30 Jan Local Knowledge: Jim Klug and Yellow Dog Flyfishing

It should come as no surprise that upon entering the Bozeman offices of Yellow Dog Flyfishing, I’m greeted by Daisy, a lovable yellow lab whose tail wags back and forth at the speed of light. It’s probably equally unsurprising that she shows me Montana-sized hospitality. That is, after all, the name of the game for Yellow Dog, the world’s preeminent fly-fishing travel and outfitting company. 

The warm reception continues as I enter the office of Jim Klug, the company’s founder and CEO and Daisy’s human. The room is filled with pictures and keepsakes from a man who has traveled the globe with a fly rod in hand and published two photography books, including the new Waypoints: Flyfishing the World, which celebrates the company’s recent 25th anniversary. 

Yellow Dog isn’t Klug’s first rodeo in the fly-fishing world. Having been introduced to the sport by his grandfather, he grew up fishing the waters of central Oregon, and by 14 years old, he was working at his hometown fly shop in Bend, Oregon, sorting hooks and bagging tying materials. “When I was 16 or 17, my neighbor, a local steelhead outfitter, asked me to work for him. I assumed I was going to be guiding, but he quickly set me straight and let me know that I needed to pay my dues,” Klug recalls. “I ended up rowing gear boats on the Deschutes for multi-day guided trips. It was a great apprenticeship on learning how to row and read rivers, and I learned so much getting to spend time with experienced guides who were legends on the river.” 

The Amazonian peacock bass, from the waters of the Agua Boa River in Brazil, is mesmerizingly vibrant yellow-green in color.

Klug eventually started running day trips and guiding on the Deschutes, and after graduating from high school, his next stop was Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. But it was the terrain he crossed to get there in the fall and his travel home to Oregon in the spring that really caught his eye. “I started driving the Oregon to New Hampshire route that went through Montana, and I just fell in love with the state,” he remembers. “As an 18-, 19-year-old, I knew this was where I wanted to be.” 

“During my college summers, I started working for Gary Lewis of Lone Mountain Ranch and Steve French, the founder and owner of Gallatin River Guides,” he explains. “Then, when I graduated and everyone else was trying to get their acceptance letters from Wall Street or applying for grad school, I decided I was going to head back to Montana to focus on guiding for another year or two.” 

On most of these early guide trips, Klug was joined by his yellow lab, Bo, whose profile now defines Yellow Dog’s logo. “He was an awesome fishing dog. If I was rowing, he’d lie under my seat, and if we were wading, he’d watch us from the bank,” Klug recalls. “Clients wouldn’t always remember my name, so when they requested me for their next trip, they’d say, ‘I want the guy with the yellow dog.’” 

While many of his clients didn’t recall his name, he was quickly becoming known in the fly-fishing world. After a few years of guiding, he became a sales rep for a varied collection of fly-fishing manufacturers. “I was in my 20s, single, so I’d jump in the truck with the dog, drive my three-state territory, and visit every fly shop in the Northern Rockies. On the way, I would get to fish every river I passed.” 

Anglers read the water from the banks of the Eqalugsugssuit River while fishing for Arctic char in Greenland.

His success and passion for fishing eventually led to a job with Scientific Anglers and a position as national sales manager while he was still in his 20s. “The only problem with that job was that I had to work out of 3M’s corporate headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota,” he says. “I was there for a couple of years, and I learned a lot — almost like a stint in business school. But I also learned it was not what I wanted to do or where I wanted to be.” 

During this time, when he wasn’t sneaking back to the house he never sold in Bozeman, Klug was using all his vacation time to jet off to Belize to fly fish. “These days, going to Belize is as easy as going to Montana to fish, but back then, it was considered about as exotic and remote a fishing destination as you could get,” he says.

As a frequent visitor, Klug made friends with the local Belizean guides, as well as the new owner of the El Pescador Lodge, Logan Gentry. Back then, the fly-fishing world was pretty small, and word spread that Klug had some experience in Belize. 
Soon, he was regularly giving advice about where to fish, the best guides, and where to stay. “I eventually was sending so many people down to Logan that he told me I should consider a career change to becoming a focused booking agent,” Klug says. 

At first, Klug thought the idea was crazy, considering how many adventure and international travel companies were already established. But looking closer, he identified an opportunity for a fly-fishing-focused travel company with the kind of attention to detail and emphasis on local relationships he’d developed in Belize. 

Not only did his angling and community-focused approach set his fledgling company apart, but so did the Yellow Dog name, which has grown into a well-known brand in the fishing industry. “Though I hadn’t really ever left, I came back to Bozeman and started the company in 2000,” he says. “At first, it was a one-man, one-dog operation, and we only had four destinations, all in Belize. Now, we’re on the third yellow-dog mascot with 42 team members, more than 250 destinations [including many in the Mountain West], and operations in 40-plus countries.” 

A school of permit cruise the tropical blue water of the Mesoamerican Reef in northern Belize.

