Wind Rivers, WY Fishing Report 7/7/12

After the fireworks went off this 4th of July, my buddies (Randy Browning and Brett Wright) and I jumped in the car and headed up to the Wind Rivers for a backpacking/fly fishing extravaganza!  We left at midnight, drove straight through the night and arrived in Lander, WY to purchase our Indian Reservation passes.  The gas station that we planned on getting our passes at 5:30 am was out of Reservation permits so we had to hang out for a little bit and make some calls to find someone who would sell us permits that early in the morning.  We finally found a generous soul in Ft. Washakie that let us come in early to his grocery store and pick them up.  We stocked up on some food and we were on our way up to the trial head.  We got to the trailhead around 7:45am and started our 6 hr, 8.5 mile hike to the lakes and rivers we were going to be fishing for the next few days.  Here are some pics from the hike in

Here is the view from the top of the summit...

It was kind of smokey from all the fires this year...but it looks like i can make out a moon in the next pic, nice Brett, nice!

We were so tired when we got to camp all we wanted to do was relax but we knew we had made that journey with one purpose in mind, to fish!  We setup camp in a rainstorm and hit the lakes and rivers nearby.  Here are some pics of the scenery and fish that we caught while we were there.

Caught this fish on a size 12 foam hopper pattern

 Caught this one on a bead headed pheasant tail

Here are some pics of the hike we went on in the morning to get to the next lake.

Since we did not bring any food with us we decided to have an old fashion fish fry on a fire that we made next to the lake.  Here are some pics and a video of our feast...

Here are some more pics of the rest of that day as we hiked around to a few other lakes.

The next morning we woke up and thought we would take it easy.  Caught a bunch of fish as we stayed close to camp.  We fished the river by our camp and slayed it on dry flies.  We were mainly catching them on PMD's, and size 20 Parachute Adams'.

 What a beautiful picture of one of the rivers we fished on Friday!  Unbelievable

Here are some more pics from the river...

We finished up fishing upstream to the lake that was right next to our camp.  Here are some of the big fatty rainbows that Brett BSD Wright caught that evening...

And one of Randy's fatties

Later that night we were sitting around the fire talking about all sorts of things.  When it came time to go to bed we all went down to get some water and we all thought to ourselves "Why don't we just hike out tonight so we can get back early on Sunday".  So, we did.  It was pretty random.  We started packing our stuff up around 12am, finished packing around 1:30 and hit the trail head for the 8.5 mile hike out.  We got back to the car around 5:30 in the morning and made it back to SLC, UT around 1pm that next afternoon.

Our feet were killing us and we were excited to be back but sad to leave such a good fishing trip.  Thanks boys, lets do it again next year!
-Jimmy Sorenson