Castwork: Pete Cardinal

Castwork: Pete Cardinal

Missouri River – Craig, Montana

The Missouri River between Wolf Creek and Cascade, Montana, is a living, breathing fly fishing laboratory. Home to a distinctly tough-fighting strain of rainbow trout, numerous hook-jawed brown trout and astonishing swarms of insects. It is a Mecca of fly fishing higher learning and enlightenment that lures crusty veterans and young adrenaline junkies. This is the place where fishing guides from other Western rivers visit when they get time off. 

Along the west bank of the Missouri lives a man possessed by this river, one driven to unlock all its secrets. He is the master of this laboratory, a pseudo “mad professor,” whose frenetic intensity has earned him both high praise and loathing from locals and clients. His name is Pete Cardinal. 

Pete is indeed a scientist, though long ago he shed the formal title of fisheries biologist, a job for which he earned a masters degree from Montana State. Now he is a river guide who makes his yearly living plying the Missouri for trout with Ahab-like conviction. When you fish with Pete, it is full-tilt, full-contact the whole way. And you will catch trout, perhaps more than you could imagine. But you had better damn well do it Pete’s way.  

Those who revere him and others who think he is uncompromising agree on this: Pete Cardinal knows more about fly fishing than 99 percent of people on this planet, and more about this part of the Missouri River than just about everyone who has floated it since Lewis and Clark first paddled by.   

For better or worse, Pete Cardinal tells it like he sees it. No matter how good you think you are, Pete will press you. And, if you fish with him, there is no doubt that you will be a better angler when you step out of his boat at the end of the day.

* * *

It is not all rough and tumble with Pete Cardinal. On the exterior, at least on dry land, he is an unassuming, cordial gentleman, with an engaging smile and infectious laugh.  

Pete is thoughtful and resourceful. He saves addresses from his clients’ fishing licenses so he can mail Christmas cards at year’s end. He is a gardener, who devotes early morning and evening hours to rows of potatoes, squash, onions, corn, and even flowers that grow next to his riverside cottage.  

A single man, he has two dogs. The younger Labrador Retriever, Maggie, is a constant crew member in his drift boat. Pete built a comfortable, carpeted platform for her and mounted it in his boat so she can hang her head over the side to get an up-close look at fish as they are reeled in. She is never in the way, and Pete recalled no one ever has objected to her presence.

“I guess if I had a customer who didn’t want her to come along, then we probably shouldn’t be fishing together anyhow,” says Pete.

* * * 

Pete moved to Montana from Michigan in 1983. After a stint as a fisheries biologist, he started a fly shop, which he eventually sold. He said he needed more solitude and wanted to avoid the political baggage inherent in other pursuits. So a self-employed guide’s life suits him perfectly. Now Pete hustles to carve out a yearly living in the short summer and fall months. When the snow flies, he remains hunkered down in the middle of Montana, tying flies and devising new strategies for after the thaw.  

It is clear that Pete cares about the Missouri River, almost to a fault. He is obsessed with it. His presence here is a hand-in-glove union between a complex and elaborate fly-fishing theater and a man who is enamored enough by the big screen to run its projector, day after day, year after year. Anyone or anything that threatens the show disturbs Pete. 

“I’ve known I wanted to be on the water since I was in eighth grade,” he says. “And when I got here, I knew I wouldn’t leave. It bothers me to see the river get thrashed nowadays by so many fishermen. It used to be better, especially the dry fly fishing. But it’s still a special place. Maybe I’ll have to move on someday, but I doubt it. I have to be where my heart is.”

* * *

Pete’s highly skilled intensity becomes evident not long into our first day. Somewhere north of Craig, he spots a large pod of rising fish, working beneath an elbow in the river, maybe 15 feet off the bank. They are eating tiny black mayflies, Tricos, by the hundreds. Pete ties on a small House & Lot Variant, dabs it with grease, and tells us to wait.

