Finding Great Spots To Fish In Montana

Almost every conversation I have about fly fishing, fly selection or rod selection ends with “where is the best place to catch fish?”  My answer is usually a bit of a smart aleck answer, ‘in the water’!  In reality, you are not going to get anyone to tell you their ‘top secret’ spots.  Sure, you will get people to give you some decent spots, potentially even good spots from time to time. But you typically don’t get the great spots. But, you can do some work on your own to find those great spots.

I am fortunate to live in Montana for several reasons. One is that Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks has a great web page to get information from and is where I always start looking for new spots. MFISH, their fish finder section, is awesome to get you pointed in the right direction. You can find MFISH under the fishing tab on the Montana FWP web page or just Google ‘Montana MFISH’. MFISH allows you to search for bodies of water, areas and species in any combination you want. I can search for all tributaries that are part of the North Fork of The Flathead River that have native cutthroats or just rivers that have native cutthroats in Flathead County or just all rivers along the Flathead River.  If a good small streams flows into another good stream, you probably have a great spot to investigate. MFISH allows you to download the information to an Excel spreadsheet to sort as well.

To get started I typically select a ‘Hydrologic Unit Code’.  I pick the unit I want and usually leave the ‘Species’ blank. The next page allows you to pick what you want to see.  The top button is ‘Fish Distribution’ and gives you rankings by the FWP for how many fish are in that body of water. I download that to Excel.

Once I have my list downloaded I delete all the bodies of water that the fish are not considered ‘Abundant’ or ‘Common’, and delete all the fish species I have no interest in, like suckers.  I then turn to Google Earth. Over the last several winters I have spent several hours finding river confluences that have good fishing per Montana FWP, with Google Earth. Some look promising and I make a list of those I want to scout out. Google Earth is great because I can see bends and structure in rivers as well as depth, the darker the blue the deeper the water, and structure in lakes. This gives me a great idea where to start fishing.

The other great thing about Google Earth is that I can see trails, road side pull offs as well as old forest service roads. A pull off gives you an idea of where people pull off the road to park.  They are stopping for a reason.  Some might be because of great hikes. But a quick look at where the trail goes might give you information as to what the pull off is for.

Now the good part. You put in the time studying, now grab your forest service map go drive the road.  I pick five to ten spots to stop at and investigate on a trip. Some require short hikes some have no hikes at all. Sometimes I find pull offs that I did not see on Google Earth.  The first thing I do is roll down the window and listen for water. Then I look for a trail leading away from the pull off. A simple comparison to your forest service map gives you an idea of where the river is and how far away. I have found a lot of new spots purely by accident by just pulling off to the shoulder and listening and looking.

The work I put into finding spots in the winter with MFISH and Google Earth has lead me to some really good fishing spots. Trust me, those are not spots that I disclose to other people.