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The Black River Runs Through It

by Sean Mulready

Ever since Robert Redford got Brad Pitt to star in A River Runs Through It, fly fishing has had an even brighter aura about it.

In the Redford film it took on an almost religious quality, a shared experience for a family divided in their faith but united in their certainty that there was value in fly fishing’s beauty and its harmony with nature.

Debby Guillow loves those elements of the sport but knows that fly fishing has its downside.
She and her husband Don have become such fans that their house often gets cluttered with the tools of the sport.

“My dining room table is covered with feathers and hooks,” she admitted while laughing about how nearly everything might turn out to be useful in creating a new fly.

“I’m afraid a bald spot is going to show up on my cat someday because my husband decided he needed a bit of that color fur.”

Guillow who now works as a Polarity Therapy Practitioner at the Okemo Wellness Center, has fished since she was a child.  Her dad took her fishing in Ludlow area streams in those days when fishing was as basic as tossing a hooked worm into the current and hoping for the best.

Fly fishing demands a whole lot more; more gear, more skill, more time and more commitment. However, the rewards are greater than just a few small brook trout that might hop on your hook and more and more people have become aware of that over the last few decades.

She is more aware than most of the impact of Redford’s film. Back in the early 90s, she was working at a fly fishing shop in Jackson Hole and they were regularly “running gear” up to Redford’s crew in Bozeman, Montana. Even in that fly fishing hotbed, the film’s release sparked greater interest in the sport.

It was at that shop where she first became immersed in a real flyfishing culture; a group of guides who would work 28 days in a month taking people out fishing…and then go fishing themselves on their two days off.

Vermont’s fly fishing subculture is smaller but no less committed to the sport. Guillow enjoys the shared society of those who most appreciate the sport’s unique traditions.

“I got involved in fly fishing because a bunch of my friends did it,” she admitted. “I loved the serenity. It’s not catching fish to eat. It’s catching fish to fool fish.”

She tells a story of fishing with a guide in Idaho as being the perfect parable of that rationale for fishing with flies.

“I was on a spring creek and the guide and I noticed a big fish taking flies off the surface of a pool just above us. I wanted him to cast but he insisted that I should,” she recalled. She remembered feeling the pressure because in those quiet pools, you would probably get just one cast before the fish would spook and stop feeding.

“I got in position and started false casting and finally dropped my line in front of the fish. The fly floated down and he got it. I had it on for 1.8 seconds before I lost it. We considered the day a success.”

Guillow was fortunate to have the expert assistance of a whole string of guides in a region known all over the world for its flyfishing opportunities. Southern Vermont doesn’t have quite the same cachet as the areas around Yellowstone but there are a lot of good places for fly fishing in the Green Mountains and many qualified guides to help you find your way into the sport.

Kevin Ladden (802-228-5195) has fished Ludlow waters for decades and makes a living teaching people about the art and science of flyfishing. As a registered Orvis guide, he has taken people to streams around Okemo Valley and showed them how to fish and how to understand the environment around them.

“I’m an amateur naturalist and like to talk to people about flowers, insects, birds and animals.  I’m also into local history and enjoy talking about where we are and what went on there years ago,” he explained. “I try to make it fun even when the fishing is difficult.”

Clients like New Yorker Jeffrey Tullman are quick to confirm Ladden’s skills.

“In summer, I fish sometimes when it’s not optimal,” said Tullman who has hired Ladden several times a summer for the past 15 years. “Kevin has the unique talent of not just fishing big waters but also headwaters that are still fishable in August.”

That allows a client to find fish or get access to waters on private lands that he otherwise would never even know about.

Robert Cankes has been with Ladden even longer. Cankes lives in New Jersey but works in New York City and relishes every chance he gets to fish with Ladden.

“He actually taught me how to flyfish,” he said. “Now we’ve developed such a bond that I come up here two or three times a year to fish with him.”

They usually work the waters of the Black River, which has a trophy section along Route 131 and gets stocked each year with nearly 7,000 big brown and rainbow trout.
“In spring, the Black is fantastic,” said Cankes. “Particularly since they made it into a trophy trout stream.”

Ladden often takes his clients there and he’s ready to guide or instruct or offer more, depending on the situation.

“I am prepared to outfit people from head to toe. I have rods, reels, waders, leaders and flies. The only thing that people have to get on their own is a license.”
Ladden recently gave up his Orvis connection, preferring to focus on his established clients while cutting down his trip totals a bit this year.

Doug Florence who operates Vermont Angler, (www.vermontangler.com) is now the Orvis registered guide in Ludlow. He also guides many of his clients on the Black River even though he knows that there are many other excellent opportunities to flyfish nearby.

He talked about the diversity of fishing in the area from wild trout in many of the smaller streams to the excellent stocked trout fishery in both rivers and ponds as well as warm-water fishing for bass, pickerel and panfish. He’s done all of that, mostly with fly fishing gear and mostly on the Black River. It’s not that it’s the only water around. It’s just that there’s so much water around, it’s hard to keep current on all of it.

“There are some really amazing areas, underexploited ones,” he explained, citing some remote ponds in the Green Mountain National Forest that get stocked from the air as prime examples. As a guide, though, he can’t afford to just chase fish around everywhere.  “It’s a problem becoming familiar enough with all the spots to become expert at them.”

He concentrates on the Black but makes forays onto the Otter Creek, Battenkill
West, Ottauquechee and White Rivers. While he knows that each might offer similar water flow at similar times, each is a unique fishery and might offer a client something that would fit their needs.
He recalled that one of his best trips last year wasn’t even a fly trip. It was a day spent casting rubber frogs on Lake Nineveh, taking advantage of some different warm water opportunities in the midst of the summer doldrums. As a guide, though, he knows more than enough places that will offer fly fans a good shot at trout right through the dog days.