“Watch them. Time them,” he says. “Watch the seams in the current. See how they follow that seam? When the scum line moves, the fish beneath it are moving also. When they get a window overhead, they eat. Make sure you have that rhythm. Now go! Bust ‘em!”

The first cast falls short and lands somewhere near a fish’s tail.

“They eat with their heads,” he says. He is not smiling.

A second cast. This one is far enough, but a few feet left and off the feeding lane. Luckily, none of the fish have seen the fly. No harm, no foul. With the exception of our captain, the consensus on the boat is to pick up the cast and try it again.

“Wait. Live with that,” warns Pete. “Never pick up a fly in front of a fish, or where he even has a chance to see it–never. Sometimes, you just have to live with a bad cast, and wait for it to pass by. It’s like anything else in life, you just live with it.”

* * *

We have to strike an uneasy peace with Pete in the early stages of our visit. Pete is wary of writers. 

“I’ve had writers in the boat, and some say ‘I’m an expert at this or that, and I’ve been fishing here and there, and blah, blah, blah…’ You need to know that’s all bullshit to me,” he admonishes.

You need not look any further than Craig, Montana, to behold the power of the press. The village where Pete lives is several miles beneath Holter Dam, near the heart of the prime trout fishing water on the Missouri. A reporter for the New York Times datelined a story from Craig in the summer of 1999, accurately describing the unique character of this tiny hamlet and the fly-fishing wonders to be found here. Within days, the private jets began to stream overhead with regularity, and trucks dragging drift boats rumbled over Craig’s old, steel bridge with greater frequency than anyone had seen before. Pete said the day the story ran was one of the worst days of his summer.

* * *

Of course, the Missouri fly-fishing boom did not really happen overnight, at least not in full. The big river has gradually stepped out from behind the shadows of the Madison, Yellowstone, and Beaverhead Rivers over the past two decades, as many writers visited to gauge for themselves what the buzz was all about.  

Pete has had a lot of them in his boat. He liked some and could not stand others. Whether they are good people, respectful of the fish or not, in Pete’s mind, their work is dirty. They crowd rivers.

He recalls the day he was at a hidden run on the Missouri, a place that holds fewer (but larger) trout and is not visited often by river guides or day-trippers. There, he ran into a rare writer-friend, a seasoned outdoorsman from the San Francisco area.  

“I shouted across the river and asked him if he was there for work or pleasure,” describes Pete. He said, ‘both.’”

“So I paddled over to him, and we had a talk. I said, ‘please don’t write about here. This part of the river is all I have left.’ And you know, he didn’t.”

* * *

Pete is not a candor-challenged individual. He has his own blunt, succinct means of communicating in the heat of battle.

Words like “lefter” and “righter” give you a clear, if not grammatically correct, indication of where he wants the next cast to land. “Wrong” and “bad,” words that often are taboo among other guides, are common elements of the Cardinal dialect.

“I am not a tactful person,” he admits. “You hire me to catch trout, not to tell me what to do.

“If you want the lazy float down the river with a wine and cheese party, find someone else. Small talk, pretty checkered tablecloths, and bottles of chardonnay are for people who struggle catching fish.”

* * *

Unlike many guides, Pete Cardinal is guarded with his light years of accumulated information, meting out only enough to ensure a successful day. He believes he is in a competitive business and finds it increasingly difficult to produce the kind of results that meet his high standards.  

He often breaks off his own specially-designed flies before he reaches the boat ramp, so other guides, “loitering” or “scavenging” for information, do not know what he is using and cannot copy his patterns. To Pete, every fish in the river another guide cannot catch is a fresh target for him.

He tells us he does not have patience for people who pay a guide, only to be found (the next day) in the same run they fished together the day before. Pete understands that such tactics are fair game, and knows most savvy anglers will hire out a guide to get the “lay of the land” at the beginning of an extended trip. To get around that possibility, Pete asks people on day one how long they are staying in the area. Their responses affect the trip they get.

