Lady of the Line

How an ambitious angler helped women break into the world of fly fishing.

It all started in 1952, when Bud Lilly, Montana’s father of fly fishing and often referred to as “a trout’s best friend,” bought his fishing shop in West Yellowstone. Two years later, his wife Pat delivered their daughter Annette. Born in the tiny town of Deer Lodge, Annette carried within her the genes of a fly-fishing legend and would one day become an angling icon in her own right.

Annette currently lives in California, but if you ask where she’s from, she’ll say Bozeman and West Yellowstone. As a child, Annette spent most of her time in Bozeman, but every summer she’d return to West Yellowstone and work in her dad’s shop.

The trout shop that bore her father’s name was a foundational piece of West Yellowstone’s community. It housed a basement gallery for local artists, and for anybody who entered the shop, there was always hot coffee available—in the restroom. “The bathroom might have been the busiest part of the shop,” Annette says, laughing, “because that’s where we brewed and kept our coffee pot.”

It was a family-run store that required all hands on deck during the busy summer season. Along with herself and her two older brothers, the shop’s staff included their friends. “It was all about fishing, all the time,” Annette remembers. “We worked together, fished together, and hung out together. And when we weren’t fishing, we were talking about fishing. Who caught what. Where the fish were biting. What flies were working and which ones weren’t. We talked about where we had fished that day, and where we might go fishing tomorrow.”

It was rare when the whole family could fish together. When certain members were out on the river, others needed to stay behind and man the shop. Annette said that it was always on her father’s birthday when they were able to enjoy a group outing. They’d set up along the banks of the Gallatin to fish and have a picnic. Her mother grilled steaks over a campfire, and as Annette explains, “It was a tradition, and a special time. I have really good memories of my dad’s birthdays.”

Annette can’t pinpoint when she actually learned to fly fish. “It’s something I just always remember knowing how to do,” she says. “I never had any formal training. My brother Greg and I think we learned by osmosis.” But it’s her brother Mike who she called her first “fishing buddy.” She recalls them riding bikes to the south fork of the Madison—until Mike hit a certain age. “When I was growing up, you could get your driver’s license in Montana when you were 14 or 15,” she explains. “When Mike got his license, it opened up so much for us. We’d drive somewhere, and then hike up. We started going up to Fan Creek, or to the headwaters of the Gallatin.”

As a teenager, Annette was an anomaly in the world of fly fishing. “Back then, it was the mid-’60s, and there were no females fly fishing,” she says. “So I fished with my brother a lot, and some of his guy friends. But you never saw any girls out fishing the rivers.” That’s something Annette would soon remedy.

"Fly fishing is something I just always remember knowing how to do," Annette says. "I never had any formal training. My brother Greg and I think we learned by osmosis."

At the family shop, Annette described how clients and customers would come in and ask her dad for advice on fishing. “My dad would just point to me and tell those guys, ‘Go ask my daughter. She can help you.’ You’d see the look of surprise on the guys’ faces when they were told to go ask a girl, but to my dad it wasn’t weird at all. I was knowledgeable and knew what I was talking about. In his eyes, I was a valuable resource.”

Summer after summer, familiar customers returned to the shop—locals and out-of-towners alike. The Lillys started to notice that the fishermen’s wives were curious about fly fishing, but were too intimidated to go out with a bunch of men. That’s when the idea was hatched for Annette to teach women.

In 1973, as a teenager, Annette started one of the first all-female fishing classes in the U.S. called, “For Ladies Only.” She remembers it well: “I was 19, and I didn’t know what I was doing initially. I was never formally taught how to fly fish, so I didn’t have a model. Translating what I knew about fly fishing to complete novices was daunting.”

“What I quickly realized,” she adds, “was that the things I took for granted, the parts of fishing that were second-nature to me, were things that the women I was teaching just didn’t know. They didn’t realize that fish hold in one spot, and that they face with their heads upstream. They didn’t know that fish don’t live everywhere in the water, that they don’t travel around—that fish tend to school and stay in one area. To me, those things were a given, but to my students, they were foreign. Ladies were asking me questions about knowledge that I thought everybody had. It was eye-opening, and realizing how basic I had to start out was a challenge.”

“It was all about fishing, all the time,” Annette remembers. “We worked together, fished together, and hung out together. And when we weren’t fishing, we were talking about fishing."

But Annette not only embraced the challenge, she mastered the process. Her classes became a hit, and as the first licensed female fishing guide in the state of Montana, she helped scores of ladies learn to fly fish. No longer was it an activity for men only.

Eventually, college called, and Annette shifted her focus away from guiding. But that wouldn’t last. She does, after all, have the Lilly chromosomes. She moved to California, and in 1993, started another female fly-fishing class, this time called the “Woman Angler.” Once again, the rivers west of the Mississippi harbored students from the Annette Lilly Russ school of fly fishing.

Today, Annette is retired and living with her husband. The girl from Montana has put lines in the water all over the world, and although it’s the rivers of California where she now spends most of her time, she says that when she returns to Montana, it feels like coming home: “There’s no place I’d rather fish than in Montana.”

In Montana, Bud Lilly’s name carries weight. Any angler who has knowledge of the West’s fly-fishing heritage has heard of the man. Legends may be soft-spoken, but their reputations don’t allow them to remain silent.

Born in Manhattan, Montana in 1925, Walen Francis Lilly II was the son of a barber and a homemaker. For reasons lost to time, locals called him “Bud.” In his youth, Bud was a gifted baseball player. Had society not been interrupted by Hitler and World War II, Bud might have found himself pictured on a baseball card donning the uniform of the Cincinnati Reds. Instead, he wound up dressed in the threads of the U.S. Navy. That was the kind of man he was; when duty called, Bud said, “Hello, how may I help you?”

Bud returned to Montana after the war and taught high-school science. He married Patricia Bennett and they had three kids: Gregory, Michael, and Annette. Little did Bud know, these four people would end up being the main workforce for the business he would soon purchase.

Bud bought his West Yellowstone fly shop in 1952, re-naming it “Bud Lilly’s Trout Shop.” This store would be the fertile soil from which his fly-fishing legacy sprouted. Known for being a trout fisherman, as well as an author and a conservationist, Bud was an early—and ardent—proponent of catch-and-release angling. Bud instilled this belief in his customers and his children, and as his daughter Annette says, “We never kept a fish, ever.” This ethic is now de rigueur among fly fishermen, in Montana and beyond.

Bud passed away in 2017, at the age of 91. But as we all know, legends never die.