitterroot Range.
Access: Walk-and-wade fishing; the entire stream is encompassed by Clearwater National Forest. The lower watershed is vehicle accessible; the upper watershed is mainly reached by hiking, horse, and OHV trails.
Headquarters: The nearest (small) towns are Pierce, ID, and Superior, MT. Missoula, MT, is the largest nearby full-service city.
Appropriate gear: 3-to 6-wt. rods, floating and sinking-tip lines, 3X–6X tippets.
Useful fly patterns: Turck’s Tarantula, Trudes, Madam X, Stimulators, Sofa Pillow, Chernobyl Ant, Chubby Chernobyl, Elk Hair Caddis, X-Caddis, Renegade, Irresistible, Humpies, Wulffs, Yellow Sallies, PMD Sparkle Dun, Rusty Spinner, RS-2, Palomino, Serendipity, Brassie, Kaufmann Golden Stonefly, Brooks Black Stone Nymph, Yuk Bug, Bitch Creek, Prince Nymph, Copper John, Lightning Bug, Pheasant Tail Nymph, Woolly Buggers, Muddlers, Double Bunny, Matuka, Zonker, Zoo Cougar, Boogie Man.
Necessary accessories: Waders or wading boots (wet-wading in warm weather, but use wading boots or sandals with traction), polarized sunglasses, sun-protective clothing, fish-friendly net, camping and hiking gear. High-clearance 4WDs are useful for accessing remote portions of the upper watershed.
Nonresident license: $22.75/1 day plus $7/each additional day at time of purchase, $108/annual, $23.75/junior (14–17 years old).
Fly shops/guides: Northwest Outfitters, (208) 667-2707, www.nwoutfitters.com; Cayuse Outfitting, (208) 507-0781, (208http://www.idahocayuse.com) 962-7059, www.idahocayuse.com.
Books/maps: Idaho Blue-Ribbon Fly Fishing Guide by John Shewey; Flyfisher’s Guide to Idaho by Ken Retallic and Rocky Barker; Fly Fishing Idaho’s Secret Waters by Chris Hunt; Fishing Idaho by Joe Evancho; The Big Burn by Timothy Egan. Clearwater National Forest Visitor Map by U.S. Forest Service.
