Bigfork guide builds a career on professional fishing

For Jason Lanier fishing isn’t just a hobby, it’s his career.

Lanier, who owns Bigfork Anglers, has been a fisherman his whole life and a flyfishing guide for 17 years.

“I grew up fly fishing,” he said. “Dad had me fly fishing before I can even remember.”

He grew up in southern California and would spend his summers traveling the west with his grandparents fishing.

As a kid, Lanier said, he didn’t know many other people who were into fly fishing. There was only one fly shop in his part of southern California.

“Fly fishing wasn’t cool when I was a kid,” he said.

Lanier started guiding to pay for his schooling at the University of Montana, where he studied business administration. He chose Missoula for college, largely for the fishing opportunities.

“Until I moved to Montana, I didn’t exclusively fly fish,” he said. He didn’t realize you could fly fish on lakes, so he would always lure fish there.

Since he’s learned that you can really fly fish anywhere, and in his opinion, that’s the best method. “Fly fishing is about dry fly fishing,” he said. “It’s the funnest way to do it.”

In dry fly fishing the fly is meant to mimic an aquatic insect, and float on top of the water. Fish have to rise to take the fly, and it can be a more challenging method.

Lanier said there’s a progression in learning to fly fish, that he’ll see in clients.

Once you get the hang of casting he said, then you want to catch a fish. Then you want to catch a lot of fish. Once you’ve caught a lot of fish you want to catch a really big fish. After that it becomes more about the method, you want to catch a really big fish on a dry fly.

“Then you get to the point where you don’t care about the fish at all,” he said. You just want to be on the water, fly fishing.

Living in Bigfork provides access to different waters for fly fishing. Lanier and the guides he contracts with for the shop take clients on the Flathead River, Swan River and Blackfoot River.  “All those provide a unique experience,” he said. While those are their primary spots, if a client wants to go else where, they will. The Missouri River, for example, which is known for the size and amount of fish it holds. “I would get bored if I was stuck on one river all summer long,” Lanier said.

When he was just a guide, Lanier would go on 120 fishing trips every summer. Now that he also has the shop to run, he’s down to 80. As much as he loves fishing, there was a time guiding when Lanier started to burn out. So in 2007 he took a job with Montana Fly Company in Columbia Falls. He lasted eight months before he realized the cubicle wasn’t for him.

Lanier began tying flies in elementary school, when his grandfather bought him a fly tying kit at a garage sale.

“It’s a natural progression really,” Lanier said of tying flies. You go fishing and look at the bugs, trying to figure out what the fish are eating. Then you go home and tie a fly to mimic what you saw — and that makes you want to go fishing again, so you can test it out.

“Tying just kind of brings the whole sport full circle,” he said.

Though he guides less now that he has a shop to run, Lanier still gets out on the water, especially with regular clientele.

The rapport with a client can make or break a trip.

“It’s like being a waiter, but if you had the same table for 8 hours,” he said.

One of Lanier’s most memorable guide trips was last year when he took New York Mets pitcher Bob Ojeda and four time Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times writer Joe Sexton to the Flathead and Missouri rivers.

It was a trip when the weather didn’t cooperate, and it was 8 degrees out. Lanier said it was the coldest trip he’d ever done, but the fishing was incredible and the clients were fun.

“Those dudes were just really crazy,” he said. “They had a bunch of really great stories.”