I Have Returned

 9/3/22:  3,300 miles of driving over 4 days but I'm back home.  This time my knees had little or no pain vs. last year when I could not have done it without Lidocaine patches.

My plan to fish Paradise Valley in Montana chiefly centered around the Yellowstone River.  There were also some small tributaries that looked tempting as they flowed out of the nearby mountains.  Due to very poor research on my part, none of that panned out.  Like Henry's Fork, the Yellowstone is simply too deep and fast to wade but is ideal for drift boats if you are willing to hire a guide.  The water looks quite good despite the catastrophic early spring floods.  I completely misunderstood that the valley is extremely dry, hard baked and hot, even well up into the mountains.  I thought it would be greener and cooler - not.

So, I moved on to the Big Horn River which some guys from CT I ran into at Island Park, ID put me onto.  It was about a 3-hour drive but fit nicely as part of my gradual swing eastward, in the general direction of  home.  I heard on the radio, when I was about 15 minutes from there that Montana Fish & Game put a ban on fishing the river because of high heat.

That put me on the edge of the eastern Montana "bad lands" which are flat, hot and dry.  News was full of dire warnings about heatwaves from Colorado to Montana so, I just kept right on driving and started for home.  Lots and lots of construction zones dragged the speeds down to 55MPH and often lower.  Aggrivating.

I'll need to do a much better job of research for next year's trip.