30 Jan From The Editor: Anticipating the Thaw

For a boy who only knew red dirt, heavy air, and the threat of twisters, visiting the Northern Rocky Mountains must have been magnificent. He traveled by train from the southern Great Plains to work on a U.S. Forest Service crew in northwest Montana, where he spent the summer building trails and planting trees. Then, as the season’s dry heat cured wheat fields in the valleys, he journeyed back home to Oklahoma with far more than calloused hands.

Big Sky Country captivated my dad so much that, soon after graduating from Texas’ Baylor University, he hightailed it back, settling in southwest Montana. He was transfixed by the outdoor opportunities and loved the people’s tangible optimism. He admired the clouds that loom, swirl, and swell across soft blue skies; the towering peaks that speak their stories, revealing the ways of water, wind, and tectonic forces; the cold rivers fed by snowmelt; the crisp, thin alpine air.

I’m so glad my dad picked Montana; it’s where he dedicated half a century of life and where we laid him to rest last fall, surrounded by the peaks, beneath the skies, and near the cool waters he loved.

These are traits beloved by so many of us who have tethered ourselves to the Northern Rockies. And they are poignantly at the fore when standing knee deep in the region’s rivers, during that moment’s pause as the body remains poised, hand clasped around the rod after the line floats through the air and the fly gently descends to the stream. This is a moment of stillness, when all that makes up the region melds into the shaping of shining water where painterly patterned trout reside.

This issue, the first edition of Big Sky Journal’s 32nd year, celebrates fly fishing and commemorates all that is Big Sky Country. It’s complete with fish tales and adventure, lessons learned, and moments remembered.

I used to wonder at the decision to publish our annual fly-fishing issue in February — why not in spring, summer, or even fall, when the trout streams are most alive in their brilliance? But this winter, in this season of life so near the recent passing of my father, who loved angling for trout, I’m grateful for the timing. It’s a collection for those days when you can’t see past the snow and ice that’s gripped the riverbed. It’s a reminder that Montana is so much more than months of winter — that much lies beneath the blanket of snow. It’s to help get you by on those cold, dark days of late winter and during the muddy flow of spring. For the snow and cold are a promise: glistening trout waters await.