“I know a lot about this river,” he says. “The question is, how much do I have to show you to make sure you have a good time.

“Every really good guide in the business does the same thing. You have to be guarded with information on your home river. Especially when your information is the source of how you eat. Guides know that. I’m just one of the few who will admit to it.”

* * * 

An ideal client for Pete Cardinal does not have to know entomology, tie beautiful flies, or cast with laser accuracy. He tells us flat out who his favorite customers are: the ones who fly in, fish with him for three or four days, get back on the plane and say, “see you next summer.” 

Pete has a unique point of view regarding the guiding life and his professional responsibilities. When he is in his boat, Pete does not see himself as a teacher, or a tour guide. He is not a casting guru, or a lifeguard. He is not a naturalist, and he is not there to make you feel warm and fuzzy about your fly-fishing ability. 

The trick, says Pete, is matching expectations of clients with their abilities, finding fish, and hooking them. Period. If you do these things, clients leave entertained and happy.

“I am in the entertainment business,” he explains. “When the rod is bent, people are most entertained.”

* * *

We had heard that Pete Cardinal was a fly-fishing wizard, a rare and unassuming man with eyes like a hawk. Fishing with him proves it. “You must try to be perfect, even if you know there is no such thing,” he tells us.

Pete sees things most other people would never think to look for. He can anticipate a fish’s movement in ways most experienced anglers cannot. He has developed fly patterns that imitate bugs most fishermen never have seen–boxes and boxes of them. He is the definition of a man in tune with his environment.

One afternoon, he calls us over to stare into a waist-deep pool in the river. At its bottom swims a tiny fish with a black tail. “Whirling disease,” Pete says. How he saw the fish in the first place was a mystery. How he noticed its disfigured tail was remarkable.

* * *

Every day for Pete is a private learning experience, a time for frenzied experimentation. Every trip is an opportunity to develop, tweak, and prove his stream-based theories, whether with clients or not. Topics like your family, where you are from, and what you do for a living become insolent small talk. In Pete’s mind, there are only so many days he was put on this earth to study the Missouri River’s trout. There simply is not any time to waste. Sifting through a box of specially tied hoppers, he explains how the boat (our shared laboratory) would work on this afternoon.

“The client is a cardboard figure in the front of the boat, an incidental tool for the scientist,” he says with a smile. But he absolutely is not kidding.

He decides that we will fish grasshoppers down the center of the river near Cascade, hoping to pull some four and five-year-old fish up from bottom depressions and weed beds. Forty to sixty-foot casts will be in order. Recasts and tangled leaders will be unacceptable. Relax, concentrate, and focus.

“When you’re hopper fishing, remember that time on the water equals fish. I can steer those flies with the boat, as long as they are floating high. The casts belong to you guys, but once those hoppers hit the water, they’re mine.”

* * *

Pete pulls in his oars and lets the boat free float as he scans the banks for trout heads.  

“Come on! Don’t be flaky, fish. Let’s see a big eat,” he invites them in a whisper. “Come on, big tuna. Let’s see some beaks.”

He has a three-step formula for locating dry-fly targets: hunt, look, and sort. You hunt for the right type of water, look for consistent rise patterns, and sort out the little fish from the alphas. At this particular moment, we are looking.  

“See those little breaks in the current,” he says, pointing left. We lean, squint, and strain our eyes. “That’s where the whoppers (pronounced wuppers) hang.”

A fish rises, right in the seam he pointed to, then a second, and a third. A leviathan brown pokes out its dark snout to inhale an insect skating along the surface.

Pete springs to life, and the oars shoot back out the sides of the boat. 

“Give me one good cast up there,” he says as he churns us toward the pod. “Be ready. If you hook that one, this day becomes a five-star adventure.”

* * * 

Without a word, Pete swings the boat into shore, twenty yards below the working fish. He quietly slips over the left gunwale and into the river, then begins walking the boat back up river and into position. Not until the first cast is delivered does he speak again. When he does, his words have become short and blunt, ringing from the middle of the boat like a corner man in a title fight.

