1 September 2009 - Tuesday

AM up at 0530 – drive down the road in the dark to Jackson. It is cold – 39F – I put on full winter gear with fleece lined tights, balaclava, heavy winter gloves, ear muffs, etc. Very few cars and trucks as I bike out and back from Jackson – very scenic country at sunrise again!

 Post ride I swung by to chat with Richard in Jackson where we discuss the evolution of farming equipment into computers and advanced electronics – starting to require significant education for the technicians who support such equipment. Also chatted about wolves – just a week or so earlier there had been a kill of 122 sheep in the Beaverhead River valley. Damage to herds come when special cows used for breeding etc are attacked and decimated. People are starting to have significant fears about the wolves on them and their children. While we were in Montana, the state start issuing permits for wolf hunts – there would be a harvest of 75 wolves statewide – they ended up selling something like 7500 permits!! GK and I speculated that this might be a bad time to be a pet dog running loose! We even chatted about the Blended Wing Body aircraft – Richard was curious as to what we thought of it Well, it works as evidenced by a Northrop version and of course the B2 bomber. However, the economics have not worked out yet for a commercial version. Maybe that will change in the future but not right now.

Driving back to Wisdom, I run into a local cattle drive where they run the herds down the road to move them from one field to another. There are real cowboys on horses with herding dogs driving the cattle down the road – pretty cool! Listened to great tunes on the MP3 player – another day in paradise! Back in the hotel, picked up a thermos of coffee, a couple of sandwiches, and munched down to Cliff Bars on the way to the Cemetery hole.

Cemetery Hole Braids – we head back into the braids and go looking for new waters from yesterday. The fishing was pretty easy yesterday and we are all confident about today – well that will be true for one of us only…….

AB, JR, and AM head up stream while GK elects to go downstream. Something like 5 miles of water lay in front of us with great looking pools, runs, sunny skies – for AB, JR, and AM, the fishing "sucks" – AM’s only victory is hooking into a small grayling on a #20 trico, 6x tippet, 5 ft, 2 wt rod. AB high point was that the pain in his knees stopped after taking aspirin! JR high point was hooking 3 fish in a little bucket under a tree and with wood all around it!

Meanwhile GK is having a super day – he started by catching a grayling on a hopper, then following that by catching many, many, many brookies (5 in 5 casts at one point!) – a spectacular day of fishing that was every bit as good as the AM/AB/JR fishing was awful.

We had a long walk back through the fields to the highway – ducked under barbed wire – it was another mile back to the cars along the highway. We got so far apart during the day that the portable radios would not let us talk to Greg and vice versa.

Back to the hotel to shower and cleanup. Dinner was had at the Big Crossing Restaurant- in honor of a big day, GK springs for dinner for us all!! Thank you GK!!