Parks' Fly Shop

Parks' Fly Shop is a fly shop and outfitter at 202 2nd Street South in Gardiner, Montana, on the edge of Yellowstone National Park. Founder Merton Parks learned to tie flies during the Second World War and began selling them afterward when fishing companions kept asking for more. By 1949 the flies went out through a small mail-order catalog. In 1953 Parks moved his family from Minnesota to Gardiner and opened the shop. After spending 200 days on the water that first season he added guiding to the business. The shop passed through three Gardiner locations before settling in its present building in the 1960s. When Merton died in 1970 his widow Ellen and son Richard took over, Richard returning from military service in Vietnam to run it. Richard had grown up in the shop, tying flies commercially at twelve and guiding at eighteen. From the 1980s the guide service tripled and winter ski and snowshoe rentals grew. The shop describes itself as old school and stocks what anglers need for fly fishing and fly tying. Guided trips run in the park and across south-west Montana in summer and in winter. Parks' Fly Shop calls itself an old school outfitter with roots in the Gardiner area going back seven decades.