Grand Tetons & Jackson Hole; July 25-26

Colter Bay on Jackson Lake, Grand Teton National Park

Jenny Lake Overlook

We spent our past weekend as tourists, traveling two hours south of the Park to the Grand Tetons and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The Grand Tetons are another fascinating story of Rocky Mountain geology. Preposterous earthquakes lifted these magnificent mountains up and laid down a broad valley below them. Huge glaciers then sculpted them and carved out the lakes below that mirror the towering montains to the eye’s delight. The landscape serves as a reminder how fortunate we are to live in this blink of geologic time that allows the fragile thing we call modern life.

Antler Arch on Town Square, Jackson Hole, Wyoming

Jackson Hole, Wyoming is twenty-five miles south of Grand Teton National Park, a four-season town with ski and golf resorts, Snake River rafting, and the National Park. It has the traffic and sprawl to go with it, quite a contrast from Yellowstone’s gateway cities of Gardiner and West Yellowstone.

We had an entertaining evening in town, watching the 55^th annual Jackson Hole gunfight on the town square and enjoying a terrific meal at the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar’s Steakhouse.  Too many tony retail shops and inflated real estate price tags, though, made me uncomfortable, evidence of people with more money than they know what to do with. So many employees here at Yellowstone are the underemployed and working poor.

Grand Teton mountains over sagebrush valley floor

We enjoyed the grandeur of the Grand Tetons the next day.  A three mile hike took us to the back side of Jenny Lake beneath the brow of Teewinot Mountain rising to 12,325 feet, where a high mountain stream cascaded down to the lake and cooled the hot summer day. The shuttle boat ride back across the lake was a delightful way to shorten the hike.

Hike to Hidden Falls around Jenny Lake

Lewis River Canyon, Yellowstone National Park

The tourist feeling dissipated as we made our way back into Yellowstone. Most travelers miss the first and last few hours of each day; views from a restaurant table are severely limited. We enjoyed a picnic dinner overlooking the Snake River with sandhill crane, marmot, and a few trout hanging in slack current. Cool of evening brought out the wildlife along the Lewis River that South Entrance Road follows. The Lewis River Canyon is spectacular; a place where the river nearly disappears at the bottom of a huge gash in the landscape carved out by yet another preposterous force of Nature and span of time.

Icy Rivers, Active Fish

Brown Trout, Gallatin River below Specimen Creek

Close-to-home fishing on the Firehole is over for now. The water has warmed and dropped, the insect hatches over. They will resume in September.

Fishing now is on Yellowstone’s icy rivers that finally come into their own in July. The Lamar and Soda Butte in the Park’s northeast corner; the Gallatin on the flank of the Park north of West Yellowstone; the Yellowstone River between the lake and the falls. All are a 1-2 hour drive from Old Faithful. I have explored them in the past couple of weeks.

Fishing Soda Butte Creek

The Gallatin is a favorite, a classic, high mountain stream that never stops its mad dash over a cobble and boulder bottom for more than thirty miles. It isn’t easy fishing with the current and uneven bottom, but it is fun seeking out the soft pockets and seams where trout lie. 

Cutthroat Trout, Soda Butte Creek



The Lamar River and Soda Butte Creek are cutthroat trout country. I fished both of them briefly July 12-13 when Heidi and I spent our weekend there (cabins at Mammoth Hot Springs and outside the Park’s Northeast Entrance in Cooke City).

Cutthroat Trout, Lamar River

Fishing these two streams is a real treat. I caught a nice cutthroat trout out of each; no fancy technique, just streamers and nymphs.

Then, there is the Yellowstone River from where it leaves Yellowstone Lake on down to the falls. It stays closed to fishing until July 15^th to protect the spawning run.  Its fabled cutthroat trout population has been decimated the past two decades by non-native lake trout into Yellowstone Lake (introduced accidentally or maliciously, no one knows).

Still, the river-resident trout are present, and run big. Observing many big trout lying below Fishing Bridge at the lake’s outlet was an encouraging sign that the lake trout control program is having a positive effect.

The Yellowstone River just below Yellowstone Lake

I fished the Yellowstone July 18^th on a day off. The river is huge (3000 cfs discharge coming out of the lake), the current fast. The sight of all those big fish at Fishing Bridge and a few big ones cruising the banks kept me going. So did the proliferation of bugs in the air all day long. Wow, what a rich, healthy trout river the Yellowstone is! 

A long, hot day of fishing had me pretty much whipped by 4 PM. I decided to spend one last hour running nymphs slowly working downstream from Buffalo Ford. My destination was another “Dave’s Island”, named from the 2007 trip when Dave Parker had rolled a big cutthroat there. Four bison less than 75 yards from the riverbank gave me pause, but I proceeded. What the heck.

After several hundred yards of featureless bottom, several large boulders lying midstream caught my eye. As my line drifted into the pocket below them, it caught on something. The bottom, I thought at first…then, the bottom moved. Holy smokes! I was onto a big Yellowstone cutthroat!

This fish was even bigger than the Firehole brown I hooked back in early June. I leaned on it hard, confident in the 8-pound leader I was running (hawser size by stream trout standards).  It ran out 100 feet, then came back toward me. The fight lasted for minutes.

