Madison River

Fifty miles of riffle. The river that taught a country to nymph.

The Madison begins where the Firehole and Gibbon meet in Yellowstone National Park and ends at its confluence with the Jefferson and Gallatin near Three Forks, MT, where the three together form the Missouri.

The stretch most anglers mean when they say "the Madison" is the fifty-mile run from the outlet of Quake Lake down to Ennis Lake — a long, even-graded, cobbled riffle with almost no traditional pool structure. It is the textbook "50-mile riffle" of American fly fishing, and it is rainbow- and brown-trout water from one end to the other.