Mayflies
Caddisflies
The Madison is the Greater Yellowstone freestone everybody pictures — a long, even-tempered riffle you can wade most of, famous for its summer salmonfly hatch and a steady run of caddis. Below Quake Lake it's the '50-mile riffle,' and it holds brown and rainbow trout the whole way down. Montana's high-water-mark rule keeps the banks open, which is no small thing. In a low, warm year it goes under hoot-owl restrictions, so check before you commit to an afternoon.
The Madison gathers in Yellowstone where the Firehole and the Gibbon meet at Madison Junction, then runs north and west toward Three Forks, where it gives itself up with the Jefferson and the Gallatin to make the Missouri. The famous middle river — the fifty-mile riffle, they call it, from Quake Lake down to Ennis — is one long, even, boulder-studded run, a braided freestone glide over volcanic cobble with no real pools to speak of, just a continuous walking-pace seam that holds fish everywhere and obviously nowhere. Below Ennis Lake it changes its mind, dropping through the granite of Bear Trap Canyon in heavier, pushier water. The Madison rose out of rhyolite and basalt and it shows: the bed is hard, round and slick. Wading is a careful business on greased bowling balls, and the current is stronger than it looks.
Wading: Slick round cobble in a strong current
- Mixed
- Unconfined
- Pool riffle