MidCurrent Plus Live Event – May 13, 2026
Synopsis
This MidCurrent Plus live event pairs host Phil Monahan (Vermont) with guest Hilary Hutcheson — Montana guide, outfitter, and one of the most thoughtful voices on the native fisheries and conservation challenges of the Crown of the Continent — for a wide-ranging conversation on guiding the Flathead system, the character of a pure native trout fishery, and the climate realities reshaping Northwest Montana.
Growing Up in Glacier — Hilary opens with the story of an upbringing few fly fishers can claim: a childhood inside Glacier National Park as the daughter of National Park Service employees, raised to read terrain, weather, and water from an early age. She started at Glacier Raft Company in junior high, took the oars as a whitewater guide in high school, and — in the wake of A River Runs Through It and the wave of interest that followed — she and her sister became among the first fly fishing guides working the region. Today she runs the outfitting business Glacier Anglers and owns Larry’s Fly and Supply in Columbia Falls, anchoring a guide service that grew directly out of the place she’s spent her life learning.
A Native, Wild Fishery — The Flathead system carries the highest level of river protection in the country under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and Hilary makes the case that anglers don’t fully appreciate what that means until they fish it. There are no non-native species in the equation: the water belongs to Westslope cutthroat and bull trout, full stop. That changes everything about how the fishery feels and how it fishes — a native, wild, intact assemblage in water that’s never been planted over or muddled with introductions. Hillary frames it as one of the last places in the Lower 48 where you can fish a river that’s still doing what it’s always done.
Reading the Water and the Flies That Work — Guiding the Flathead drainage requires more than rowing skill — Hilary explains that the river system is dynamic enough that her guides need to be proficient in technical whitewater alongside the fishing. The system itself is low in nutrients, which sounds like a liability and turns out to be the opposite: with little subsurface buffet on offer, the native trout are ambitious, opportunistic, and famously willing to come up for big, visual attractors. The fishing leans hard into dry-fly work, and the flies tend to be bold profiles that play to the natives’ aggressive nature rather than imitate any specific hatch.
The Seasons of Northwest Montana — Hilary walks through the season as the fish themselves experience it: a main window that opens once trout move out of their tributaries and wintering water after runoff and runs strong through the end of October. Spring is its own conversation — high, off-color water that can sometimes shut the rivers down entirely, at which point she and her guides pivot to lake fishing rather than force a bad situation on moving water. It’s a rhythm dictated by snowpack, weather, and the river itself, and reading those signals is part of what guiding the region actually is.
Climate Grief and a Changing Landscape — The conversation turns serious as Hilary describes coming of age around climate science in the 1990s and watching, in the decades since, the place she knows best change in front of her. She talks about the degradation of pristine river conditions, the hybridization pressure native fish are facing, and water levels that swing in ways that affect everything from wildlife corridors to wildfire risk. Hilary introduces the term “climate grief” — sometimes called eco-grief — and describes the particular emotional weight carried by guides whose livelihoods and identities are bound to landscapes they’re watching shift in real time. It’s a candid passage, and one that gives the rest of the interview its center of gravity.
A Call to Action — When Phil asks what people can actually do, Hilary’s answer is direct: vote for climate champions. She points specifically to legislation like the Clean Air Act and the Inflation Reduction Act as examples of the kind of policy infrastructure that protects the rivers anglers care about, and she argues that supporting candidates who will defend that infrastructure is among the most consequential things a fly fisher can do beyond their time on the water.
Throughout, Hilary returns to a simple framing worth holding onto: the rivers of Northwest Montana are still wild and still native, but neither of those qualities is guaranteed. The anglers who love them are also the ones best positioned to defend them.
