Montana’s Classic Stonefly Bench: Wyoming — Lost, Found, and Catching Cutthroat
Series: Montana’s Classic Stonefly Bench — Article 6
Wyoming doesn’t care about your schedule.
This is the first thing you need to understand about fishing Wyoming. You will make plans. Wyoming will make different plans. You will study maps, book accommodations, research hatches, and drive twelve hours through sagebrush convinced you know exactly what you’re doing. Then Wyoming will hand you a dirt road that wasn’t on the map, a small creek that wasn’t in any article, and a cutthroat trout that hasn’t been asked a difficult question since the Eisenhower administration, and you will catch so many fish on a size 10 Yellow Humpy that you will forget what you originally drove twelve hours to do.
This happened to me more than once. I am not complaining.
I have spent days on the Snake River with a fly rod in one hand and a DSL camera in the other, floating through Grand Teton scenery so aggressively beautiful that it constitutes a hazard to drift boat operations. The fine-spotted cutthroat of the upper Snake are not complicated fish. They live in one of the most spectacular river corridors in North America, they eat large dry flies with an enthusiasm that border on reckless, and they reward any angler willing to put down the camera long enough to make a cast. I put down the camera. I made the cast. I should have done it sooner.
I have also wandered Wyoming backroads on trips where getting lost wasn’t a navigational failure — it was the plan. Small streams along vacant two-tracks that don’t appear on most maps. Creeks that tumble out of the Absaroka and the Wind River ranges cold and fast and full of cutthroat that have never had a philosophical debate about whether a size 12 Royal Wulff accurately imitates a salmonfly nymph. It does not. They eat it anyway. This is Wyoming’s gift to the fly fisher who has spent too much time reading about selectivity.
The North Platte — specifically the Miracle Mile below Kortes Dam and the Grey Reef section near Casper — is something else entirely. Up to 7,000 trout per mile in some sections. Brown and rainbow trout in the 14 to 20 inch range with genuine 30-inch fish present for the angler willing to face the Wyoming wind without whimpering. The stonefly hatch runs mid-May through mid-June, the Green Drake and caddis follow, and the North Platte will test every skill you developed on the tailwaters of Articles 4 and 5 and then ask if you have anything else.
This is Article 6 of Montana’s Classic Stonefly Bench. Wyoming doesn’t do anything quietly and neither will this article.
