Patty Reilly

CHRISTINE PETERSON

For the Star-Tribune P atty Reilly hadn’t planned on being a fishing guide. She came out west to be closer to nature. She found a job near Jackson and co-owned a successful restaurant. She was young. And she really liked to fish.

Maybe it’s because she liked to fish so much that she ended up making fish guiding her life’s work. Maybe it’s because 40 years ago her friends told her she needed to figure out how to row the boat, too, because if she was going to fish so much she would have to take turns at the oars.

Whatever it was, Reilly took her first two clients down a stretch of river through Grand Teton National Park called Deadman’s to Moose in 1979. Decades later, after hitchhiking with a friend and fishing through South America, opening one of the first floating and fishing businesses in Argentina and spending decades organizing trips for clients to fishing destinations around the world, Reilly still hosts trips.

Why fishing?

“There is so much involved with it. You have to really be aware of your surroundings. What is happening in nature tunes you into what is going on with fish. The barometer, insect hatches, a current where fish might hold, special spots where fish might be. Are they up in a ri e because insects are coming o ? What are birds eating? Is there a hatch that you can’t see that they’re eating?” she asked.

“And the fact that you never become perfect. I like that. It’s a thinking game.”

Reilly was a 5-foot, 6-inch (her friends tell her she never quite made 5 feet, 7 inches) woman operating in an almost entirely man’s world in one of the country’s premier fishing destinations. She’s been featured in Field & Stream, ESPN and had a chapter in the book “Fifty Women Who Fish.” But get her on the phone talking about fishing, and she’s still clearly just a woman who loves to fish.

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Reilly, 69, moved to the West from suburban New York in 1972. She had gone to college in Boston and wanted nothing more than to be outside.

“My father was not an outdoorsman to speak of, but the two vacations we did we were fishing,” she said.

She went to Montana first, by way of Jackson. And when she reached Missoula, intending to finish college, she instead decided to backtrack to Jackson where she knew she could find work — and fish.

From there the story tracks like any early-20s traveler to Jackson now — she took odd jobs working for survivalists and

JACKSON GUIDE HAS LED WAY FOR 4 DECADES

Patty Reilly, owner of Guided Connections out of Jackson, has spent more than 40 years guiding anglers in Wyoming and around the world.

managing a beer bar — and spent every free moment on the water.

They were spin fishing back then, chucking lures and pulling whatever took their bait out of the water. The same group of friends decided to buy a restaurant, and Reilly managed the front in the evenings, spending the days on the water whenever possible.

“My friends said, ‘You need to row, you can’t fish all day, you have to learn how to row,’” she said. “’So I said, ‘Fine, I’ll learn how to row.’”

She also learned to fly fish. She was tired of catching so many fish and keeping them. Fly fishing, she thought, would allow her to catch just as many but also safely release all those cutthroats, rainbows and browns back into the water.

Then one day a friend asked her to help guide. She wasn’t sure she’d like it because it seemed macho, not something for her. But then she tried.

“I thought, ‘This is really great,’” she said. “Plus it was a way to make a living outside.”

And so began a career first guiding out of Grand Teton National Park and an Orvis Lodge in Jackson, then the Firehole Ranch on the Madison in Montana.

In 1978, she sold her stake in the restaurant and her car and she and a friend flew to Ecuador, spending six months fishing and hitchhiking around Peru, Chile and Argentina. Near the Andes in northern Patagonia she met anglers from Buenos Aires who suggested they bring back boats to float the rivers. The fishing was phenomenal. Brown trout were big, hungry and feisty. Because few anglers targeted them while floating, the fish were not as wary. So they came back, flying boats in and driving into the mountains.

Other seasons she spent fishing in New Zealand, guiding anglers in Alaska and taking out steelhead fishermen in Oregon.

All of those experiences helped her start Guided Connections, a business out of Jackson connecting clients with fishing adventures around the world.

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Rarely does Reilly think about being that 5-foot, 6-inch woman in a man’s world.

But sometimes it’s hard to forget.

Like the time guiding in Grand Teton when she had a client come in and look her up and down, up and down and say: “This is it?”

She stared right back at him and said simply, “Yep.”

“I felt l could teach someone something, and it was their loss if they couldn’t do something with it.”

For Jean Bruun, a longtime Jackson guide, Reilly is a mentor, dear friend and fishing partner. Reilly’s accomplishments like first ascents down rivers in South America often go unnoticed because of her humility, Bruun said.

“She is, in my opinion, one of these trailblazers that remained professional, hardworking and humble,” Bruun said. “She sloughs it o like it’s not a big deal, but then you think of what she’s achieved.”

Both women want to be thought of not as women who guide but as professionals and guides in their own right. And while there aren’t nearly as many female fly fishing guides as male, Bruun is quick to point out the first registered guide in the country was a woman named Cornelia “Fly Rod” Crosby. Historical pictures in museums in Jackson show women as fly fishing and hunting guides.

“Patty is that kind of person in that she’s got the intellect, she’s got the talent, she’s got the skill and she’s got the personality that really wants people to love the outdoors and love what she does for the right reasons,” Bruun said.

While Reilly’s interest in fishing hasn’t lessened, her need to catch fish isn’t what it once was. She figures after almost half a century reeling in fish, it’s fine if she doesn’t catch the most or the biggest anymore. She’d rather help teach others how to fish or watch someone successfully set the hook.

She doesn’t use the word “passion.” For her it’s not spiritual. It’s not a calling. It’s something much more basic that has run like a current through her life.

“I just find the process very captivating,” she said. “To me it’s all an outdoor wonder.”