Rob Breeding favors the North Fork Watershed Protection Act. He also likes visiting the North Fork, especially the part where he catches fish . . .
I read about the North Fork long before I visited. This was back in the early 1990s, soon after I’d moved to Montana. Newspaper accounts painted a picture of a wild place filled with interloping Canadian wolves, grizzly bears and unwashed hippies occupying Polebridge.
It sounded amazing.
Still, it was more than a decade before I made it to the North Fork, visiting for the first time shortly after I returned to Montana following a two-state sojourn living away. It was just a drive-by, a Sunday afternoon loop with the family up to West Glacier, then back to the valley via Camas Bridge and the North Fork Road. I remember looking down at the water on that drive and thinking I needed to be there. I needed to be on that river.
I now know well the spot that inspired my reverie…