TRAVELINGWITHTOOLS

I was really hoping to find a creek full of wild and colorful cutthroat trout, and to have a day perhaps like that one years ago on Long Draw in Colorado. I’d watched some YouTube videos of guys fishing small creeks up in the boonies of southwestern Wyoming, and I pinned a couple of rivers that looked promising.

My first stop at the Ham’s Fork produced one pretty good day, but it was a tailwater experience catching non-native rainbows, not the remote and wild fishery I’d imagined. Granted, I did not spend enough time upstream in the wilder portion, but it was 20 miles of dirt road away from where I camped with the motorhome.

I had picked out several good looking campsites on La Barge Creek on Google, and when I got to the first one I’d pinned, it was an amazing spot right on the water. But it was several miles downstream of the fish barrier that the state had engineered to prevent non-native fish moving upstream after they had extirpated the brook trout and rainbows to re-wild the river for native Colorado river cutthroat.

The dirt road from the end of the pavement on La Barge creek road was of such high quality, (really, it was smoother than the paved portion), that I decided to continue upstream past the fish barrier. It didn’t look that far on the map. But as it happened, the county road maintenance ended long before the National Forest boundary, and the path became really rocky and pot-holed. You probably haven’t experienced driving a 16,000 pound motorhome over rocky, potholed earth before, and I hope you never have to.

This map covers the area where the forest boundary starts and where the fish barrier makes a small pond:

I kept looking over at the screen of my phone, trying to gauge the distance between my current location and the first campsite pinned past the fish barrier. I was out of cell range, so I couldn’t get Google to tell me how far it was, but there was also no opportunity to turn around. The road was far too narrow.

I eventually reached the forest boundary, where the road maintenance was obviously managed by a different agency. While not as good as the Lincoln County road (or was it Sublette?), the Forest Service road improved and allowed perhaps 20 mph for the most part. La Barge creek road actually crosses the Lincoln/Sublette county line four times before getting to the top of the Tri-Basin Divide.

The first campsite pinned inside the National Forest looked good, but it was still below the fish barrier. The two-track path also was obscured by the terrain, and I wasn’t sure if the RV could make it. So I kept rolling towards the second site, which was a bit upstream of the dam. As I crested a hill that revealed the campsite, I was bummed to see that it was occupied already!

Fortunately, there were at least two or three other spots off the same spur road that were unoccupied, and I snagged the one closest to the turnoff.

I won’t bore you with the fishing details, except to say that first evening, I caught one very small cutthroat. The next day, I walked maybe a mile upstream, which had better looking water, but I only found one fish bigger than the span of my hand. And, I had to tie on a wooly bugger, (a wet fly!) to get it. Cutthroat are supposed to be eager dry fly eaters, easy to catch on simple patterns. Harrumph!

Well, it was a beautiful day regardless and I only saw one other angler. I’d like to come back some day with a more capable off road camper to get up to the top of the divide. The road actually goes all the way over to Idaho, and you can choose to fish the Greys River, which feeds into the Snake, flowing to the Pacific Ocean or the Smiths Fork, which flows into the Great Basin and Salt Lake. La Barge flows into the Green River, which meets the Colorado and the Gulf of California (when enough water remains to make it to Mexico). Here’s a good overview from Big Sky Journal.

The Green River at Warren Bridge is next on the agenda. (I’m writing two weeks behind the road trip, currently in Montana).