North Platte, Wind River, Big Horn

Gerry fishing on the North Platte upstream from the raft.

Synopsis: Spent a week fishing with Gerry Cox.  We started with a day and a half on the North Platte river at Gray Reef. Wade fished the dam the first day and floated from the dam to Lusby the second.   We stayed at Sloan's cabins in Alcova.  From there we drove overland through the Rattlesnake Hills to the Wind River at Boysen State Park.  That was about 60 miles of dirt through some rather beautiful sage country.  We wade fished the Wind in Boysen State Park for the afternoon and into the evening catching many large rainbows (18" to 24") on size 18 caddis.  We probably should never have left Boysen. We drove north, spending the night at the Greybull Historic Hotel (which I can recommend should you happen to pass through Greybull WY.)  Continued north, over the Big Horns and up into Montana.  We did a quick tour of the Little Bighorn Battlefield and then to Fort Smith on the Big Horn below the Yellowtail damn.  Stayed in a small but very new and clean room at the Bighorn Angler. It was an unbearable 98°F and we waited until almost 5PM to wade fish at the three mile access - and it was still brutally hot with icy water at about 47°F.  On the fourth of July we floated the Big Horn from Afterbay below the dam to 13 mile takeout at Bighorn.  The final day we floated the three miles from the Afterbay to the three mile takeout.  The fishing on the Big Horn was difficult and the average fish is nowhere near the size they were fifteen years ago, and we were not the only ones saying so.  We left Fort Smith at 2PM and were at home, sitting on the couch sipping bourbon, a bit after 9PM.

Gerry with a nice North Platte rainbow.

Dates - 30 June 2013 to 5 July 2013
Miles Driven: 1042
Miles Floated: 24 - Grey Reef to Lusby (8), Afterbay to Bighorn (13), Afterbay to Three Mile (3)
Longest Overland: 42.5 of dirt (Dry Creek Rd. Alcova WY to Gas Hills Rd. Riverton WY)
Best Sleep: Greybull Historic Hotel, Greybull, WY
Best Meal:  Pulled pork sandwich with coleslaw, Up in Smoke BBQ, Buffalo WY
Weirdest Meal: Subway, Garryowen MT
Biggest Fish: 25" Rainbow - Wind River, Boysen State Park, Shoshoni WY
Coldest Water: 47°F - Big Horn River, Fort Smith, MT
Warmest Water: 66°F - Wind River, Boysen State Park, Shononi WY
Hottest Air Temp: 98°F - July 3rd, Fort Smith, MT

Wind River cutthroat - over 18"

On Sighting In

Gerry sighting-in for elk season 9/29/10

Here's a really nice account of the procedure for mounting a scope and sighting in a rifle from friend Gerry.

Ask 3 people what you need to mount a scope and you'll get at least 3 answers.  This is my take on it; others may disagree.
Dunk the scope in hot water and see if any bubbles come up.  If not, it's waterproof.  Sigh with relief.
If you buy a decent quality gun and decent quality mounts, they probably will be aligned, so you won't need a lapping rod.  Alignment rods are sort of fun, but align them both ways, point to point and butt to butt.  A torque wrench is nice (I bought a Weaver one on sale), but if you just turn the scope screws tight with no more than thumb and finger, you don't really need one.  If you do decide you can't live w/o one, do find out what torque the manufacturer of that mount recommends.
I don't own a collimator, as most of my rifles are bolt actions (and I'm cheap).  My procedure is to center the reticule (very imp if a used scope; new Leupolds are typically centered*).  If you cut V notches in a cardboard carton, place the rifle in them, and remove the bolt, you can boresight the target.  Adjust the elevation and windage until the crosshairs are on target.  Test fire.  Holding the rifle steady and aiming at the bullseye again, move crosshairs until they are on the bullet hole.  Test fire again.  You should be close to point of aim.  Tweak until you're happy.  This will work with a No. 1:  just be sure to have the rifle high enough that you can drop the lever to see through the bore.  I often start at 50 yards to get on paper, then move to 100.
*Centering:  Turn a knob all the way until it stops.  Now turn it back all the way, counting the number of clicks.  Take half that number and turn it back; it's centered.  Now do the same for the other knob.
As you're hunting, not trying for a benchrest record, there's no particular reason to try various brands of ammo.  Sight in the Federals and use them.  If you can get a 1.5" group at 100 yards, you should be fine. Start with a clean dry barrel.  Some barrels throw the first shot from a clean barrel, then group nicely; if you have one of those, hunt with a fouled barrel.  Keep a journal each time you test or shoot for practice:  temp., wind, ammo, group sizes, etc.
And remember, this is supposed to be fun.

