I’ve had the opportunity to fish one of my favorite stretches of water on Bear Valley Creek near Stanley, Idaho over the past week.  Bear Valley Creek offers spring creek like water for sizable cutthroats, smaller feisty brookies, a few rainbows, and whitefish.  But, fishing there is not always beginner fishing 101….it often can be graduate level and very technical if you want to tempt the larger fish.  Sometimes, you can’t seem to raise a fish, other times, you opportunistically catch a few isolated fish on a variety of dry fly patterns.  But, occasionally the stars all align properly and you slay a big cutthroat like the one pictured below.  But, its really all about getting out with a bamboo fly rod, an old Hardy reel, and experiencing a beautiful piece of water in total solitude…it’s not about the numbers of fish you catch.

A Big Cutthroat That Rose to a Little Yellow Sally Dry Pattern.