The two-track that wasn't on any map, and the beaver pond at the end of it
Twelve miles in, the road became a suggestion. What we found was a chain of ponds full of brookies that had clearly never seen a fly, and one culvert I should not have attempted.
Station readout · Unnamed beaver chain, Wind River foothills, WY
- Water temp
- 58°F
- Air, low
- 39°F
- Drive, one way
- 377MI
- High point
- 8,610FT
- Nights out
- 2
- To hand
- 31
- Fly that worked
- Elk Hair Caddis #14
The road
It shows on the forest service map as a dashed line and on satellite imagery as nothing at all. Twelve miles of it are fine. The thirteenth crosses a creek on a culvert that has partially collapsed on the downstream side, leaving a lip about fourteen inches high on the exit.
I looked at it for a long time and then did it anyway, at an angle, with a spotter. It went fine. It should not have, and if the far bank had been softer I would have written a very different entry.
The fishing
Five ponds in a chain, each one a little higher than the last, all of them full of brook trout between six and eleven inches that appeared to have no concept of being fished for. An Elk Hair Caddis in a 14, cast anywhere, produced a fish. It stopped being interesting around noon on the first day, which is its own kind of lesson.
The largest fish in the system were not in the ponds at all but in the fifty yards of fast water between the third and fourth, holding in a seam no wider than a doormat.
What I got wrong
- The culvert. I made a marginal call on a road with no traffic and no signal, alone apart from one other vehicle. The correct answer was to walk the last mile.
- No thermometer reading until day two. At 58°F I should have been fishing earlier and stopping earlier than I did.