With the woman out of town a friend and I headed for an obscure corner of Northwest Montana to hike, fish, and practice photography. After a long drive and a treacherous climb up a precipitous washout we got to the trail head at around 11.00. The trail was a little over 1.5 miles to the lake and gained around 1000 feet but despite these unimpressive statistics it was pretty hard.
It was steep but as soon as the forest opened up we got great views of the valley.
By this point we crossed numerous washed out, steep, and rocky switchbacks. We were close!
This was our first view of the lake. It was dead calm and we spotted plenty of fish rising! I heard rainbows but I wasn't entirely sure what to expect.
I only had one deer hair caddis and no midges so after losing the caddis things got tough for me. My buddy used a little spinner and he pulled in a nicer one, but because the reel had very little line he couldn't cover much territory...
So I decided to cover more on foot! While walking on this logjam I spotted the outflow. In the first little pool I spotted, photographed, and filmed, a snake swimming after a brook trout.
At this point he had gotten a good chomp down and they were struggling. The snake kept trying to get the fish onto shore but the fish fought hard. I continued on to climb up as high as I could to get a picture of the lake from above. I got pretty high but in the grand scheme of things I was nowhere near as high as I needed to go for a good aerial photo.
That's alright though because the colors were beautiful, the fish were eager enough, and the mountains were awesome! After a few hours up here we bid the lake goodbye and headed back toward the car. On the way home I caught a few little trout in some of the rivers along the highway.
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