Mayflies
Chironomids
Gammarids
The Missouri below Holter Dam at Craig fishes like a spring creek the size of a real river — huge, fertile, stable year-round, and stuffed with rainbows and browns. The hatches are the kind you tell stories about: Baetis, PMD, caddis, and Trico, in their seasons, often all at once. The flow comes off Holter, not the clouds. Locals call the stretch the 'Land of Giants,' and on a good day you'll understand why.
The Missouri proper is born at Three Forks where the Madison, Jefferson and Gallatin come together, but the river fly-fishers love runs below Holter Dam near Craig, a tailwater the size of a small sea. This is enormous water — a quarter-mile wide in places, deep and even, sliding across open prairie-and-canyon country with a steady, dam-governed flow. Don't let the size fool you into thinking freestone: the Mo fishes like a giant spring creek, weed-rich and insect-mad, the trout pods sipping on long glassy flats and hanging in the seams below the islands. The bed is gravel and rooted weed; the banks are grass and rock. Wading the edges and the inside flats is straightforward, but the main river is too big and too deep to cross, and a boat is how most of it gets fished.
Wading: Too big and deep to cross on foot
- Limestone
- Unconfined
- Pool riffle
- Large river