Madison River
Dam: 722 cfs
Kirby: 1,250 cfs
Varney: 1,950 cfs
The Upper Madison continues to fish extremely well throughout the entire river. Sure there have been a few off days, but even then people are picking up decent numbers of good fish. The wade section is still mostly a nymphing game right now, and we’ve had great reports roll in from people fishing caddis larva, PT’s, serendipities, yellow sally nymphs, and a myriad of other patterns. We are starting to see a few caddis pop in the wade section above Lyons, but the vast majority of the bugs are below Windy point for the moment and more bugs will be popping below Lyons Bridge with each passing day. The rubber leg and general stonefly bite has started to wake up again over the last few days and it should only get better as we await the emergence of our Salmonflies and Golden Stones…speaking of which, they have already started hatching in good numbers below McAtee Bridge. It’s not quite full-blown yet, but there are enough shucks on the rocks and adults crawling on willow branches that the fish have started to take notice. We should start to see the majority of the hatch start to get going here over the next couple of days, but if you are looking to throw big bugs all day I would concentrate your efforts between Mac and Town for the time being. In addition to stoneflies, there are also TONS of caddis, PMDs, and Flavs hatching down there as well. Also worth mentioning is that the streamer bite has been incredible when the clouds have rolled in. We did a float yesterday expecting to be throwing dries all day and ended up with four hours of some of the best streamer fishing we have seen this year. Olive happened to be the color but we also landed a few on black and olive over white when the sun peaked through for just a second.