Gerry and I are off to fish the N. Platte and the Bighorn for a week.

A Sportsman's Library

Steve Bodio's newest book is out, and it's great.  It is an erudite, idiosyncratic, personal catalog of one hundred sporting titles. At 256 + xvi pages, each title gets, on average, an 2.56 page description.  And what descriptions they are, one chapter for each of the hundred books.  Each description contains information on the author, a gloss of the content of the book and and Steve's reasons for including the book among among the hundred. He knows many of the living authors and that comes through in personal anecdotes about them.
Steve manages to pull together so many cultural and literary threads it's hard to imagine how he keeps them all in his head.

I was lucky enough to have been sent a preprint back in November - but I just got my bound copy today.  Aside from the pleasure of having a properly bound copy to hold in my hand, what I had not seen, was Malcolm Brooks' blurb on the back which is truly excellent.

"Nobody who loves traditional blood sport wants it's long literary line totally obfuscated by faux-gonzo, Wang-dang Nugents and gear-hawking carny barkers of cartoonish hunting shows.   Steve Bodio brings his formidable powers as both reader and writer to the cause, gifting us with a guide to the greats as varied, as magical, and yes, as essential as the works he champions."     -- Malcolm Brooks, author of Painted Horses 

When a pre-print arrived in my inbox I printed a copy and could not put it down.  I quickly ordered a couple of the rarest titles that I did not already own, figuring prices for some of these out of print books are going to go sky high. In an unscientific survey I just checked to verify my theory and it seems to me that prices on some titles are definitely up. I claim it's because Steve's book is now out.  In a shrewd moment I thought of cornering the market on Plummer's Tales of a Rat Hunting Man, which wouldn't have been all that hard at the time - now it is impossible. One copy is now listed at $673.76.  Prices on a few of the titles in the hundred have been out of sight for a long time -- I'm thinking of Jack O'Connor's  Hunting in the Southwest which I looked for again after reading Steve's description.

Steve's book won't help the price situation, though it may actually get some classics back in print.  I notice that one of the hundred, Saxton Pope's 1923 book  Hunting with the Bow and Arrow, a longtime favorite of mine, is recently back in print. I traded my own copy, an early printing, to a fanatic bow hunter in Virginia for a hind quarter of a whitetail he killed with his bow.  That meat was the beginning of my own long relationship with game meat; killing, butchering, cooking and feasting. I cooked and shared a memorable meal with friends, one of whom popped the cork on a 1974 Chateau Latour for the occasion.  But I always regretted not having my copy of Pope's book which I bought for five dollars in a used book and magazine store in Norfolk Virginia.

In our broader culture, the trend to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator, to reach the largest possible audience, seems inexorable.   Steve refuses to participate in that trend.  A selection of books like this reveals as much about the selector as it does about the books themselves.  Taken as a whole, it represents a lifetime of scholarship. This book, and the books he recommends, provide a view into the mind of perhaps the deepest thinker about blood sport we have today.  Thank you Steve.

Buy Steve's book now!

A Day on the Green

Leopard spotted brown. 

