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Walter Wiese

Walter Wiese on the Yellowstone River trail on his way home after a nice afternoon on a stretch of river accessible only by hiking.

        Walter Wiese is Head Guide at Parks' Fly Shop, manages the shop when Richard is out of town, and ties most of our custom flies.  Walter has been working for PFS since 2001, and is also a contract fly designer for the Montana Fly Company.  If you would like to request Walter's services, book your trip early, as he tends to stay busy. 

        Walter prefers fishing flowing water to still, and when fishing on his own tends to gravitate towards small streams like the Gibbon and various Yellowstone River tributaries where he can fish dry flies on light rods in solitude.  He also enjoys matching hatches in the Lamar drainage and on the Firehole, nymphing the Gardner River for fall-run browns, and exploring the Yellowstone's canyons upstream of Gardiner with streamers and big dry flies.

        When Walter was seven, his dad passed on an old fiberglass rod and a Pflueger Medalist reel, and the boy was never the same.  Growing up in the Missouri Ozarks, he gained his first exposure to trout on stocked spring creeks and the White River, with the streams of Montana barely registering in his consciousness.  This changed when he was twelve, when a well-meaning relative gave him a pile of books, including John Gierach's Where the Trout are All as Long as Your Leg and M.R. Montgomery's The Way of the Trout, both of which are set largely in Montana.  Soon, Walter started tying Prince nymphs and Stimulators instead of the strange things stocked trout like, and he started lobbying for a trip West.  Before he began working for PFS in 2001, he made two such trips, both to Yellowstone, and each one only deepened his fly fishing addiction.

        In other matters, Walter holds a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Creative Writing.  He earned the latter degree in the spring of 2006 from Western Washington University, in Bellingham, Washington, a school he chose partially because he wanted to learn about fishing for steelhead.  A new addiction was born.  Walter has been writing professionally since 1999.  His outdoor journalism and essays have appeared in American Angler, Fly Rod and Reel, Fishing and Hunting News, various Game & Fish publications, Outdoor Guide, River Hills Traveler, and other publications.  He is hard at work expanding his Master's thesis into a book.  The work is a collection of essays about fly fishing a short stretch of the Yellowstone and its tributaries in and near Yellowstone Park.  Walter also spends too much money on records and concert tickets for his own good, plays terrible guitar, and reads and writes like a fiend.

        In addition, Walter is the webmaster of this site, which makes him wonder why he wrote the above profile in the third-person point of view.

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