My buddy and I recently got back from our annual fall backpacking/flyfishing trip, this time to the southern Wind River range in Wyoming. We flew into Casper, drove to the Fiddler's Lake campground south of Lander, hiked up about six miles into Silas Canyon, and set up a base camp on Island Lake, a truly beautiful alpine lake. We spent the next three days fly fishing Island and other lakes in Silas Canyon and bushwacking over into Atlantic Canyon to climb Atlantic Peak and scout for elk, which were in abundance.
In terms of the fishing, it was challenging but productive and rewarding. As we approached Island Lake we saw large cutthroats cruising near the shore and figured it would be easy pickens. We were wrong. The fish would come over and investigate all the flies we threw at them but they were very picky and would turn their noses up at almost everything. They were surface-feeding, slurping tiny white flies off the surface that looked no bigger than specks of dust, and we had nothing to really "match the hatch." The fish were rarely fooled by what we consider standard backcountry fare (royal wulff, caddis, wooly bugger, adams). The water was, of course, crystal clear, so it's possible that in still water especially they were spooked by the line itself, even though we were using long leaders and 5x tippet. I had something of a breakthrough after switching to tiny ants and started catching some decent size cutts more regularly.
The highlight of the fishing was up on Thumb Lake, which supposedly holds large golden trout. We didn't score any of those, and generally the lake didn't seem to have many fish -- until we worked our way to the back end. There we found pockets of good-size rainbows and cutts that were picky but catchable, generally with ants or woolly buggers. I attached (hopefully) a couple of pictures of the more colorful trout we landed. Fishing the buggers was a lot of fun. At first the trout would come over, take a look, and turn away. But give the bugger a twitch and the fish would come back for another look, as if to say, "I know that thing is fake, but it looks so darn big and juicy that I need to check it out again and maybe I'll just give it a little nibble..." Eventually they'd either bump the fly or take a bite and it was game on.
All in all another great trip. I'm already thinking about where to go next year, money and time permitting. I hope you enjoy the photos (if I can attach them corectly).
Kevin
Island Lake
Unfortunately I could not attach any more photos. I'll try to add them in a follow-up post. Sorry about that.
-- http://www.tpfr.org
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