Kelly....you are killing me with your description of one my favorite streams....and if you would have waded down around that bend below Pipe Organ bridge there is a fabulous bend hole which goes for about 50 yards and has produced some very nice browns for me. Used to live in Montana (now am wasting away in Alaska) and fished the Beaverhead extensively. The number of large fish in there would boggle your mind. A decade ago I was driving back home from California to Great Falls and stopped in about -10 degree weather with a stiff breeze....only had a few minutes (this was about 1/4 mile below Pipe Organ....couldn't use the flyrod so I cast a deep pool there with a small brown trout pattern rapala and tied into a good 10 lbs brown....he jumped 3 times then came right over and spit the lure in my face....it still gives me goose bumps.
Have fished in the summer and you find many 18-24 inch browns feeding in little shadowed, shallow areas along the bank. If you sneak up on them they are suckers for anything large presented well. Grasshoppers in late summer are a hoot there. My largest dry fly brown came on the Beaverhead....23 inches on 5X tippet. It is considered primarily a nymph fishery (although stripping muddlers and buggers will produce big browns) but the dry fishing can be quite good at times.
The Beaverhead became infested many years ago with whirling disease which greatly depleted the number of rainbows......which can be very large when they survive. Have taken a couple of 24-25 inch bows up by the dam. The browns increased in numbers when whirling disease showed up as they are immune to it.
Although the Beaverhead was originally in the range of the westslope cutthroat I have never seen anything which looked remotely pure cutt there in 30 years.....you get some of the bows with a bit of an orange slash but the brownies and bows outcompeted the cutts long ago for the most part.
It gets quite a bit of pressure in the warm months. I remember many years ago hammering one of my favorite sections with PT nymphs for a couple of hours without so much as a sniff. As I was walking back to the car....a late evening hatch of caddis started and this same "sterile" stretch of river I had just fished was one continous boil from the fish.....that's why its fishing.
Thanks for the visuals of a great area.
Brian
This is what I have to put up with now that I live in Alaska and not Montana....this was October on a 5 wt:
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