2025 marks our 25th season as Yellowstone Park fishing guides.
Walk and wade fly fishing trips in Yellowstone Park offer a wide range of experiences for anglers of any skill level. Over the space of a single day of guided fly fishing in Yellowstone, we might catch as many as four trout species, plus Arctic grayling and whitefish. We catch these fish in everything from raging canyon rivers to tiny creeks that look like they could come from your garden hose.
Options for wade fishing in Montana are a bit more limited, but they offer excellent chances at big fish in early spring and late fall. During the summer, a few odds and ends on both famous rivers and out-of-the-way creeks offer great opportunities both to beat the heat and the crowds. Our private water wade trips on the Paradise Valley spring creeks are discussed separately.
Yellowstone Park fishing trips are ideal for anglers interested in targeting native cutthroat trout.
Walk & Wade Trips: Who, When, and Where?
Our walk & wade fly fishing trips in Yellowstone Park and Montana are ideal for the following clients:
- beginners
- clients of any skill level who want to focus on learning or improving their fly fishing tactics
- visitors who prefer a slower-paced day
- eager hikers
- and those eager to enjoy the scenery, the wildlife, and the geologic wonders the region has to offer as much (or almost as much) as the fishing
Because our river rocks are slippery, the banks often steep, and the walks into our fishing areas sometimes long, they aren’t ideal for anglers in poor physical condition or those who don’t wish to hike.
Walk and wade trips are available year-round, and the fishing can be excellent even in the dead of winter. If it’s warm enough for you to stand it, there’s good fishing. Shedding crowds during the prime summer season generally requires aggressive hikes and/or fishing off-the-radar creeks like the one pictured below.
Sometimes we fish with an audience on Yellowstone Park fishing trips. Note the critter in the background.
Walk and Wade Fishing Trips or Hike and Wade Trips?
Roadside waters in Yellowstone see extreme fishing pressure from mid-June through September. In our opinion, there’s enough pressure it hurts the experiences we can provide our clients.
For this reason, our guided fishing trips in Yellowstone Park during peak tourist season involve a hike of half a mile to four miles one-way, often in rugged terrain with fast water once we get to our destination. Burning some boot leather produces more fish that are in better condition than those near the road–and it enables our Yellowstone fishing guides to show our guests “the real Yellowstone.”
Don’t let this scare you. We routinely take children aged 10-12 as well as folks over age 70 on short hikes that put us on water where we don’t see any other anglers all day. For teens and adults eager to do some exploring, there’s an infinite number of options, from tiny mountain creeks on up to the raging Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River.
It’s hard to argue with the appeal of large brown trout.
2025 Walk & Wade Trip Rates and Notes
Walk & Wade trips are available as full-days, half-days, and seasonal 3/4-days. Due to excessive travel time due to all the traffic, we offer only full-day trips in Yellowstone Park between July 1 and September 30.
- Full-Day Rates: $650 for one client or $675 for two during the May 23–September 30 peak season. $600/$625 during the April–May and October shoulder seasons. Available on all waters in our operations area.
- Half-Day Rates: $550 for one or two clients at peak season. $500 during the shoulder seasons. $400 during the November through March winter season. We may be able to add an additional angler for $100 on these trips, depending on our destination, client goals, and weather/water conditions. Available on waters in the mainstem Yellowstone, Gardner, and Gibbon systems only. Please note that half-day trips in Yellowstone Park are not available July 1 through September 30 due to all the traffic and associated extreme travel times.
- Seasonal 3/4 Day: $550 during the shoulder seasons. $500 during the winter. Note that these are generally poor winter options except during rare warm snaps. Available on waters in the mainstem Yellowstone, Gardner, and Gibbon systems only.
- Standard terms apply.
On Yellowstone Park fishing trips, guests will need to pay Yellowstone Park entrance fees as well as have Yellowstone Park fishing licenses.
We’ll meet in Livingston, near/at your lodgings, or near our fishing destination, whichever makes more sense.
Wade Trips: Season by Season
The places we fish and the experiences our guests have change more radically on wade trips over the course of the season than on any of our other guided trips. From October through early June, we stick to geyser-heated waters and the mighty Yellowstone. In high summer, we fish everything from tiny creeks most visitors drive over without even noticing to technical meadow rivers and the remote canyons of the Yellowstone.
Note that Yellowstone Park has changed its open fishing dates for the 2025 season. Portions of the Gardner and Madison River are now open year-round. We focus our attention on the nearby Gardner.
Winter and Early Spring Wade Trips (November through Mid-April)
Yellowstone National Park enters a new era on November 1, 2024, when the lower Gardner River and portions of the Madison River open to year-round fishing. This expansion of fishing opportunities drastically expands our nearby fishing opportunities in winter and early spring. Combined with the Yellowstone River, which is always a great sleeper bet from late February through early April, these new opportunities make Yellowstone Country one of the best winter fisheries in the Rockies.