“There’s usually a couple of weeks where things get real tough for trout,” he admitted. Still, he has his favorite places for those times and they aren’t far away. “There’s one place right next to Okemo that’s loaded with landlocked salmon called the Branch Brook. Buttermilk Falls is well known as a swimming area, but you can take kids and catch brookies or little land locked salmon there. Hawk Pond is a great one. Cold River is another. Even the Black River that runs through Hawk has some pretty good fish in it.”

He rattles off the options quickly. They’re second nature to him now but the best spots are hard to find and impossible to know about without putting in the time.

“It’s taken 20 years of exploring to figure it out,” he said.

While sorting out all the possible places to go can take years, figuring out all you need to know about fly gear, entomology, fish habitat and water flow is an endless quest. It can be daunting to start on your own, especially for so many who have just a short vacation period in which to learn so much. For many, the choice is to take a few days and enter a fly fishing school.

The closest school is at Hawk Resort (www.hawkresort.com), just a few miles down Route 100.  Florence will be helping to coordinate that program this year. One of the better known programs in the country takes place a bit farther away each summer at the Orvis store in Manchester.
Truell Myers, Orvis’ national fly fishing director,  heads its staff each summer, taking turns teaching the students as well as any new instructors who sign on each season.

“We’ve been doing schools since 1966,” said Myers “We’re the oldest and the largest fly fishing school in the country; perhaps the world. It shows the commitment that Orvis has in the schools.”
Certainly, Myers is fully committed. After helping to run about 70 school sessions each summer, he heads down to the Orvis center in Key West where he teaches through the winter. In between, he travels around the country helping to set up schools and teaching potential instructors how to teach. In Manchester, he has found that some local seasonal instructors work out especially well.

The Manchester schools are usually two-day programs although Myers often sets up one-day sessions for those who don’t have the time. In the two-day school, Orvis provides all equipment, a Vermont fishing license, lunch and day-long sessions on all aspects of fly fishing. For those who just can’t get enough, they can take the equipment with them during the program to fish during the evenings.

That facility has taken a major step forward this year, opening up a building expressly designed for teaching flyfishing. Myers is thrilled with the improvement.

“A lot of people would say that the old facility was not up to the level of our standards of instruction,” he admitted. “The new facility does a couple of things…Number one it’s designed specifically for teaching flyfishing but it can also house the inside part of our wing shooting schools.”
People staying in Ludlow can get to the Manchester site in under an hour and Myers suggested that the school is large enough to handle people who sign up even at the last minute.

He has seen people come into the store looking for some gear or some information who discover what the classes offer and sign up on the spot. Those students often are hooked far more easily than the trout that swim in the famed Battenkill River, which flows just behind the Orvis store. Once hooked, they find themselves drawn into a sport that offers physical and mental challenges.
That’s what keeps bringing Susan Balch fishing. A talented artist, Balch has resumed her quilting business (www.fishnquilt.com), with a clear nod to the hobby she pursues all over the country. It seems that even when she gets away from fishing, she never really gets away totally. Then again, she doesn’t want to.

“When you’re flyfishing you’re not really thinking about anything else,” she explained. “There’s so much to learn that it’s something you can do for your whole life. It’s challenging but it’s engaging. I found that I really had to pay attention to what I was doing…the balance of concentration and relaxation…the Zen of it. You have to take it all in.”

That experience alone would satisfy most, but Balch found a way that made her hobby even more fulfilling. It began with a contact from the Orvis headquarters in Manchester. They were looking for women to serve as instructors in their flyfishing school. Balch’s name came up and she soon found herself teaching flyfishing with a group of women who had come up with a unique application of their knowledge.

Their plan was to use that Zen-like experience of flyfishing as a means of helping women deal with the physical and emotional recovery after having had breast cancer. Their idea came to be known as Casting for Recovery (www.castingforrecovery.org) and it has become an award-winning nationwide program.

Balch was there at its inception as a volunteer and eventually became its program director. She still talks enthusiastically about the impact on the hundreds of women who have learned flyfishing through CFR.

“It is a therapeutic activity but the therapeutic value for breast cancer patients is the motion of casting,” she said. “It’s a good motion for soft tissue, stretching and increasing mobility.”
CFR not only offers women specific flyfishing instruction but also appropriate information from health professionals on its three-day retreats. All is provided free to women whose names are entered in a lottery following their cancer treatment. Those chosen, typically arrive on a Friday night, get to know the group and then spend the weekend learning about fly fishing and exploring health issues related to their illness. Balch says that through it all, they bond with each other and find escape in the focus on something completely new and healthful. Their final exercise for the weekend is a one-on-one guided flyfishing trip with a woman fly fishing guide.

“That’s the highlight,” said Balch. “That’s when it all comes together.”

She said that the session is often a very emotional one; a time when the camaraderie, the empowerment that comes from acquiring new skills and the ability to focus on something beyond the illness that haunted them, all combine to let them begin their lives again.

It’s odd that a hobby like fly fishing can overcome such adversities and bring people together with each other and within themselves, but Norman Mclean seemed to see things just that way in his short story which inspired the Redford film. He ends it with some lines suggesting that fly fishing is at the center, not on the periphery.

He wrote that, when he fly fishes, “All existence fades to a being with my soul…and the hope that a fish will rise.”

“Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”

Sean Mulready, an avid outdoorsman and member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America. He specializes in writing about fishing, skiing, boating and hiking.