Day 8b: Back Into The Hills of Wyoming

After completing my blog updates at 3:30, I started looking online for the best places to catch a Yellowstone Cutthroat in Wyoming. The Wyoming Cutt-Slam site stated that the Wood and Greybull rivers were the best places to fish. After I struck out on the Wood River, I decided to head to the larger Greybull River. My Kindle copy of Flyfishing in Wyoming stated that the Wood River fishing was poor, but the Greybull River fishing was great. I drove on the same road as yesterday, just took a different fork in the road.

It took more than an hour to drive the 35 miles to the Jack Creek Campground right along the Greybull River. I grabbed my gear and found a trail through the woods to the River. I came out of the woods into a rumbling stream looking exactly like the waters I found on the Wood River. However, upstream there appeared to be a glide / pool. Fortunately, many people had created a trail through the willows and overhead tree foliage to the upstream pool. I traversed through, breaking my leader on willow branches. But when I escaped the foliage I was in front of a beautiful pool—-a fishable pool, the pool one dreams of.

I planned to fish from the bottom of the pool to the top, but then I noticed a rise at the top of the pool. I put on a size 14 Royal Humpy and started floating the fly into the top of the pool, and just dropping it into the slack water at the top of the pool. I immediately had half a dozen rise-refusals, and some of the side slabs leaving my fly looked larger than fingerlings. I switched to a mini-foam hopper to a few more rise-refusals, and then cast further out, stripping the fly back, under the surface, into the slack water.

And then, BAM. A heavy Yellowstone Cutthroat had my fly and was not happy. I was able to get the fish into my net, only to be amazed at a beautiful 13-inch Yellowstone Cutthroat in my net.

I had done it! I had a photo of a Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout, in Wyoming, in my net. This fish met my planned Wyoming entry into the Western Native Fish Challenge. I kept fishing and picked up a small 6 inch fish. No longer were larger fish rising as I may have caught and released the King/Queen of the pool, who obviously was getting his/her bearings back after being rudely brought out into the air for a short while.

My next stop was to drive the next day to Alpine, Wyoming, for the next species in the Wyoming Cutt-Slam. It would be a 5.5+ hour drive from my Jack Creek Campsite, and there was another 90 minutes of daylight left. I left the campsite and drove to Cody, Wyoming, to spend the night. There were no truck stops available for overnight parking, but there was a large Walmart filled with RV’s parked on one side of the giant parking lot. I joined my larger brethren and spent the night peacefully. Tomorrow, on to Alpine for fish 2 of the Wyoming Cutt-Slam.

Tight Lines!