After working every day but one for the past month, I managed to take a day to fish the Green River on my drive home from a conference in Utah.  The Green River below the Flaming Gorge dam in Utah is a world class fishery.  There are reportedly 20,000 fish per mile and I believe it. The "A section" extends seven miles downstream from the Flaming Gorge dam to Little Hole.I'd planned to fish downstream from the dam access but I abandoned that plan because of the crowd.  Instead I drove downstream to the Little Hole access.  The parking lot there was nearly empty when I arrived at 9:30 AM.  It's the takeout for boats floating from the dam and by afternoon it is filled with trucks towing trailers that have been shuttled down during the day.

It turned out to be a very good day. Saddly, I was a week late for the Blue Winged Olive hatch, though a few olives did come off during the day. Even so, the fish were still keyed in on BWO nymphs, and I caught as many fish as I care to in a day. I know because I lost count. If I had to guess I landed 15 and hooked about twice that many.  None of the fish I landed was under 15" and none were over 20".  All of them took my Black Back Wet Dream.

BBWD tied on a size 20 Dai-Riki #135 hook - black flashback.

I tie this version of the WD on size 18-22 Dai_Riki #135 hooks.

Black Back Wet Dream (BBWD)
Hook: size 18-22 scud/pupa hook
Body:  olive or  brown olive thread
Tail: a few fibers from a Wood Duck  flank feather
Thorax: tan/brown dubbing
Wing Case:  Black Holo-Tinsel

In the pictured fly I used 70 denier brown olive Ultra thread, the thorax is SLF Spikey Dubbing in natural fox color and the wing case is black Holo Tinsel.   It is a synthesis of Mark Engler's original WD (wet dream) pattern with a flashier version of Randy Smith's Tyvek Baetis.  Engler's pattern was renamed the WD-40 by  Umpqua when they commercialised it - so as not to offend delicate sensibilities. I do not share their compuction. Many folks assume the WD stands for "wood duck".  Good marketing at work I guess.  Smith's pattern uses a wing case tied from Tyvek that has been colored black.  Mine uses black holo-tinsel.   Feel free to tie as many as you like, it's proving to be an amazingly effective pattern, but also, consider this post a copyright on the pattern should you want to commercialize it.

An eighteen incher.

The Green is primarily a brown trout fishery although I did catch some nice rainbows too, fat fish. These fish are heavily pressured and can be selective feeders.  The water is extraordinarily clear and good sized fish hang on the banks. You see many many of them as you hike up the trail.  It can be a frustrating experience for the tyro to fish to one of these large trout, clearly on the feed, in shallow water.  There is nothing more satisfying than taking one of these fish.  Once again, I complain that the fly shops are pushing the big flies to novices because so many fisherman are reluctant to fish the small flies.  The green has a good hatch of cicadas and a big black foam fly is a common pattern there.  Later in the summer there is good hopper fishing as well.  The fly shops are starting to push those flies though I did not see one cicada nor did I see any hoppers.

I met a man on the trial who I took to be from Oregon since he talked about fishing to spawning rainbows on the Williamson River. These are fish that run up out of Klamath Lake. He seemed somewhat disappointed with the Green in comparison. He said he'd done well the day before but he complained that he'd had to fish size 20 flies.  When I first met him he was fishing a cicada and when I saw him later had a streamer tied on.  By that time he'd had one hook-up.  Somewhat hopefully, he told me how he'd met someone the day before who frequently fishes the Green and who prefers to tie on an Adams or a Royal Coachman. A size 20 Adams would actually be a decent imitation of a BWO and there is a kind of local beetle with red/orange colouring. So who knows, maybe an Adams or a Royal Coachman would be just the ticket.  I expressed my doubts which prompted him to walk on.

Looking down into Little Hole on my way out at about five-thirty.

The Green is a great river.  I caught it yesterday at an in between stage, after the BWO hatch but before the summer hatches.   I promise myself that next year I will catch the BWO hatch.

Wanted: A Blue Winged Olive Hatch

A wild brown that took a BWO imitation.