“Come on, wake up! That’s not right. Do you want to catch him or not?

“Reach left. Shorten up. Way short! Shorter. Stop. Come on. Hit him in the head!  

“Shorter next time, you’re dumping it. Make it pop. Shock that tippet over. Shock it! Stop it. Reach left. Two feet over. Too much line in the water.  

“Follow that one. Good. You have a little drop-off there. See the weed change? There. No over! One more! That’s it. Better. There’s the cast.”

Two seconds later, the fish eats the fly, and Pete laughs. At just the time most guides would begin to get excited, Pete starts to relax. Although we are chasing a 21-inch brown trout downstream, the hard part, for Pete, is over.

* * *

Pete began fishing with a fly rod at an early age, a fact that is apparent in his every cast. But like most kids growing up in Michigan, he did not spend all his time using flies or fishing for trout. He started out by catching bluegill, bass, and pike on bait he netted in the many inland lakes, then worked up his courage for rivers and trout.

“When I was little, the only way I could catch trout was by using nightcrawlers. The truth is, I was intimidated by them. I always got my ass kicked by trout.”

But during his twenties, he ironed out his fears with hours and hours of science, studying fisheries management in Montana and Alaska, and the rest of his time testing theories on the available trout, salmon, and char. Doing graduate research on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska, he spent so much time perfecting casts and tinkering with flies (instead of studying) that he had to stay on an extra semester.

“Once you get fly fishing in your blood, you’ll never get it out.”

* * *

It is hard to drift along the Missouri and not find your mind wandering to thoughts of the Lewis and Clark expedition. What it must have been like to summer or winter in this valley, to have run the Missouri River in a handmade boat; the grit and raw tenacity required to have battled sickness, the elements, and hordes of bears.

Before and during our trip, we share a tattered copy of Stephen E. Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage, which fuels our collective imaginations with its gripping details of the expedition.

During afternoons, we watch golden and bald eagles perch in trees and circle over islands, mule deer drink from the river, and an enormous beaver swim under the boat, all traces of the world Lewis and Clark had discovered long ago.

After days on the river, we read descriptions from the expedition journals, detailing massive herds of deer, antelope, and buffalo. Animals Lewis and Clark had seen in staggering numbers, and in volumes we only could imagine or equate to films of the Great African plains.  

We wonder if in two hundred years there only will be journals to describe the Missouri’s vast schools of fish, clouds of insects, and birds. Pete thinks that there is no way to really know for sure.  

“But we are changing this river, Montana, and everything else faster than I would like.”

* * *   

Near the end of the last day, we have stored up enough confidence to bait Pete with a loaded question.

“Who is the best fly fisherman you know, Pete?”

Pete becomes pensive and unusually quiet. A silence falls over the boat for several seconds. We assume he is rifling through a mental catalog of guides, writers, and other assorted “river pros” he has fished with during the last two decades.

When he breaks the silence, his answer surprises us. 

“The best fishermen in this world are the ones you have never heard of,” he says. “There is another level to this whole sport that goes way beyond what most people can imagine. There are a lot people who get really wrapped up in the fly-fishing industry, trying to get good enough to be known as an expert. There are some who take it a bit further, and eventually try to make a buck or two off it, like guides or outfitters. I guess that’s where I landed.

“But then there are people out here who go to the final stage. They’re so good, they can teach themselves. They’re so confident, they don’t care if other people think they’re experts. And they care so much about the river and preserving what’s here, that they don’t think of exploiting it for money.”

He nods toward a gray-haired man walking along the bank.  

“For all I know, he could be one,” he says. “They're around. You just don't know many.”

* * *

Pete finishes our trip by telling us the story of his mentor, a rancher from Cascade named Ron Lyons. Ron and Pete introduced themselves when Pete was a fisheries biologist. Ron had been in the area for years, and he took Pete under his wing, teaching him everything he knew about the Missouri. As Pete describes his rancher friend, his voice vibrates with reverence and remorse. 

