Guardians of the Snake, an F3T featured film, is the kind of fly fishing film you think you’ve seen before—it tells the story of a few guides in a world-famous fishery. But Guardians is unique in that it’s more of an honest portrait of guiding and the guide lifestyle in one of the most demanding places on the planet—Jackson Hole.
Guiding on the Snake River isn’t for the faint of heart, as guiding in general isn’t, either. It takes a special kind of person to be a legitimately good fly fishing guide, and places like Jackson attract some of the best in the world.
But Jackson comes with its own problems, ubiquitous across ski and fishing towns in the Rockies. It’s expensive to live there, it’s tough guiding on water that sees insane amounts of traffic, and it’s easy to feel like you don’t have what it takes to make it.
The film opens with a focus on guide Mike Janssen, who at one point was one more mistake away from not guiding anymore. He dug deep, worked extremely hard, and turned his career around in a way that will surprise you.
Janssen’s experience anchors the film, while other guides—from newcomers to Jackson legends—detail their time on the water, what the Snake means to them, and ultimately, the importance of protecting this river for future generations.
The film’s title is apropos; these guides really are the guardians of their river, and this film does an excellent job of showing you why this place is worth protecting. To give you even more insight into the film, we sat down with filmmaker Jon Klaczkiewicz to discuss some of the movie’s finer details.
Flylords: What made you want to do a film highlighting guides? That seems like a topic that’s relatively well-worn, but you obviously came at it in a very unique, insightful way. What inspired that?
Jon Klackiewicz: I was standing in the parking lot of Albertson’s with my bag of fried chicken (they’ve got the best), waiting for a buddy to go fishing for the day, and I watched at least a dozen guides with drift boats pull in, say their hellos, give their fist pumps, and head off to meet their clients. The early morning roads and rituals of Teton County are strewn with trucks pulling drift boats, and I was momentarily struck by the “Groundhog Day” routine that the guides go through every single day, day after day, yet for everyone who steps on their boat for the day, it’s a new and hopeful opportunity for what that day will bring. I think that guiding can, in many ways, be considered a “solo” profession, yet the “community” that exists, whether it be the exchanges getting lunch in the morning, boat ramp rigging, or the nods on the river, is robust. There is an unspoken bond within the ranks of the guide community that I was inspired to pay homage to.
Flylords: What made you focus on a place like Jackson? It’s so well-known, and you found a great story in this group of guides, but what made you choose this area and this fishery?
JK: Jackson has been home for me for 27 years; it is such a phenomenal place to be able to call home, and because it is so epic, it is very well known. I started to think about the human impact, not the digital, curated, doom-scrolling eyeballs, but the face-to-face, verbal, human, shared experience that these guides have spent hours together coaching those who go fishing with them for a day. Multiply those hours by the number of guides, and the number of days they are on the water every season, and they have a massive human impact on education about the ecosystem, the etiquette, the risks, and the stewardship required to mitigate those risks. I started chatting with John Bowers at Visit Jackson Hole about their desire for more community-driven storytelling and celebrating the people that make Jackson so special, and was like, “Hey, I got an idea…” I am super grateful they were able to support the project, and then the JH One Fly Foundation, Snake River Fund, and JH Trout Unlimited came on board as well to make the idea a reality.
Flylords: One of the guides in the film says that “guiding is sort of fishing by proxy.” That was one of the film’s best lines, and it seems like you picked great guides to feature here. How did you choose the guides to be in this film?
JK: Tom Montgomery. Absolute legend. He came up in the era of John Simms, Paul Bruun, and the Allen family as guiding was getting pioneered in the region. He has been guiding for 48 years and is an incredible photographer, and still crushing it. He actually bought his first jon boat to guide in from Paul Bruun and would strap it to the top of his Datsun to go figure out the secrets of the river. (There is a whole story that needs to be told.) I think the impact of that quote really stems from the acquired wisdom that these guides get from the critical thinking required to figure out their clients, the river that day, the fish, the bugs, and their ability to put all of the pieces together. Choosing awesome guides from this community wasn’t hard; the crux was how to try to encapsulate the guide community without having the time to feature all of the guides that make this place what it is.
Flylords: Have you ever guided before? This feels like a personal story, of sorts.
JK: From a career standpoint, I have been a filmmaker since I moved here, but I have always loved fishing, and I have a lot of really good friends who are guides and who live it and breathe it every day. I am incredibly lucky to have guide friends who want to go fishing on their days off, and I am always struck by the nuance of knowledge they have and are willing to share. I think, regardless of experience level, every day is an opportunity to learn and be curious, and not just about tactical technique, but also about the people you get to go fishing with. The journey of conversation throughout the course of an 8-hour day sitting in a boat together, hopefully interrupted by moments of absolute stoke (and sometimes by moments of heartbreak), is hard to describe. I have always loved asking questions because it provides the inception for a response, and you never know what you’re going to get. I think this project combined one of my passions with the vehicle to ask questions to a group of people whom I have the utmost respect for.
Flylords: Strategically, how did you plan out this shoot and get all the footage you needed? You worked with a lot of guides—it’s impressive. Can you peel back the curtain a bit on what it took to get this project to come together?
JK: I was chatting with my good friend and Production Manager at Fish Camp, Anthony “AJ” Swentosky, about how to make the film different; obviously, we all love our fish porn films, but we wanted this to be about the people, the community, and how to give the audience the experience of a day with a guide. (So I naturally had to fish out of the back of the boat of the guides we were interviewing.)
We also wanted to bring a different level of production to it, so we hit our buddy, Jon Riley, at Out in Space Studios, who is an epic GSS camera operator. (The GSS is a gyro-stabilized camera system that we typically use to film action sports films from a helicopter.) We devised a plan and figured out how to rig the GSS to the front of an Adipose Flow, where Jon could operate the system from the back of the boat. We were immediately nerding out over the shots we were getting and how smooth they were, as typically shooting boat to boat is tough to keep the camera stable for the operators on a long day floating down the river. The combo of splitting our limited number of shoot days between boat interviews and GSS shots, with some traditional content capture, lets us stack a ton of footage from multiple guides.
Flylords: What other insights about the Jackson community in particular did you not get into the film that you’d like to share with the audience?
JK: I think the biggest thing is how many amazing guides there are who we didn’t have the time or resources to feature in the film. We tried to get as many voices in as possible, while still allowing for the ultimate mentor, Mike Janssen’s evolution as a guide to anchor the experience for the audience. We are lucky to have such an amazing and supportive community that really cares about this place, and I am grateful to all the people who helped bring the film to life.
Watch the Film
The 2026 Fly Fishing Film Tour is on the road, bringing another exciting lineup of captivating stories from the water to the big screen. If you want to watch the films in this year’s Behind the Lens series, check out the F3T Tour Schedule and purchase tickets for a show near you!