Anglers float on Fort Peck Reservoir just offshore from Devil's Creek Recreation Area. Many anglers travel hundreds of miles to ice fish on the reservoir.
Tammy Ostermiller holds a pike she caught at Fort Peck Reservoir. Her husband, Jared, likes to be mobile when he ice fishes, using an ATV to motor from hole to hole.
Jared Ostermiller is willing to drive 400 miles — 11 to 12 hours from Rexburg, Idaho — just to ice fish at Fort Peck Reservoir.
He’s not alone.
“We’ve got guys coming in from all over the place,” said Eddie Mindt, owner of the Lakeridge Lodging & Bait Shop near the small community of Fort Peck.
Why drive so far in the winter to a remote corner of northeastern Montana to ice fish?
For Ostermiller, it’s because there are few places he can catch as many different species of fish — and big ones — sometimes on the same jig and bait. Mindt, who also runs an ice-fishing guide service, said anglers are willing to drive 16 hours from the Midwest and Dakotas to catch a big lake trout through the ice because it’s something they can’t do in their state. He’s even had clients from California.
“You can also use live minnows and six rods which ups your chances even more of catching a bunch of big fish,” said Matt Dungan, a Rigby, Idaho, friend of Ostermiller’s. “Any time you get a bite it’s a good chance that fish is going to be at least 8 to 10 pounds or bigger, which is phenomenal.”
Dungan visited Fort Peck at the end of February and with his friends caught 23 pike, five lake trout and some small walleye and burbot.
“I tell you what, there was a bunch of people out there this time,” he said. “People were running all over.”
Ostermiller joked if he lived closer to Fort Peck he would be unemployed and divorced because he would be at the lake fishing every day. It’s so fun it is nearly addictive for him. Years ago when the owner of the Hell Creek Marina, Clint Thomas, gave him a business card and told him about the marina motel being open in the winter, Ostermiller said, “I’d like to say that changed my life, but that may be overly dramatic.”
Setting the hook
The first time Ostermiller visited the lake with a friend in 2002, the badlands landscape, clear ice and lack of snow at Fort Peck was so different from what he’s used to near his home in eastern Idaho below the towering Teton Range that he was a bit freaked out.
“It was just a different experience,” he said.
Then something strange happened and hooked him on the place. While he and his buddy were fishing in the Snow Creek area near Jordan an angler from Michigan rode up on an ATV and chatted with them. He was having a hard time finding his tip-ups, devices that raise a flag if a fish bites. A board keeps the tip-up from being pulled through the augured ice. Attached to the board is a spool that holds the fishing line.
The next day Ostermiller and his buddy found one of the Michigan man’s tip-ups with its flag up. It had almost been pulled through the hole and all of the line was spooled out. So Ostermiller began pulling in the fishing line hand over hand, not feeling any resistance of a fish on the other end. Then his friend looked down through the clear ice and saw a large shadow. About the same time, the line was jerked through Ostermiller’s hands and the tip-up slammed back into the hole.
The second time after pulling in the fishing line the men landed an 18-pound northern pike with a 15-inch walleye stuffed down its throat. The walleye had been hooked, but the pike had dined on the wrong fish and couldn’t cough it up.
“That was our first ‘this place is going to be incredible’ moment,” Ostermiller said. “We were really hooked.”
Spreading the word
Dungan invented the ice-fishing gadget called the JawJacker. When a fish strikes the bait a trap-like reaction is triggered and the attached rod is jerked upright setting the hook.
For the past six years Dungan has also trekked from Idaho to fish Fort Peck, often shooting video to help advertise his device online. He won’t get his camera out unless it’s a big fish, though. For pike, that’s a fish bigger than 10 to 12 pounds. He’s seen other anglers pull out 40-inch northerns.
Mindt said this year he’s had anglers in his shop with 16- and 17-pound lake trout, a 41-inch pike and walleyes measuring 31 inches.
“It started out to be a good season,” he said.
“One of the cool things about Fort Peck is you can leave your stuff up overnight,” Dungan said, something that’s illegal in other states. “That allows you to fish multiple spots all over the lake.”
He will drive a half mile and drill another hole to set up his JawJacker, then drive another half mile to drill another hole. Then he moves between them as he seeks out the best place to catch fish.
“That’s what makes Fort Peck so fun. It’s like running a trapline,” the Tennessee native said.
With temperatures hitting the 50s last week, Fort Peck’s ice is already fleeing. It was also late arriving this year because of an unseasonably warm winter, concentrating anglers in back bays like Crooked Creek.
So the ice-fishing season has been relatively short this year. Mindt canceled all of the guided trips he had scheduled for March. By the end of the week he’s predicting the hard shell will be unsafe for four-wheelers and side-by-side UTVs.
Mindt said the growth in winter ice anglers the past three years has been aided by the fact that his motel is now open in the winter, providing a place for visitors to stay close to the action. Likewise, Ostermiller likes to get a room at the Hell Creek Marina so he has easy access to the ice.
Dungan, on the other hand, tows hundreds of pounds of gear onto the ice behind a Snowdog, which resembles the tracked portion of a snowmobile without the skis. Then he camps on the ice, never far from the action.
“You’ve got to pay attention,” Ostermiller warned, because Fort Peck is such big water. “There are a few hazards, and conditions can change quickly. I’ve had pressure ridges open up when following the same tracks from the morning. So you’ve got to be careful.”
Ostermiller and his friends landed a last-minute booking at the Fort Peck Marina last week and hurried to fish before the ice disappeared. He couldn’t wait to return to the 132-mile long lake spread across more than 380 square miles, the last impoundment of the Missouri River before it snakes across the border into North Dakota.
“It’s so wild. It’s so gorgeous,” he said. “We live in the shadow of the Grand Tetons, but that rugged landscape at Fort Peck is beautiful in another way. We just love the primitive nature of it.”
March 15, 2021 at 12:51AM
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The drive to ice fish: Idaho anglers motor 400 miles east to fish Fort Peck Reservoir - Casper Star-Tribune Online
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