Making a Wretched Mess
In West Yellowstone, a festival built around art, music and fly fishing suggests what the future of fishing gatherings might look like.
Fishing events usually follow a familiar formula. Booths. Rods. Reels. Product demonstrations. Perhaps a casting pool if there is enough room. Wretched Mess Fest starts somewhere else. Held in West Yellowstone on September 11 and 12, the festival describes itself simply as a community festival of art, music and fly fishing. That order feels significant. Fishing remains at the centre, but it is allowed to exist beside everything else that tends to accumulate around a life spent near rivers. There were fishing brands and equipment to try. There was also an artist market, two evenings of live music, more than twenty fly tyers working in front of visitors, workshops and presentations, casting competitions, youth tying, chalk artists, wader repair, food and beer. It sounds less like a trade show and more like the sort of small local cultural festival you might stumble into and decide to spend the entire afternoon at. That is partly because Wretched Mess has an unusually good piece of history behind it.
The festival takes its name from The Wretched Mess News, created by David Bascom—writing under the name David “Stanley” Poltroon—in West Yellowstone. The publication parodied conventional fishing periodicals, mixing absurd angling advice, illustration and commentary with criticism of conservation issues. The first modern Wretched Mess Festival was held in 2023 to celebrate Bascom and his artistic legacy. Organisers subsequently realised that something fundamental was missing from a festival honouring his work: fly fishing itself. So they put it back in. The result is interesting because fly fishing is particularly well suited to this kind of gathering.
The activity already contains an unusual amount of making. People tie flies, build rods, photograph fish, draw insects, write about rivers and spend unreasonable amounts of time discussing tiny objects with other people who understand why those objects matter. Culture already exists around the activity. Wretched Mess simply gives it somewhere physical to happen. That may also explain why an event like this feels increasingly relevant. Fishing doesn't necessarily need another hall full of products arranged by category. The brands, artists and people shaping the more interesting edges of the sport increasingly overlap anyway. Give them some music, a river nearby and enough room to make a mess.
