Montana. I knew next to nothing about it. I guess that's why I call this film Discovery.
When I found in Montana made me tremble, literally made me shake, with excitement, with fear, for the enormous grandeur of its mountains, for its hundreds of streams and rivers, and its amazing history and culture.
In 1805 the Lewis and Clark expedition reached the three forks of the Missouri and camped here to get their bearings.
I camped here also, and found for a while, quite by chance, I was retracing their footsteps, westward.
Here was the Madison, where golden eagles, bald eagles, and ospreys scream and fish with you.
Here Lewis and Clark discovered the three branches of the Jefferson River, the ruby, the beaver head, and the magnificent big hole.
That was just the beginning, and I followed the flow of the Clark Fork River for more than 80 miles, up and around the spectacular mountains of the Flint Creek Range.
Here I'm once again on the west side of the continental divide. Here the rivers now before me flowed to and eventually reach the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest of America.
There's wonder and mystery in this knowledge, because it also means the trout, and other critters I was here to pursue, had their origins in the vast saltwater realms of the Pacific Ocean.
When I arrived in Missoula, I discovered the city fame for the Clark Forks confluence with two other mind-blowing tributaries, and the first of those was the Blackfoot River.
I fished the big Blackfoot as much a pilgrimage as an attempt to catch its wild trout, for the Blackfoot was the river of a river runs through it, a classic story written by Norman McLean.
And I tried to imagine I was now fishing where Norman, his father, and his brother Paul had fished so many years ago.
It's possible I had.
There was just one river left I simply had to fish, the Bitterroot. How does one describe, in words, in paint, or in photos, possibly the most perfect wild river one has ever held in a lifetime?
One does not.
Now I sometimes wonder if fishermen catch fish, or if fish catch fishermen. Clearly on the Bitterroot, I was the quarry.
Myron Reed wrote this around 1910.
It is the earliest prophecy of the demise of wild native trout I have ever found.
So I ask you, now watching this film, to envision America's rivers not from the viewpoint of today's generation, but of generations beyond. Will wild, glorious, undamped, unrestrained, unpolluted rivers exist for your children?
Will they exist for their children, to fish and enjoy? It's largely up to you and me.
