ON MANY September mornings, cold air nestled high in Yellowstone National Park wakens with sunlight, slowly warms, then swirls a determined path up through Montana’s Paradise Valley. A few hundred feet above the valley floor, it clashes with dry ranchland heat and begins to bounce off the Absaroka Mountains, transforming into an erratic, volatile breeze. Where the valley narrows, near Carter Bridge, the wind gathers velocity until it explodes northward like a shot from a jet nozzle aimed straight at Livingston.

Such is the case this morning as we stand in the parking lot of George Anderson’s Fly Shop, lining up and casting 6-weight fly rods until they warp beneath the wind, wondering aloud about our chances on the open flats of the Yellowstone River.

Rusty Vorous stomps out of the shop, rattling flies in his left hand like dice. At first glance, he is not an overwhelming presence. Somewhat slight, with a brushy, graying mustache, wire-rimmed glasses, duck boots, and a well-worn cotton shirt, he looks like a junior high school principal on a field trip.

Looks are deceiving. Half grimacing, half grinning, paying no mind to the wind roaring overhead, he walks up to us, snatches a Winston fly rod we had been noodling around, gives it four or five short, sharp strokes, then hands it back.

“It’ll march,” he proclaims. And with that, we jump in his truck and head south.

AT FIRST, Rusty is all business, quiet and composed, running through the day’s fishing options on the fly with no lengthy introductions or small talk. We pull into the Mallard’s Rest put-in, back his giant, wooden dory into the river, then watch him clear a dead rattlesnake from a fishing access sign. He lights a “hump” (a no-filter Camel) before setting off to park his beat-up, brown Suburban.

To the novice fly-fisher, a 30-mile-per-hour headwind is foreboding. To the average oarsman, heavy wind is either a bitch or a blessing, depending if it buffs your face or pushes over your shoulder. Rusty could give a rip, one way or the other. To him, the breeze means only one thing: hopper day.

We had heard plenty about Rusty Vorous before we ever reached Livingston. Mention of his name often elicits wry smiles and head bobs among some of the most seasoned guides in the West. Rusty is an underground cult hero to many of those in the know. He’s a rowing and fishing iconoclast, an intellectual who carries himself with jagged-edge aplomb.

Rusty is not guarded with his opinions, and he will not roll over for anyone. He is tough, brazen, and at the same time, surprisingly poised and insightful. He has done, seen, and put up with too much in the fly-fishing world ever to worry about formalities or facades. Within the first 20 minutes in his presence, you realize that Rusty Vorous is the real deal, an honest title contender. Shoving away from the ramp and pushing out into one of the last undammed trout rivers in the American west, Rusty mutters, “Let’s go catch these fish while they’re still alive. Let’s see what they’re chewing on.”

A LOUD splash behind a sweeper on the shady, east side of the river breaks the tension. It is a decent trout, probably a brown. He just hammered a terrestrial. Rusty calmly spins the bow toward the bank and presses ahead on the oars.

“Let’s rob this bank,” he barks. “Lash ’em!”

Two casts into the shade, another trout rolls on a Dave’s Hopper, and only seconds after it hits the water. After a quick chase, Rusty grabs the net and scoops up a beautiful, medium-sized brown. A hundred black and red spots on its back and sides prompt Rusty to chime in with his own variation of one of the oldest clichés in the angling world.

“Exquisite fish, bitchin’ colors,” he laughs.

THREE HOURS pass, but except for the first brown and a few errant strikes, the wind and hoppers are not producing with much consistency. Rusty decides to switch to a nymph rig, which quickly produces a well-built whitefish.

“Yeah, yeah,” he mutters to the fish wiggling in his hands. “You shouldn’t have bit it.”
After prying the hook from the fish’s mouth, he holds a handful of leader up to the sun, revealing an intricate maze of knots. Rusty is not the type to mess with tedious, on-river puzzles, so he bites off the tangle with a back molar and quickly reties a new rig. He says there are no such things as wind knots, only casting knots and fish knots.

“If God had meant for us to untie knots all day, he would have given us smaller fingers,” he adds.

As the wind subsides, the fishing picks up a bit, but most of the catch is still whitefish. The trout, for whatever reason, are nowhere to be found. We float in the heat and begin working gray streamers along giant drop-offs and submerged boulders, hoping to find a player in heavy water. But the trout have taken the day off. Rusty laughs as he rows and lights another cigarette.

“That’s the character of the Yellowstone,” he explains. “ I went through a phase when I thought I could figure this place out. It’s on for two days, then off for six. No apologies, no explanations. To be in tune with this ecosystem is to accept that some things happen without reason. That’s why a lot of guides won’t work here.”

RUSTY was born in Winchester, Virginia, seventy miles west of Washington D.C., among Civil War battlefields and in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley. He grew up fishing for panfish and smallmouth bass in the many warm water streams, but it was not until many years later that Rusty began to focus on fly-fishing.

He moved to remote northern California in the late 1960s and eked out a living building furniture and cabinetry. Following days at the shop, he would buzz over to the challenging, spring-fed currents of Hat Creek, teaching himself the technical intricacies of small bug, light line trout fishing.

A local outfitter eventually took notice of the anonymous angler who was catching fish with greater frequency and consistency than his own guides, and in a wise business move, hired Rusty. In the following years, Rusty began guiding many of northern California’s blue-ribbon trout streams, including the Fall River, the McCloud, and the Upper Sacramento. When we ask him why he stopped guiding California, he simply responds, “Those rivers are just ghosts now.”

Rusty was drawn “up north” to Bristol Bay, Alaska, during the 1980s and 1990s, in search of giant runs of chrome-plated salmon and the leopard rainbows and arctic char that followed. Stationed at Mission Lodge near Dillingham, he spent summers flying and exploring the now famous drainages of Bristol Bay: the Goodnews, the Togiak, the Kvichak, the Alagnak, as well as countless other lesser-known rivers.

Returning in the autumn to build furniture in California, or in some years to Oregon to guide steelhead on the North Umpqua River, Rusty quietly earned a reputation as one of the West Coast’s most experienced guides. He soon entertained offers to consult for fishing manufacturers, and even to join their in-house advisory staffs, but never could muster enough resolve to come in out of the cold. In 1993, it was with deliberate thought that he moved to Bozeman, Montana, where he hoped to spend the rest of his days bumping around the Gallatin, Madison, Missouri, and Yellowstone rivers. He thinks this part of Montana will hold up the longest.

“I think the Yellowstone might be the last good river, one of the last truly wild places,” he says. “Other places show glimmers, but this is a place that will not be fully understood or manipulated in our lifetimes.”

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