It was one of those places I could catch a dozen hammerhandle pike on any given day and with just about any method. Milltown Reservoir, just east of Missoula, Mont., was never intended to be a pike fishery, but it had all the attributes: shallow, weedy water; abundant prey in the form of juvenile trout; and the neglect of fisheries managers.
My main problem was that I couldn’t keep any of my fish. Milltown Reservoir had another distinction: an EPA Superfund cleanup site that trapped tons of poisonous slurry from a century of copper mining upstream. Those toxins accumulate in the flesh of predatory gamefish.
