Ruby River

The Ruby is the small water in a neighborhood of giants. Tucked into the Ruby Valley between the more famous Beaverhead, Big Hole, and Madison, it runs roughly 30 to 40 miles of trout water from Ruby Dam near Alder down to Twin Bridges, where it folds into the Beaverhead just above the Jefferson headwaters. Below the dam it fishes as a partial tailwater — cold, brushy, willow-lined — and it is the brown trout that people drive over for. Most fish run 14 to 16 inches, but the Ruby holds a lot of 17 to 19 inchers and a genuine shot at a 20-plus on a river you can cover with a 5-weight and a pair of waders. It is technical small water: tight casts, wary fish, and hatches that reward matching over brute-force nymphing.

Practically, the Ruby is a wade-and-walk fishery, not a float. It is too small and brushy to float most of its length, so you work upstream through willow-lined runs, undercut banks, and meadow bends. Flows swing hard with irrigation — the Ruby bounces in and out of shape through the June-to-September growing season, and the number to watch is the release out of Ruby Dam (USGS 06020600, below the reservoir): 200 to 300 CFS is the sweet spot, it still fishes below 200, and above roughly 300 wading gets ugly and the banks blow out. Midges carry the winter and early season, a Mother's Day caddis emergence kicks off spring, PMDs and Yellow Sallies define June and July, and by late summer it is tricos, hoppers, and streamers stripped along the cut banks for the big browns. The upper river above the reservoir is a different animal — a true freestone small stream in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest holding rainbows, westslope cutthroat, browns, and a remnant Arctic grayling population, fished with a 3- or 4-weight.

The context that follows the Ruby everywhere is access. This is the river of the twelve-year stream-access fight: a media billionaire fenced off county bridge right-of-ways along Seyler Lane, Lewis Lane, and Duncan District Road, and the Public Land/Water Access Association sued Madison County to reopen them. The Montana Supreme Court reaffirmed the Stream Access Law in 2014, and a district court ultimately established a 47-foot public easement at the Seyler Lane bridge; the fight finally petered out around 2016-2017 in the public's favor. The upshot for anglers: once you are legally on the water at a bridge or fishing access site, you can fish through private land as long as you stay below the ordinary high-water mark. There are six-plus public access points between the dam and Twin Bridges, but bridge access here has been genuinely contested, so know where you are standing. Note the fall spawning closure — the dam-to-Alder-Bridge reach and the Sweetwater-confluence-to-reservoir reach shut down October 1 into spring to protect spawners.