Geyser-heated water is the reason. The lower Gardner gets much of its flow from hot springs, so it never ices up or even gets too cold for the fish to be active and hungry. For avid anglers, this period therefore offers uncrowded conditions and aggressive fish. Big fish, too! In November and early December, the big boys are brown trout finishing up their spawn. By February, large numbers of rainbow trout begin their spawning runs.
Top tactics through the winter include nymphing with stonefly nymphs and egg patterns, but there’s good hatches, too, both on the Gardner and the Yellowstone.
Late Spring Yellowstone Fishing Trips: Late May through the End of Runoff
Yellowstone Park’s general fishing season opens the Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend. For the first two to four weeks of the season, most waters in the park are in the midst of the spring melt, and the weather can be frightful. It’s not uncommon for it to snow anytime until mid-June.
Yellowstone Park has two secret weapons in late spring, though: rivers that drain geyser basins and several excellent hike-in lakes. The geothermal rivers fish better in late spring than any other time, while the lakes become fishable sometime in the first ten days of the season, providing excellent fishing for some of the rarest fish in the area: Arctic grayling.
The park has by far the region’s best wade-fishing opportunities in late May and June. As such, it’s the only place we run public water wade trips at this time. The fishing is suitable for almost all clients, from beginners to experts. We generally suggest clients ages 12+ at this time, though, because the wading is usually difficult due to high water.
The Gibbon River (pictured) is geyser-fed and a prime destination in early June.
Early Summer Montana and Yellowstone Fly Fishing Trips: The End of Runoff through July
Waters across the northern part of Yellowstone Park drop out of the spring melt between mid-June and early July. For the next month to six weeks, these rivers and streams produce excellent fishing for anglers of all skill levels and interests.
A wealth of Yellowstone fishing trip options are available at this time, from tiny trickles you could step across that hold jewel-like native cutthroat trout and grayling on up to the raging Yellowstone River in its Grand and Black Canyons. This is definitely peak season for anglers interested in large cutthroat trout, especially cutthroat trout gorging on the region’s famous Salmonfly hatches.
Early summer is the most popular time for visitors to fish the park. Tourist crowds both on the roads and on streams near the roads tend to be very high. For this reason, our Yellowstone Park fishing guides strongly prefer hike-in fisheries at this time.
Late Summer Montana and Yellowstone Fly Fishing Trips: August and Early September
Rivers and streams in Yellowstone Park get low and clear in late summer and insect hatches decline, but the hatches are replaced by terrestrial bugs like grasshoppers and ants.
With slower water comes slower, more deliberate fishing in many places, along with much easier wading, though the Yellowstone River and several other fast-flowing areas continue to fish well on large flies for aggressive anglers who like to rock-hop.
As the nights grow longer and cooler in late August, the first hints of fall appear and fall-run browns begin their spawning migrations. We often see our largest pre-spawn browns when the calendar (and the daytime weather) still says it’s summer. We can even see the first fall Blue-winged Olive hatches in mid-August, a solid three weeks earlier than they tend to pop on our float trips at lower elevations.
Early Autumn Montana and Yellowstone Fly Fishing Trips: September and Early October
Sometime in early September frost starts appearing most mornings and cold rains or snow flurries might greet us if the weather turns ugly. When the weather turns, the number of prime fisheries across the northern part of Yellowstone Park starts to decline. Those that remain (mostly bigger rivers) often produce their best fishing of the year, however.
On all rivers that continue to fish well, fall hatches intensify, and the trout can now be tough and spooky, challenging anglers to a battle of wits. In the meantime, fall-run brown trout numbers continuously increase, while angler crowds continuously decline except on the brown trout rivers, where they often actually get worse. That’s a good argument for hitting rivers like the Yellowstone in its canyons, which the crowds tend to ignore despite awesome streamer fishing and hatches.
Angler fishing the Black Canyon of the Yellowstone in September
Late Autumn Montana and Yellowstone Fly Fishing Trips: October and Early November
Late fall begins around the beginning of October, after which most nights are below freezing and heavy snows are possible. Options inside Yellowstone Park narrow to rivers that receive fall-run brown trout, geyser-warmed rivers, and the mighty Yellowstone. These options are fantastic, though, with good chances at both heavy (but usually spotty) hatches as well as the year’s best brown trout fishing.
Fall-run browns consume the attention of most anglers in the region in late fall, and we’re not immune to the siren call of big, aggressive trout. Here’s a sneaky fact, though: the closer to the end of the season we get, the more chunky and healthy rainbow and cutthroat trout we catch in addition to the browns. These fish follow the browns gobbling their eggs (as well as BWO mayflies), and far less anglers target these fish compared to the migratory browns. As October tips into November and winter starts whistling, the fishing for these bows and cutts just keeps getting better, since more and more fish cluster in the geyser-heated areas.
