Minnesotans find new life in Yellowstone

WEST YELLOWSTONE, MONT. - Fourteen years ago, Dick Greene starting looking west. Along with his partner, Barbara Klesel, he wanted a change of locale -- a move from the Twin Cities -- and a different type of work.

Greene had been general services manager at the Star Tribune, working there for 24 years, and Klesel had toiled similarly in the newspaper's finance department. Both aspired to owning a business. Something, preferably, in fishing.

"I was an avid fly fisherman, and each year made three or four trips to the Bighorn River [in Montana], and to other rivers out here," Greene said Thursday morning. "So Barbara and I started looking for a business to buy."

Greene spoke from behind the counter at the venerable Bud Lilly's Trout Shop in West Yellowstone, which he and Klesel bought in April 1995.

Named for a Bozeman, Mont., schoolteacher who founded the shop in 1950, Bud Lilly's sits nearly at the entrance to Yellowstone National Park, which for many fly anglers is about as close to Mecca as the sport has.

"Yellowstone is still a fishery that draws anglers from all over the world," Greene said.

So much so that West Yellowstone, which otherwise is mostly a collection of motels, restaurants and souvenir T-shirts, is home to seven fly shops, each seeking as customers the river-loving pilgrims who travel here from near and far.

Some of this town's trout shops, Bud Lilly's among them, offer a full selection of flies, rods, waders and accessories. Fly-fishing fashion is also in vogue, and racks of stylish shirts and other clothing are displayed neatly, for women as well as men.

Add to this an art gallery and an Internet business, and Bud Lilly's, for one, is a growing concern, now 14 years running in Greene and Klesel's hands.

"A lot of things have happened since 1995, including whirling disease in trout, forest fires and now the economy," Greene said. "But we're still here."

However plentiful the park's brown trout -- and rainbows and cutthroats -- they don't jump on their own into anglers' creels from the Madison, the Lamar, the Gibbon and Yellowstone's other spectacular and postcard-pretty rivers.

Many anglers tip the fishing odds in their favor by seeking the latest reports from area fly shops about which rivers are working best, and how and when the park's trout can most readily be fooled.

Still other anglers pay to be guided.

"Guiding in the park is about 20 percent of our business," Greene said.

The word Thursday from Greene was that the Gallatin River, in Yellowstone's northwest corner, was fishing well in the afternoon and evening (the water is too cold to be productive in the morning), while in the northeast, the Lamar was fishing well, as were Soda Butte and Slough Creek.

Also worth a try, always, is the Madison River, formed in the park at Madison Junction by the joining of the Gibbon and Firehole rivers.

From this intersection until the Madison exits the park where moose, elk, eagles, bison, bears and coyotes routinely reveal themselves to anglers whose ambitions and successes in this landscape ultimately seem trivial.

In that respect, Yellowstone Park and its rivers are not wholly dissimilar from the Whitewater and the Root, among other Minnesota rivers, streams and creeks. In each, cold, flowing water ensures the presence of trout and the beauty that necessarily surrounds them.

"What's unique about Yellowstone is that the park's rivers complement one another," Greene said. "Each is different than the others, and when one isn't fishing well, another will be."

Thursday afternoon, in Yellowstone's Gallatin River Valley, on Greene's advice, I tied a size 16 Copper John a couple feet back from a grasshopper imitation. This was along a stretch of the Gallatin that bubbled gin clear over timeless rocks, seeming to flow with no beginning and no end.

A short while later, in hand was the day's first cutthroat trout, shimmering in the bright sunlight, gills flaring, and, soon, back in the river.

Dennis Anderson • danderson@startribune.com