RICH HAD FISHED Wyoming’s Wind River before. It was one of his favorites. Of course, almost every river a fly angler floats down or wades into is a favorite. That’s the nature of the places where our favorite fish live. But the Wind held onto Rich a bit tighter. It was the one nonnegotiable stop we had to make before our road trip back east. After purchasing state and tribal fishing licenses and some local fly patterns in Thermopolis, we headed south to Riverton to catch Route 26 and fol-lowed the Wind northwest toward Crowheart. The moment we transitioned from open high des-ert to the deep canyon, it felt as though we went back in time or to another planet entirely. On either side of us towered walls of stone with deep cracks and caves and precariously leaning slabs a thousand feet above Mack-truck-sized boulders that were precari-ously leaning slabs a century ago. From the back seat, I couldn’t see the sky unless I rolled down the win-dow and stuck my head out into the cool rush of air. A single railroad track clung to its scant crushed stone bed 70 to a hundred feet above the river as the current fell through the burly and broken valley floor in somersaults and giant pulsing zigzags. It was hard to imagine the steel nerves or insanity that thought that path worthwhile in the first place. As we drove farther toward the head of the can-yon the floor widened and shouldered grass and sage slopes. This is where Rich remembered fishing the last time he was here. Where he remembered being able to wade from the near bank to a gravel bar and catch fish in the far run. Whether it was actually the spot he had been be-fore, we were dog-tired and the water looked as per-fect for fishing as the bank above it looked for taking a load off and watching the clouds. We parked. It didn’t take long to find fish. Fat, strong cut-throat built like SEC linebackers but picky as 6-year-olds forced to eat vegetables. If we thought our flies were small enough, we had to go smaller and then smaller still with lighter tippet, which was a recipe for repetitive failure or adrenaline-and-luck-fueled surgical success. The reward, if only one fish came to hand out of the half dozen that grabbed and disappeared into the thousands of cubic-feet-per-second ether, was the 40 minutes we spent on the bank talking and laughing after finally deciding that tying on another fly was simply too much work. We were all far enough along in our fishing lives that one more cast didn’t hold the same sway it did even five years earlier. The 27-plus-hour drive home through America’s heartland loomed large ahead of us as we sat in comfortable silence at a picnic table with the Wind carrying the West’s immense past, present and future downstream below us. The hard-earned privilege of doing absolutely nothing with good friends here, thousands of miles from the fa-miliar waters of our homes, was enough. • ABOVE • “One of those days when it just seemed wrong to be at work when I could be on the river casting mayfly patterns to rising cutthroat trout. So that’s exactly what I did.” Photo: Aaron Agosto THE FLYFISH JOURNAL 069
The Flyfish Journal The Flyfish Journal 15.4: Page 67
