Right Fish, Wrong State

By Sidney Urquhart

"Montana's legendary rivers and lakes offer anglers the opportunity to catch wild trout in a pristine environment," gushes the promotional copy on the state's 1990-91 tourist map. Certainly the instructions to photographer Steve Bly seemed clear enough: go forth into the wilderness and bring back a shot of a "good-looking man with a big trout." But Bly went too far afield to snap his fisherman and his fish -- all the way to the Boise River in neighboring Idaho. With more than a million of the embarrassing maps in circulation, Montana commerce director Chuck Brooke is angling for damage control. Said he: "I thought that fish was kind of small for a Montana trout."

With reporting by Linda Williams