Fly Fishing Video: Dave Whitlock Describes An Early Trip to the Bighorn

March 7, 2008 By: Marshall Cutchin

Dave Whitlock is the focus of a well-written biography in this morning’s Billing’s Gazette. Fortunately the writers also took time to film an interview with Whitlock and here the celebrated instructor and tier talks about fishing the Bighorn by canoe in the years before it was officially opened. The article itself is a good read too: “When he was a child, Whitlock contracted rheumatic fever and polio. The polio partially crippled him in one leg, and for a while he was confined to a wheelchair before graduating to leg braces. ‘But I decided like Forrest Gump that I was going to break free of that,’ he said in reference to the Tom Hanks movie about a brace-legged boy who one day runs free of the devices.”
By the way, the Dave’s Hopper is still a killer fly on the Bighorn in the windier, warmer days of summer.