Today the pace has slowed a little, Polly’s is still a restaurant but not the gathering spot it was once, the shops are a little less crazy but still busy, the parking lots have some extra room on most days. It seems that everything here has gone through a metamorphosis except the river. Sure, it has ups and downs like any river, but overall, it’s still the same river it was back then. If you talk the “old-timers” today, they will tell you that the fishing is much the same too. We recently spoke with Mike Craig, a friend who arrived early on the scene and opened the first fly shop in Ft. Smith, and just yesterday he said the fish are as nice now as they were back in the early 80’s. The big difference he sees is that back then if you could get the tippet through the eye of the fly, you could catch the fish. He says the fish that now require RIO 5x would have been caught on 2x “back then”.
As I read through George Kelly’s introduction in the book, I couldn’t help but wonder why he never wrote more because he has a special gift for writing and as I turned the pages he pulled me into the history of the Bighorn – and I’m not a history buff. I started telling trivia to our guests and they thought it was corny, but interesting. Did you know the Crow were not the first Native Americans in this valley? It’s likely they were progenitors of the Shoshone tribe. The Crows didn’t arrive until late in the 18th century. And how about this, there is a buffalo jump found on the Hoodoo Creek-Dryhead Creek divide with deposits of buffalo remains sixty feet deep! But while that’s interesting, I was anxious to see what he has to say about the fishing.
