The Unbeatable Beaverhead

Through thick and thin, 'The Beav' has been Montana's premier big-fish river

As a dispassionate scientist, Dick Oswald is a Dragnet kind of guy ("Just the facts, ma'am"), not given to flights of fancy. So when he says of Montana's famed Beaverhead River, "There's really nothing like it" in the state for numbers of big fish, he can be taken at his word. Oswald, an aquatic biologist in Montana for more than three decades, has been studying (and fishing) the Beaverhead for 26 years. In his job at the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks regional office in Dillon, he has seen the river through great times and not-so-great times. Read more – offline – from the current issue; subscribe to FRR.