Many Rivers to Cross: Of Good Running Water, Wild Trout, and the Remains of Wilderness

A lyrical, contemplative, humorous quest for the nature and meaning of wilderness journeys through Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oregon, describing the territory, characters, and history of the last best wilderness places. 17,500 first printing.

To the author, the sight of a young woman swimming nude in a river was depressing; water warm enough for skinny-dipping was not good trout water. A writer for the Boston Globe and avid fly fisherman, Montgomery traveled to the West seeking pristine streams and native cutthroat trout. His journeys took him from Arizona to Montana, up the Missouri, down the Columbia, across the Colorado and the Rio Grande, into the Great Basin. He fished Rosebud Creek, near the Little Bighorn; he followed the trail of Lewis and Clark, observing that they had ignored fish in their reports. Montgomery found the last best place in the Oregon desert?a brooklet one foot wide and less than that deep, where he caught the rare trout. This engaging narrative is not just for those who fish but any reader interested in wilderness. Illustrations.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This splendid book is more about the search for the lost West than fishing for trout. Montgomery decided to roam the West's expanses looking for areas that have been untouched, or at least not much touched, by humankind and catching what fish he could. Not surprisingly, he didn't find many such areas--a small river here, a little creek there, even a ditch in the desert with just enough water to support a few trout. Along the literary retracing of his way, he tells tales of the Old West, discusses the strange and unusual people he met, and notes the near perpetual presence of cattle, munching and trampling their way across the countryside. In fact, he gets pretty angry at these Big Macs on the hoof for their destruction of free-flowing streams and the habitats they support. As for fishing, Montgomery pursued the cutthroat trout, which, though looked down on by "pure" fly fishers, is the native western trout (the rainbows and browns are foreigners introduced long ago to "improve" the fishery). Jon Kartman