Ranch Activities: Fly Fishing

Now that we know all about the gifts, food and history of the Ranch, you must be thinking...what did you guys do while you were at the Ranch? Well, there were lots to do and many activities were lined up for us at the Crazy Mountain Ranch! It was entirely up to us though, if we wanted to fill our days with one activity after another or if we wanted to take it slow and just relax in the room. I know this one guy who didn't take part in any activities at all, he just sat around town and talked to people as they walked by, while enjoying the unlimited food and drinks at the Ranch. If that's what he likes, hey, that's cool too! :D All of the activities began only on the 2nd day (we basically just had orientation and walked around town during the 1st day). I will blog about the activities offered at the Ranch individually, in my next few posts (of course we didn't manage to try out everything, so I'll just blog about the activities that we participated in).

We woke up bright and early in the morning (I am not a morning person, Kevin literally had to drag me out of bed :P) for breakfast at the Saloon and then headed over to the Stage Stop for our first activity of the day - fly fishing. We had a choice to take the van or we could take an early morning hike down to the lake. Since the weather was just perfect (nice and cool morning), we decided to hike down. It was nice and the scenery was amazing. It wasn't even a hike, I would say it was a nice 10 minute early morning stroll :P

Soon, we reached the trout filled lake. Yup, Philip Morris fills the lake with trout every summer, just to keep their guest happy...hahaha! Doesn't it look like a picture out from a postcard or something? I cannot say this enough, the scenery in Montana is amazing!

We headed over to the Fishing Shack and quickly geared up in our waders. We also got to pick out our fly fishing rod. We didn't need to err bait? or do anything to the rods, they were all hooked up and ready to go..woohoo!

The fly fishing instructors were really cool. If you don't know anything about fly fishing, they will make sure that you become a fly fishing pro by the end of the two hour session! They demonstrated the basics of fly fishing as well as the various techniques that you can use. Soon, we were all lined up by the river bank and ready to try our hand at fly fishing! Kevin and I are basically city kids and we don't fish :P So, this was quite an experience for us. I told myself, my goal is to learn how to fly fish by the end of the session, doesn't matter if I don't catch anything...hahaha. Oh, also notice how we are all wearing sunglasses? It's not that we like to look cool or anything like that. It's required. Yeah, we do not want to take anybodys eye out with the hook!! :P

After familiarizing ourselves with the various casting techniques by the river bank for about 15 minutes or so, we then headed out to deeper waters. Fly fishing is pretty fun actually. Of course your arms will get tired and sore after a while, from all that casting! Did we catch anything? Nope! Actually, nobody in our group caught anything :P We could see those guys out there, jumping about in the deeper waters but I guess we were not skillful enough to cast out that far. I think only ONE person actually caught anything throughout the whole trip.

After spending about an hour out in the lake, we decided enough is enough. There are lots of drinks and snacks in the Fishing Shack. We got ourselves some Powerade and trail mixes to snack on while watching the rest fiddle with their fishing rods :P Apart from food and drinks, there were also lots of sunblock and mosquito spray available at the Fishing Shack. Yeah, we slapped on loads of sunblock. Don't want to get burnt like we did in Coney Island when we went there for the 4th of July celebrations. Remember me blogging about that? :P After finishing our food and drinks, we headed back to town to rest for a bit before going for our next activity - Horse Basics. Read all about that in my next post!

* Click here to be directed back to the Crazy Mountain Ranch Homepage. You can check out other ranch related posts as well as look at photos from the ranch during our Summer 2009 trip!