So, we’re just back from the first of potentially three major western trips this summer. This first one was a combination of palaeontological work in Utah, fishing in Nevada, and then we were supposed to go on two multi-day backpacking and fishing trips on the Encampment River in Wyoming and Colorado. The latter crashed and burned as the river was still in full spring flood stage, impossible to fish and more or less impossible to hike due to swollen tributaries, but it was a great experience regardless. We hit some fishing milestones and, importantly, started figuring out that we can hike and effectively fish in the backcountry. We’re going out in July and August together for another major trip – the fishing shouldn’t be in doubt then.
I’m drearily familiar with the drive across Iowa and Nebraska, having made it year after year en route to fieldwork in the Great Basin. I tried to make a show of it for James’s sake. The only part I kind of enjoy is what we call the “Gateway to Nowhere” (officially the “Great Platte River Road Archway“). It’s awesome. It’s this kind of bridge over the interstate. It…doesn’t really mean anything or have any discernible purpose. A monument to nothing. Anyway, we got to Fort Morgan, Colorado the first day, then crossed the Rockies on I-70 and got all the way to Delta, Utah the second. Delta used to be my base of operations, but it got too soul-destroying after a bunch of years. I was dragged back to it because it was the only thing that made sense, so we stayed two nights. We did two days of fossil collecting with my colleague and former PhD student Talia Karim, now at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. Nobody asked/cares, but the deal is that we’ve discovered the world’s oldest horseshoe crab, by a long, long shot, and it’s a pretty big deal for a lot of evolutionary reasons. So we were there to get as many more specimens as we could.
That went well, though the collecting involves lugging packs of bulk rock back to the trucks. I’ve been doing that all my life, but few things drive home the effects of aging quite so directly.
Once we were done with the work part of the trip, Talia took the rocks back to Boulder in her truck and we headed west to Great Basin National Park, just over the state line in Nevada.
I walked to the top of Mount Wheeler in 2012, but there was still a bunch of snow this time. Great Basin National Park has Lehman Caves, which are spectacular, so we went on the obligatory tour.
After that, we got to fishing. The park has an alpine lake and a bunch of high gradient streams. We first went to Baker Creek and got a little intimidated. We’d never seen a stream with that kind of gradient and force. And tree cover. I really had my eye on Strawberry Creek, which has a protected population of Bonneville strain cutthroats, so we turned tail and headed there. Strawberry Creek is reached via a little-used northern entrance to the park, and doesn’t connect to the busier areas. There’s a lovely tent campground high up with no fees, so we stayed there two nights. There were only one or two other sites occupied. Great Basin National Park is the darkest place in the contiguous US, and the night skies were spectacular. We reached Strawberry Creek by driving to the end of the road, where there is a little parking lot, a bridge over the creek, and some trailheads. The first thing we couldn’t help but notice was that it was small, very small, very choked with deadfalls, protected by thickets of thorny brambles, and covered by trees.
We again felt like flatlanders, staring at this impossibly fast, tumbling, difficult little thing. But this time we got out the gear and saw what we could do. It was very, very difficult getting into any kind of position to fish. When you could, casting was often impossible and you had to resort to basically dapping, placing the fly instead of casting it. There wasn’t room for two people to fish, so we used one rod – the Rhodo at its shortest 270 cm length because it was the shortest rod we had. It was still too long. I’m thinking of getting a 240 cm rod (possibly a Nissin Air Stage Seiryu) for streams like this.
Still. Eventually we got used to it and started to recognize that there was, indeed, holding water. And then we started spotting trout. We fished with a Frenchie. The first trout we found was about 8 inches long, and feeding in a little corner pool maybe three feet long. It took ages to get into position and then it turned out I was standing on a red ant hill. I took the bites, because I desperately wanted to catch a cutthroat. I had to choke down on the rod and it was hard to control the fly placement. The fish struck five times before I got it right and could set the hook. And just like that I’d caught him.
The fish turned out to be easy to catch – they nailed the Frenchie whenever we could put it in front of them. The limit was finding fishable holding water. I caught another small one, then we found a fairly open pool. James got on the rod, and almost immediately he’d got his first cutt.
We kept taking turns after that, and ended up catching six trout over two very enjoyable hours.