It's that time of year when the Blue Winged Olive hatch should be on.  I spent Sunday seeking the hatch but did not find it.  I drove around to Six Mile Gap on the Upper North Platte and discovered it was too muddy to fish.  Maybe not too muddy, but muddier that I wanted to deal with.  Lesson learned: check the N. Platte at the State Line Ranch bridge before driving another 12 miles north to six mile gap.  The  muddy run off was from a snow storm that had hit the N. Platte River Valley but did not leave us a drop of snow on the other side of the Snowy Range.  I drove back to fish the Laramie River not far from my home.  The ice is off but the water is clear and low. These are not the easiest conditions for fishing there.  The Laramie is a wild brown trout fishery and can offer fantastic fishing - but just as often, for me anyway, it can be a bust.  In fact, I can not think of another river that has fished as inconsistently for me as the Laramie.

The day was cool and intermittently overcast with fast scudding clouds which occasionally dropped a mixture of rain and sleet and sometimes a rush of snow which was gone in another minute. Textbook conditions for a Spring Baetis hatch.  The Blue Winged Olives are the first mayflies to hatch in the season.  They are magnificent little mayflies with bluish gray wings and olive/brown bodies.  Unfortunately, the hatch was not to be.

I did have a good afternoon.  I caught six (or seven?) beautiful wild brown trout in a bit more than three hours. The largest (shown above) was just under 18" but the fish were more commonly around 14".  All but two of the fish took a WD40 tied on a size 18 DaiRiki #135 hook.  I've been tying the WD40 with a wood duck tail and a body of 70 denier olive/brown UTC thread. Compared to the old standard Uni-thread the UTC thread colors are both nuanced and rich. The thorax is dubbed with SLF Spikey Dubbing in the Natural Fox color.  The wing case is black Holo Tinsel.  The distinctive thing about the WD40 is the oversize "globular" thorax.   Of the two fish that did not take the WD40, one fancied a skinny orange rock worm and another took a gold bead caddis.  I have to say that every time I brought one in on the WD40 I was surprised to see the fish had not taken the more colorful fly of the pair.  The BWO's may not have been hatching but the fish seem keyed into a good imitation of the BWO nymph/emerger.  That has me thinking the hatch is on, I just missed it.

The flush is on at the Reef and the rainbows are in.

Biggest fish of the day.

BLM started the Spring flush below the Gray Reef dam on March 22nd.  At midnight they start increasing the flow to 5000 CFS and by 3 AM they start dropping it back down to 500 CFS. By 10AM, about the time we arrived yesterday, everything appears to be completely normal.  This release schedule ends today, March 31st. The flush is a great thing for the trout habitat - and this is why they do it - to flush out fine sediment that builds up in gravelly spawning beds.  If there is not free flow of water through the gravel the eggs do not survive. Before the dams were in place, runoff flowed free in June and performed a natural flush, clearing out accumulated slit. The management of dam flows strictly to satisfy downstream water users is a quick way to ruin a river.    This is how the once great fishery on the Henry's Fork of the Snake was destroyed - or nearly so if you read the Island Park flyshop pages.  On the Henry's Fork, flow from the dams was dictated by downstream irrigation needs. Winter/spring flushes to simulate the natural flush of runoff were perceived as a waste of good water.  This nearly killed the Henry's Fork.  Annual flushing flows were started on the North Platte in 1995 and since then, trout populations have grown from 400 to 3500 per mile.  Before the flush this year they drained the Gray Reef holding reservoir so they could inspect the gates on the dam.  That dumped a lot of sediment into the river, and along with it, a lot of aquatic worms and midge larvae.

Rock Worms - tied on a DaiRiki 135 #16 with Danville 70 denier red thread wrapped over two strands of  UTC micro orange stretch tubing, and coated with Sally Hansen Hard as Nails..