When Pete decided to become a fishing guide, he felt obliged to apologize to his mentor, to explain his personal regret over a decision that certainly would commercialize the river they both loved. In Pete’s mind, becoming a guide was jumping off the continuum one stage too soon. They do not fish together any longer, though they still remain friends. It is a burden Pete carries with visible discomfort.

“It’s a ‘Catch-22’ for me,” he admits. “I know I’m responsible for putting people on this river. I know I’m adding pressure on the environment. I try to be responsible in terms of ethics and conservation, but to guys like Ron, I’m still part of the problem.”

“It’s like I said before, live with it. Some things you just have to live with.”

* * *

River Notes

We arrive at the remodeled Flyway Ranch in Craig, Montana, late in the summer to fish the Missouri River, all of us for the first time. Central Montana always feels hot and dry in August regardless of the afternoon wind and rain. After checking in at the lodge, we grab our rain gear from the car, scan a set of quickly moving fronts for lightning, then head down to the river to see what is left of the evening rise. Although the Missouri River below Holter Dam is a tailwater, it acts and breathes more like a giant spring creek and has the diversity of bugs to prove it. Acres of serpentine underwater vegetation, along with stable water temperatures and flows, help produce all-American numbers of insects and trout. When we arrive at the river, the surface is covered with emerging and egg-laying caddis, rusty spinners, and the bobbing heads of 50 thoroughbred trout. Before we ever get a cast off, a beaver spooks then proceeds to work the river with its enormous tail, putting most of the fish down. We lose the last of our light, wander the railroad tracks back to town, and call it a night.  

In the morning, we are up early and prepared with enough fly rods, grasshopper and Trico imitations, and 4x-tippet to get the job done, or so we thought. What we are not prepared for is the size and strength of the Missouri River and its trout, or the resourcefulness and tenacity of our guide. Pete has us fish with more different dry-fly and nymphing setups than we can remember. Rigs for heavy water, shallow water, shelves, and breaks. Different leaders and tandem dries for mid-river seams, tiny sweeps under trees, and long grasshopper casts from the boat. All day Pete is changing flies, approaches, and water. Tricos, caddisflies, cinnamon ants, and attractors–every size and color. He ties an original nymph called a “Phyllis Diller” which catches fish in any type of water, any time of day. We could not describe it if we wanted to. As for the fish, calf-thick browns and rainbows that mostly tear us to pieces. We are lucky to land half the fish we want. 

As a guide, Pete is as intense as we have found, literally obsessed with perfection from his clients. Casting from the bow of his boat is the fishing equivalent of playing basketball for Bob Knight. Every morning, we are up early and on the river to reach cast, spend hours being critiqued, then reach cast some more. Until our arms are sore. And we do not leave Pete’s boat without learning to “read the strip,” the line of bug scum and flotsam snaking back and forth across the Missouri’s currents, because that is where the enormous schools of trout “line up” to eat. A properly placed fly in the “strip” always produces a fish, but if you miss…well, you get the picture. And that is how it goes on the river with Pete. Relentlessly focused, refreshingly tough, supercharged to show us every ounce of this river through his eyes. What we know is that he made us better fishermen. Showed us more about the Missouri in three days than we ever could hope to uncover, on our own, in a lifetime. There cannot be anything wrong with that. 

Tip: To become a successful dry-fly fisherman on a river like the Missouri, you must target one rising fish at a time, relax your instinct to immediately cast, then take the time to observe the unique feeding pattern of a desired trout. What you will notice is the way that trout feeds, his rhythm. A well-presented fly, regardless of its size and style, that honors this subtle rhythm is a much more effective means of hooking difficult fish than flock-shooting with “exact” patterns.

This chapter is excerpted from Castwork: Reflections of Fly Fishing Guides and the American West (2002). Photo: Liz Steketee

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