The Flathead is one of the most beautiful rivers in Montana — three forks of cold, jade-clear snowmelt draining the country along Glacier's western edge. The North and Middle forks fish like big wilderness freestones for native westslope cutthroat; the main stem below the forks is broad float water. It blows out brown in the spring melt and then settles into a long, clear summer of cutthroat on dries. Read the river, not the sky, only insofar as you watch the snowpack come off — once the runoff clears, it's a generous, forgiving fishery.
The Flathead comes off the high country along the western edge of Glacier in three forks — North, Middle and South — that gather into one big, cold, improbably clear river above Flathead Lake. The water carries the milled-down colour of the Belt argillite it runs over, a pale jade-green that lets you count cobbles in six feet of water. The North Fork traces the park boundary through lodgepole and cottonwood; the Middle Fork bangs through canyon and boulder along Highway 2; the main stem below the forks is broad, braided and gravel-floored. This is snowmelt water — it comes up hard and dirty in the May and June melt and then drops into a long, clean summer. The wading is honest gravel and cobble, but the river is bigger and colder than it looks, and the clarity flatters the depth.
Wading: Deceptive depth in very clear, cold snowmelt water
- Mixed
- Partly confined
- Plane bed
- Pool riffle