The next day I set out to fulfill a long held ambition: one of my trilobite localities in the Nevada desert, Cleve Creek, has a trout stream running past it. I looked sort of wistfully at this stream over the years when I wasn’t fishing. It reminded me of fishing in my youth. I sometimes thought about how cool it would be to fish it. And now we were going to. First, just behind our camp at Strawberry Creek, the little stream burbled through the trees, a couple of miles downstream from where we’d been the day before. What the heck, I thought, and I caught another cutthroat with my coffee mug in my hand.
Then we set off for Cleve Creek, some 30 miles away.
It also looked very intimidating. Lots of water, moving very quickly, high gradient.
Here we used our sandals and neoprene socks and they worked great. The only way to really access the stream would have been to wade straight up it. If I’d been solo I could have managed this, though the casting would have been extremely challenging. It wasn’t safe for James to wade, far too much water and energy. So we were restricted to trying to find bank access, which wasn’t easy. The road did run along the stream, crossing it several times, so we were able to have a good look. There weren’t many places to fish, though.
It started well enough. We parked beside a decent pool, and I got the impression it was going to be a high-yield day. I was fishing the Kurenai HM30R, again with a Frenchie, and I hooked four trout in succession. I lost them all in the strong current. But it seemed like it was going to be crazy good. Then I made the mistake of saying to James “Wouldn’t it be funny if these were the only fish we saw all day?”
Wouldn’t it.
So those were the only fish we saw for most of the rest of the day.
There followed a very scratchy and scrapey battle with the stream – we were wearing shorts and sandals, so got our legs lacerated by brambles. We just couldn’t find any more accessible holding water. Finally, late in the afternoon, we spotted a beaver dam with a large, deep pool behind it. It wasn’t at all accessible, but we forced a way through brambles and bushes to its tail. There, we caught the only trout of the day. But we caught trout. So it turned out pretty well.
After I got one, I switched focus to getting James one. We put on a woolly bugger. Casting was difficult (you had to side cast from downstream), so I placed the first cast. I instantly caught another brown. Oops. After releasing it, I placed the second cast, intending to hand the rod to James. I instantly caught another.
Okay, so maybe it was an idea to let James make the casts. Except, natch, when he did, no other fish were seen. sigh. We flogged the water for 15 minutes or so, but that was it. Then we went out, went upstream to a road crossing, and waded down the stream to the head of the beaver dam pool. That was going great until I spooked everything that was holding there. double sigh. So we waded back out. Then I figured that maybe the rear of the pool had settled enough that he might have luck. So we scraped our way back to there. No response to the woolly bugger. In desperation, I rigged a crane fly larva with an egg pattern hung off its bend. He heaved it in and immediately hooked a trout and landed it. Aaaaand breathe. It turned out the poor thing had probably been going for the egg, missed, then got snagged by the crane fly. But we’ll take it.
And that was that. We were scraped up and it was mission accomplished, so we bailed.
The next day we spent driving to Rawlins, Wyoming, our base for the planned backpacking trips on the Encampment River. We geared up and headed out the next morning.
The first trip was an out and back starting near the town of Encampment, walking upstream into the Encampment River Wilderness. As an out and back it’s a three day/two night hiking trip. As I’d hoped to fish I’d planned five days and four nights. As soon as we crossed the fabled North Platte on the way, though, I knew we were in trouble. It was swollen to the maximum with spring runoff, the colour of brown milk. When we got to the Encampment River it was also in full flood stage, though a little clearer, the colour of tea. It was unfishable. Oh well. We started off on the hike anyway. I had some hope that some of the tributary creeks would be fishable.
There was no fishing to be had, but it was excellent proof of concept. We hiked 5.5 miles up into the Wilderness, made camp, and stayed the night. In the morning we went upstream to check out the tributaries. The first one of any substantial size was also in full flood and uncrossable (and unfishable). So that was that. We’d hiked the available trail, there was no fishing to be had, so nothing else to do. We hiked back out. The second trip had been planned to the south in Colorado, going up the main fork of the Encampment, passing over via alpine lakes to the headwaters of the west fork, and following it back down for a 16 mile loop. I’d again planned a lot of fishing, so seven days and six nights. But there was just no way for three or four more weeks. It was disappointing, and if I’d had a backup plan for other stuff in Colorado we could have put it in motion, but I didn’t have the information along to switch to anything else. So we just came home. James is off to the UK for a month in late June/early July. Then we’re heading back out for another major trip. By then the fishing shouldn’t be in doubt. We’ve figured out the backpacking, he grooves on it, we’ve figured out the fishing gear. We’ll be back soon.