Wyoming 2024
This year's trip West was a bit shorter than in year's past, but it was the three days as I got to reconnect with my longtime fishing partner, Charlie. Charlie is a lot like me in that he doesn't sit around on his ass much at all, so he's always up to something. An encounter chainsawing a hackberry tree earlier in the month resulted in a minor injury to his thumb on his casting hand (the tree caused it, not the chainsaw), so with brace locked in, post-surgery, he was still determined to get to Wyoming and give it a go. You can't tell a German man what to do.
The weather on the ride out on I90 was sunny with a bit of torrential rain near Gillette, but all in all, relatively quiet as we were pre-Sturgis going west. Low humidity, some wind, high clouds, and smoke from a few wildfires to our north were the norm.
We got into a few Snake River cutthroats on day one, but nothing outrageous or consistent. The water is so clear that you can actually walk the stream and sight fish them. It doesn't guarantee that they want to pick up a fly, but you can watch some absolute studs sulking in the runs and pools, ignoring your best presentation. It's fascinating and humbling at the same time.
That afternoon, we climbed higher in elevation and worked an alpine meadow, brimming with brook trout that were ravenously taking every caddis in sight, so picking off a huge number of them in short time was not an issue.
Charlie and I caught a pile of brookies and decided to call it a day, shower up, hit a local bar for cocktails and some bar food and plot our plan for day 2.
We decided to check out some pins I had dropped on Google maps, with the assistance of OnX, from some research. It's always interesting to explore places to you have only viewed from satellite and not in person. The water we saw looked fantastic, but the several hours we fished it produced 5-6 inch browns and brookies. Not really what we were looking for.
By this time, the clouds had rolled in, so we went back to check on the cutties we pestered the day before. The cloud cover got the fish moving a bit, at least out of the bottom of the runs and actively wanting to pick up flies.
We figured out years ago how to fool these highly pressured behemoths, so we stuck with that plan and a lot of persistence to get them to cooperate.
The last day we did a bit more exploring in the morning and then hit the cutties in the afternoon before we drove home the next morning.
The trip out is about 12 hours of drive time. Go with a good buddy and have your Spotify playists ready to go to pass the time. We saw plenty of anglers on popular, easily accessed areas, but once we got remote on the forest service roads away from the campgrounds, we had the place to ourselves.