In 2009, Klug and his business partner and Yellow Dog co-owner, Ian Davis, bought the company’s headquarters, a charming Craftsman-style bungalow on Willson Avenue, two blocks off Bozeman’s historic Main Street. “It dates back to the 1890s, and we’ve been told it was the home and office of one of the town’s first doctors,” Klug explains. “When we bought it, it was a used bookstore, and it was in rough shape, with the floors sagging under the weight of tons of old books.” 

Renovated twice to house the growing company, the office now stands as a testament to 25 years of taking care of anglers’ every need so that each excursion is a trip of a lifetime, whether it’s the client’s first or tenth. But that doesn’t mean owning an international travel company has always been smooth sailing. 

In fact, the COVID pandemic came within a hair’s breadth of putting Yellow Dog out of business. “In 2020, we were suddenly hit with thousands of canceled trips, and each one needed to be worked on, adjusted, credited, or rebooked at a later date,” Klug explains. “These were dark days for the travel industry, and I thought there’s no way we’re surviving this, let alone going to get through all the paperwork and phone calls to deal with these canceled trips. But we just kept saying, ‘We’re eating the elephant, taking one bite at a time.’” 

Though a lot of the team was temporarily laid off when the world shut down, Yellow Dog withstood the pandemic and was able to swallow the entire elephant. Then, something amazing happened: The world re-opened, and the travel business went crazy. “By the end of 2021, the pendulum had fully swung the other way. People had had enough of buying stuff off of Amazon and wanted to instead buy experiences and see new places,” he says. “Ever since then, we’ve been holding onto a fast-moving freight train, and things haven’t calmed down yet.” 

Another thing keeping Klug and his team busy has been the 2022 purchase of Fins & Feathers Fly Shop, now Yellow Dog Fly Shop, at its iconic location in Bozeman’s Four Corners area. The shop location is on the way to the Madison and Gallatin rivers, Big Sky, West Yellowstone, and Yellowstone National Park. “Coming out of the pandemic, we knew we wanted to diversify, and the shop and retail offerings are a big part of that effort,” Klug explains. 

An angler fishes a small canyon stream high in the Spanish Pyrenees.

Buying the shop also completes what Klug calls the “customer experience circle.” “Prior to stepping into the retail world, we could help our clients decide on the location, plan the trip, and deal with the logistics, which was about 345 degrees of the circle,” Klug explains. “But the last gap we couldn’t fill was ensuring they actually showed up with the right tackle, equipment, and flies to ensure their success on the water.” 

The right gear is key to success, especially when the company sends anglers to remote, off-the-grid places without fly shops or retail infrastructure. Yellow Dog now offers a one-stop shop and e-commerce platform that can outfit anglers for any destination — be it the Gallatin River, a remote atoll in the Indian Ocean, or anywhere in between. 

While the new fly shop shows how focused Klug and the Yellow Dog team are on taking care of their customers, the company is also dedicated to taking care of the places they send their clients. 
Enter the Yellow Dog Community and Conservation Foundation, a nonprofit that has funded over $2 million in grants that support the communities, fisheries, and ecosystems clients visit. These funds could be used for mangrove restoration, English education programs, hurricane relief, river clean-up, or sustainable development initiatives. “Some of these places literally exist because of fly fishing,” Klug explains, “so it’s up to us to take care of these people, support these communities, and protect these environments.” 

While the nonprofit has an international component, the foundation also remains firmly rooted in Montana, supporting projects such as the Montana Trout Unlimited Youth Camp, Fish Kind, Upper Missouri Waterkeeper, Fishing Outfitters Association of Montana, Guiding for the Future, and many others. 

When I caught up with Klug, he was between trips to Slovenia and Costa Rica. He and his team regularly visit all their partners to ensure the highest level of logistics and fishing for their clients. But despite being on the road several months out of the year (about half the time he traveled when he started), Klug is still drawn to his home waters.

Indian angling legend Bobby Satpal holds a trophy golden mahseer caught in the Himalayan waters of the Kingdom of Bhutan.

“I try to run down to the Gallatin every couple of days, even if it is only for an hour or two,” he says. When he’s not on the river or traveling the globe, he’s at home with his wife, Hilary, an English teacher and school administrator, as well as a great angler in her own right, notes Klug. They raised all three of their children — daughter, Carson, and sons, Finn and Gus — in Bozeman, and Klug relishes the time he’s spent with them on Montana’s rivers and in its wild places. 

In fact, this fall, before Carson left for college in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Klug asked her what she wanted to do on her last day, and she said, “Go fishing.” In a full-circle moment, they headed to the Gallatin, where it all started in Montana for Klug. “She really got after it and out-fished me by far,” he laughs. “It was a great day on the water.” And, whether you’re fishing the far reaches of Mongolia or home waters here in Montana, that’s what it’s all about.

An avid fly fisherman based in Bozeman, Montana, Stephen Camelio is a former editor for In Style magazine and has written for Fly Rod & Reel, The Drake, and Field & Stream, among others. He was a regular contributor to Yellowstone Quarterly, and he wrote the fishing chapter for the guidebook Yellowstone in a Day. Recently, Camelio wrote the fly-fishing feature film Mending the Line, which was the number one film on Netflix the week it premiered.