Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
We call them pilgrims. Guys who come to the Rocky Mountains with preconceived notions on just about every aspect of Western life. They freely explain how everything we Wyoming natives do is wrong, how they did it better back home, and then they proceed to try to change our backward ways.
Not to be confused with tourists, who are welcome throughout the state, pilgrims are another breed. They move in, put up locked gates, try to intimidate their neighbors, and thankfully, don’t stay too long in most cases.
This behavior has prompted one of the most popular bumper stickers in the Equality State. The message reads, “Welcome to Wyoming, we don’t give a damn how you did things back home.”
It’s annoying, but with so many of them and so few of us, we’ve learned to take it with a grin, and maybe a little nudge here and there to remind them how helpless they really are out in the diminishing wilderness that remains in much of the west.
One weekend a couple of friends and I set out for Union Pass. On a map, Dubois, Lander, and Pinedale are very close together. In reality, the 13,000-foot peaks of the Wind River Range divide these three small mountain towns.
The area between these towns offers outstanding access to fishing, hunting, hiking, and even limited timber cutting on National Forest land. The gift President Theodore Roosevelt gave the American people when he created National Forests and expanded National Parks at the turn of the 20th century is the greatest any single president has ever bestowed on the people. It’s why he along with Dwight Eisenhower are my favorite presidents. Maybe not yours, but we all have an opinion. That’s another American right.
I’d taken mule deer and missed a magnificent bull elk in the same area with my trusty Remington .308 over the years, but this time we were after trout.
We set off on a Friday afternoon in early July destined for Fish Creek, a wonderful stretch of water full of native cutthroat trout. Fish Creek crosses the road between Dubois and Pinedale about a dozen miles from the Continental Divide.
We arrived at an area off the road about two miles east of the Fish Creek Bridge as the sun began to set in the west.
We had about 45 minutes of twilight after setting up camp and caught a mixed bag of brook trout and a couple of small cutthroats. The best fishing awaited sunrise the following Saturday.
We drove the short distance to the bridge to open the day. Standing in the water, just a few yards north of the bridge was a classic pilgrim.
He had taken the extra effort to remove all the tags off his newly purchased gear, and that appeared to be the sum total of his angling experience.
The pilgrim could have been a poster child for LL Bean, Banana Republic, and the highest-priced fly fishing rod and reel manufacturers. He whipped the water back and forth as we set up, snapping off a fly in the process. We only took 10 minutes to get geared up before we began hiking the shoreline of the stream.
“Good day for fishing,” I said to him, as I started to walk north.
The pilgrim turned a demeaning look my way and said, “You’re fishing with that?”
He was referring to my 7-foot custom rod and Pflueger reel with a black Panther Martin spinner with red dots hanging from the end of the line.
“Best lure you can throw in these waters,” I said with a smile.
“I’d never fish with lures,” the pilgrim proudly claimed. “It’s barbaric, not elegant, and doesn’t work.”
Sure buddy, I thought, squelching the urge to wander over and hold his head underwater for a few seconds. I just smiled.
The fishing was fabulous. I caught over four dozen trout in the next hour just a couple of hundred yards from the bridge on a wide bend in the creek. Panther Martins in those colors mimic brook trout fry, the predominant species in this section of the river. I caught some smaller 12 to 14-inch cutthroats and a couple of stocked rainbows and browns.
The limits in this area change often, but that summer it was six brown, rainbow, or cutthroat in any combination, with a separate limit of 10 brook trout. The Wyoming Game and Fish Department routinely alters limits if they determine an invasive species like brook trout are inhibiting native cutthroat habitat.
I kept a limit of brookies and released everything else. I knew that the lower extremes of Fish Creek we planned to work that afternoon and Sunday morning were teeming with 16 to 18-inch cutthroat, but that required carrying bear spray, and my 1911 .45 ACP in addition to my fishing equipment. The area was fabulous fishing, and the grizzlies knew it.
The cutthroats could wait, there isn’t a finer meal than a pan of eight-inch brook trout sizzling in a layer of bacon grease over an open fire.
As I walked back, the pilgrim was still there thrashing the water and remained devoid of fish.
He spotted my stringer and went nuts.
“You can’t catch that many fish, you’re way over the limit,” he stammered.
“Ten brookies is the limit,” I said. “That’s how many are on this stringer.”
“Those are cutthroat,” he said, but they weren’t.
“Learn your species,” I told him.
“But you caught too many,” he almost cried.
Loading into the truck for a six-mile drive to Lower Fish Creek I noticed the plates on his Land Rover (Of course it was a Land Rover) County 22, Teton, home of Wyoming’s answer to Las Vegas in Jackson Hole and a known haven of pilgrims coming west to straighten out the ignorant natives in their rental SUVs.
The extra cans of gas, water, and three spare tires tied to the top and back of the Land Rover gave him away. This was the Gobi Desert, the Serengeti, and the Australian Outback all rolled into one for this urban dweller. For us, it was a great place to fish 75 miles from home.
My friends walked back in, loading their gear, and just for fun, I gunned the engine as we passed his Land Rover, showering it in a cloud of dust. It was my little way of saying welcome to Wyoming.
We love tourists. As energy production wanes it will soon become our predominant economic force along with agriculture, wind, and solar.
Come here and enjoy what Wyoming has to offer, but don’t Californicate the state in the process.