About Yellowstone Country Fly Fishing

Yellowstone Country Fly Fishing is owned and operated by Walter Wiese. It is a small operation and Walter guides many trips personally, though we now also have several other guides on staff. We have guides based throughout Yellowstone Country: in Livingston, Bozeman, and in Paradise Valley close to Gardiner, and guide waters within roughly a 100-mile radius of Livingston, including the northern portion of Yellowstone Park, the entire trouty portion of the Yellowstone and Madison Rivers in Montana, and various smaller waters.

Walter founded YCFF in 2014 in Gardiner, Montana. He moved the operation to Livingston in 2018. From Livingston we can still work on all the waters we did when we were in Gardiner, but we’ve also got access to a lot more fisheries, particularly float rivers. YCFF is a small home-based business and we do not have a retail storefront. Walter’s dog would rather he didn’t even have an office, because she can’t enter the office due to errant fly tying hooks.

No, not Montana. Walter caught this large Dolly Varden trout in Alaska in 2017.

Montana is full of very large guide services. Some of these are attached to a fly shop. Some are not. We are not one of these big operations and never will be. Walter’s long-term goal with the business is to make a solid living for himself and help a small guide staff do the same. That’s it. What does this mean?

• We will always remain home-based, both in terms of the location of our “office” and in terms of our water. You will never find us advertising trips all over Montana. We hardly even guide on the Missouri River, unlike the vast majority of the competition. Why not? Because it’s 3.5 hours from here. Unless you’re a repeat client who just wants to fish with one of our guides, you’re better off fishing with somebody based up there… but you’re better off fishing with us around here.
• We will always customize every trip. Walter will always book every trip we sell, and guides always communicate with their clients to make final plans. We have no sales staff who get paid based on how many trips they sell but never get on the water themselves.
• We strive for a “no BS” operation. If the fishing will be poor when you’re coming, we’ll tell you that. If one trip type is better than another, we’ll tell you that. If you’re better off booking with somebody else, we’ll even tell you that. We’d rather you decide to book with us knowing everything, rather than be disappointed by what you find when you get here. Check out our fishing reports for the unvarnished truth.
• We “fish the corners.” Often this means floating rough or hard-to-access areas. Often it means hiking further than most competitors in Yellowstone Park. Often it means using unusual flies and tactics.

Walter spent far too many years as a head guide at a shop that gradually became “corporate,” trying to be everything to everybody and sell as many trips as possible. If you want to fish with the little guy instead, we’re your operation.

Our “Guiding” Principles

Regardless of trip type, duration, or location, Yellowstone Country Fly Fishing strives to follow the principles below on all of our Yellowstone and Montana fly fishing trips in order to best serve our customers and protect the waters and landscapes in which we guide:

1. Personalize All Trips: We’ll never take a client fishing without a thorough phone consultation beforehand about their skill level, their interests, the weather and water conditions, and other factors that’ll determine where we fish and what we’ll use. In this regard, all of our guided trips are custom trips.
2. Find the “Nooks and Crannies:” What do we mean? We try to fish slightly different waters or oddball stretches of popular waters, use slightly different tactics, fish slightly different flies, and sometimes target different fish than most of our competitors. This area gets fished hard. Really hard. Changing things up usually makes for a better experience for our guests.
3. Focus on Education: The fish might bite and they might not, but we can always make our clients better anglers, no matter if they’re total rookies or experts. Our guides will constantly work on helping you improve your fishing, whether through big changes or tiny tweaks and tips.
4. Never Forget Where We’re Fishing: Montana and Yellowstone Park are beautiful places full of scenic, geologic, and animal and plant wonders. While the focus is generally on the fishing, the overall experience of fishing this area is a big part of making memories for most of our clients. Well point out the petrified wood, show you neat scenery, and be more than willing to stop so you can photograph that buffalo or bear.
5. Fish Ethically: By this, we mean two things. 1.) We always guide with a conservation-oriented mindset: all hooks are barbless, all fish are released except where must-kill regs are in place, we follow “leave no trace” guidelines, and we do my best to avoid fishing over heavily-stressed or actively spawning wild trout. 2.) We behave ethically towards other anglers and guides. Namely, we don’t crowd them. On Yellowstone Park trips in particular, this generally means we work harder hiking into our fisheries than most outfitters, but we don’t see many (or sometimes any) other anglers once we get there.

Walter’s Bio

I was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1980. I first picked up a fly rod (after much begging) in 1986 or 1987, and cut my teeth on stocked trout in the Missouri Ozarks, mostly near my grandfather’s summer house (that is to say, an old, run-down mobile home). By 1992 I threw away the Powerbait and had started fly fishing exclusively for trout. My first fishing experience in Montana and Yellowstone Park happened on a family trip to Yellowstone Park in 1993. After that, my dad and I made regular trips to the park and Montana, and though we’d stop and look at a waterfall or geyser or two, these were almost exclusively fly fishing trips.

These trips made me fall in love with the region, both its fishing and the wide open spaces. In the winter of 2000-2001, with the end of my undergraduate career in sight, I decided to spend a full summer in Yellowstone Park, flipping burgers or selling rubber tomahawks or doing whatever I needed to do to have one last fun summer before entering “the real world.” Through what amounts to dumb luck, I wound up with a job at a fly shop in Gardiner, MT, as a shop clerk and trainee guide, and the rest is history. I’ve been guiding ever since.

Walter in 2002 or 2003.

From 2001 through 2006, I spent summers (and early fall, a couple years) guiding and working in the fly shop, while I first finished my undergraduate degree in English at a college in Missouri and then got a creative writing Master’s degree from Western Washington University. I wrote my graduate thesis on fly fishing, so the course ahead was clear. Since late spring of 2006, I’ve been a full-time Montanan, and a full-timer in the fly fishing industry.

After guiding as an employee and independent contractor guide for a fly shop in Gardiner and several outfitters in southwest Montana through for fourteen seasons, I got my outfitter’s license and started Yellowstone Country Fly Fishing in late fall 2014.

As noted above, I have a Master’s degree in creative writing, from Western Washington University. So far, this degree has mostly helped me write better web content for my and other fly fishing businesses, but I also write occasional magazine articles and have written three books about fly fishing, with more to come. In 2024 I have also begun selling fiction stories, which is my real passion.

My wife Jani Rounds – a software engineer – and I live in Livingston, on a (very marginal) trout stream that flows right through town along our back property line, with Winnie the Rescue Dog. In my limited free time, I read, listen to a wide range of music, play guitar badly, and snowboard.

Walter’s wife Jani Rounds “fishing” on the Missouri River