From a macro point of view, the flushing flows keep the river healthy from year to year and increases trout populations. From a micro point of view, fishing during the flush is a different game than it is at other times.  In mid-February, and throughout much of the regular fishing year, even when the flows are high, midges are hot.   A Mercury Midge (or some variant of it) is my goto fly.  The flush is churning up the rich sediment that was dumped into the river.  I started yesterday with a Rock Worm and a midge on the point and
I did not get one hit on a midge - neither did Jeff.  As I've never seen it before red was the fly color of the day.  If I was a better naturalist I would have thought to pump the stomach on one of the fish I caught to see what they were feeding on. I'd bet money they were stuffed with annelids - or were they stuffed with midge larvae?  Most of the fish, including my biggest fish of the day, took a smaller worm pattern  which was tied on a size 16 Dai Riki 135 hook.  By the way, the biggest fish I caught  22" and it was the largest one I've managed to catch for some time at Gray Reef.  The flush and the pending spawn are bringing bigger fish up to the dam.

I have often been resistant to fishing worm patterns, but yesterday, to match the hatch, a worm was de riguer.  It's pretty much the only thing I could get any fish to look at though I did hook two on a green leech. The red "rock worm" is a standard pattern at Gray Reef and it produces fish on a regular basis.  Some guys fish almost nothing else.  During the spawn, a worm is often teamed with an egg - this rig is commonly referred to "Bacon and Eggs."  The standard Gray Reef Rock Worm pattern is usually tied in a larger size than the ones shown above.  Yesterday, with the fish so keyed in on red, I eventually rigged up with with a larger rock worm above the smaller one on the point.

On the web you can find the Rock Worm pattern referred to as a San Juan Worm; this just shows an unfortunate ignorance (or indifference) to fly pattern history and nomenclature.  Unfortunately this usage seems to be taking hold - I talked to someone yesterday at the Reef who had a Rock Worm tied on and told me he was fishing a San Juan Worm.   For those who may not know, a San Juan Worm is a fly pattern developed on the San Juan river in NM.  It is a bit of ultra-chenille tied on a hook. It looks nothing like the N. Platte Rock Worm.  Personally, if I ordered half a dozen San Juan Worms and a package of Rock Worms showed up instead (or vice versa) I'd be miffed.  Not all worm patterns are San Juan Worms.

I've always been a bit puzzled as to why the Rock Worm is such a popular pattern at the Reef.  Sure it brings in some good fish throughout the year - but so will a Gold Ribbed Hares Ear nymph. I caught my largest trout ever (measured at 27") on a GRHE drifted deep on the south side of the Gray Reef dam. I suspect it was taken for a crane fly larva. A day like yesterday is not enough to convince me that a Rock Worm is always the way to go at the reef - but I could see how some people might get that idea.  It seems to be common knowledge that the flush is a good time to fish and so it was as crowded yesterday as I've seen it in a long time.  That means a lot of people got the rock worm message.

Fishing the Wind River Canyon

A nice rainbow caught in the Wind River canyon.

The Wind River starts up high near the summit of Togwotee pass, flows south and east through Doubois WY and then into Boysen Reservoir.  From Boysen reservoir it flows north into the Wind River canyon.  After exiting the canyon, at the "wedding of the waters" it becomes the Big Horn river which flows north through Thermopolis WY and into Montana eventually to flow into the Missouri.  

For about a mile (maybe less) after the Wind flows out of Boysen Reservoir and just before it drops into the  canyon proper, it flows through Boysen State Park.  In the state park a WY fishing license is all you need. Once past the park, the river flows on the Wind River reservation which is the home of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes.  To fish or hike in the canyon (or anywhere on the reservation) you need a Tribal Fishing/Trespass license plus a $5 conservation stamp. For WY residents the license costs $20/day, $50/7days and $80/year - non-residents pay $25, $75 and $125.  I purchased a yearly permit at the Fast Lane in Shoshoni.  Last year I tried to buy a permit on a Sunday in Thermopolis - no can do.

Looking upstream - I am bringing in a nice fish.

Starting around noon I fished a deep run low in the canyon for a couple of hours in the sun, the air temperature was around 50F.  I hooked up pretty consistently on a size 12 bead-head pheasant tail.  In an hour and a half or so I managed to land five nice fish and hooked up with another five I did not bring to hand.    I fished further upstream later in the day - after the sun had disappeared in the clouds - and was frustrated to not hook up again.

A smaller rainbow in beautiful form.