Madison River

The river

The Madison starts as the Firehole and Gibbon meeting at Madison Junction and ends at Three Forks, where it helps build the Missouri. Between those two points sit the wade-only stretch below Quake Lake, the fabled 50-Mile Riffle, and a chain of float sections that fish differently in July than they do in October. For a fly angler the useful way to read it is by water type, not mileage: boulder riffles above Lyons Bridge hold the best dry-fly fish, gravel runs downstream hold the biggest ones.

On this river

Reading the 50-Mile Riffle

The riffle is not one riffle: it is a repeating sequence of boulder shelf, chute, and gravel tail on roughly 200-metre spacing. Fish the shelf from the bank with a high stick, then walk the gravel tail and fish it again from behind — the same 30 metres of water fishes twice from opposite directions and gives two different drifts.

Fishing the evening caddis window

Hydropsyche adults return between 18:30 and full dark. Position yourself at the head of a tail so you drift into the seam where the riffle dumps into the pool, and grease the leader to within 40 cm of the fly so the tippet floats. When the light goes flat, switch to a swung X-Caddis and let the fly pull tight at the end of the drift rather than lifting for another cast.

When the dam releases

A rising hydrograph is not automatically unfishable. Fish move to the inside of bends and to any bank with a soft edge within a metre of the water. Shorten your casts to 6–8 metres, add 30 cm of depth, and use a heavier nymph rather than a bigger one. If the flow climbs above roughly 3,000 cfs, the wade stretch is no longer a wade stretch — move to a boat or to a spring creek for the day.