The fish was beat, up and thrashing on the surface. But it was still 60 feet away and below me, and the river was on the fish’s side. I couldn’t gain any line against the strong current and was unable to wade down to the fish due to deep water. I made it to shore, hoping to regain the advantage from a rock ledge over the pool where the fish was holding. But, the movement toward the bank allowed the fish to go there too. By the time I made it to the ledge, the fish had wrapped me around a log. He was off. Big river…big fish…what fun!

It was a quarter mile through sagebrush back to the car, nervously eyeing those bison over my left shoulder. If I was tired before, I was exhausted now. I had a bite to eat, and started the drive home.

The Estuary on the Yellowstone River

The road home passes the Estuary. This is a wide, slow-moving part of the Yellowstone River a couple miles below the lake outlet. It was early evening, and caddisflies were everywhere. Too tired to fish, I nevertheless stopped to observe. Rising fish began to dimple the wide, calm water up and down the bank. A lone angler watched the proceedings too, from the comfort of his camp chair on the bank. Promptly at 7PM, he rose and waded out waist-deep. In less than ten casts, he hooked and landed a dandy cutthroat.

There aren’t a lot of trout in the Yellowstone, but they are big ones. I will be back to fish it a couple more times before all the hatches play out.

Beula Lake Laugher; July 10th

Going off the beaten path almost always has its rewards. Today was one of them.

Ted Weglarz and I did a day-hike into Beula Lake to fish for cutthroat trout. We work together at Old Faithful Inn, and Ted did this trip last year. It isn’t for everyone. It’s a 2.5 mile hike in and a 400-foot elevation gain. Located in the Park’s little-visited southwest corner, it also takes a slow, bumpy eight mile ride on a gravel road just getting to the trailhead.

This was my first time down to the Park’s South Entrance, a little over an hour from Old Faithful. It’s popular because this is the way to get to Jackson Hole, Wyoming and the Grand Tetons. Less well-known is that the road through this part of Yellowstone National Park follows the shoreline of Lewis Lake, then along the Lewis River Canyon. It is beautiful country. The canyon is dramatic; we wondered why it isn’t talked up more in the Yellowstone travel books.

Back country entry into Yellowstone National Park

A steep trail is never easy, but far better to tackle it at the start of a hike. It assures it will be downhill on the way home at the end of the day.  Since the Beula Lake trailhead lies outside the Park off the gravel road, it is a special treat of this hike that you enter Yellowstone country on foot. The way Jim Bridger and Harry Yount did it. Of the 3-plus million visitors to the Park each year, only a fraction gets to claim that. We arrived at the lake about noon.

Beula Lake sits at 7500 feet elevation in the Park's little-visited southwest corner

Beula Lake is not big. The book says 107 acres; it looked to be about a quarter mile across. But, is it beautiful, pure wilderness! Forested slopes flank every approach, an unbroken shoreline, gin-clear water; puffy, white clouds in the big Rocky Mountain sky above.

We walked a couple hundred yards up the shoreline from the main trail, and chose a spot to start to fish. The firm lake bottom made it easy to wade in thigh-deep, giving enough room for a fly line backcast. Dark-hued water of the lake’s dropoff was within easy casting distance.

Cutthroat trout, Yellowstone's native

We started catching trout right away. Beautiful cutthroat trout, Yellowstone’s native fish.  Their flanks and tails are dappled with a distinctive pattern of spots; the orange slash beneath the gills that give them their name; a gold-into-copper color to the belly on mature fish.



What they lacked in size, they made up for in eagerness

Trout fishing is not known to be easy. This was a day when it was. The fish hit eagerly. Cast after cast resulted in a fish on the line, or at least a dashing follow out of the deeper water back to the rod tip. It was non-stop action for several hours. The fish were not big…the biggest went about twelve inches…but they made up for it with the fast action. It was a blast! It was like fishing in a big aquarium…bluegills in a farm pond…except that these were wild trout in a wilderness lake!

When we called it quits late afternoon, we had counted 33 trout for Ted, 21 trout for Dan. 54 native cutthroat trout in one afternoon! Unheard of!

Ted says we can’t go back there again this season. Nothing could match this.

Ted, winner of Beula Lake trout derby

He’s right.

Exploring Yellowstone's Lake Area; July 5

We spent a day exploring the heart of Yellowstone country, the river and lake of its namesake. Lake Yellowstone is an hour’s drive east of Old Faithful. In one of many geographical quirks of the day, the road to get there crosses the Continental Divide twice in a short five mile stretch. Isla Lake, little more than a pond really, sits astride one of those places. It is claimed to drain to both the West (Pacific drainage) and the East (Gulf of Mexico drainage). Kind of confusing to a drop of rain.

Craig Pass on the Grand Loop Road to Yellowstone Lake

Things change fast up here, especially the weather. After a sunny, warm week, the day was overcast, cool.  Disappointed at first to break out sweatshirts and windbreakers in July, we soon realized that the weather added to the drama of the day’s exploration.

We are very familiar with the beauty of large lakes, having spent so much time around the Great Lakes. Even so, Yellowstone Lake has much to impress the senses. It’s a natural panorama that unfolds mile after mile. The horizon is ringed by sharp-edged mountains that still hold patches of snow in early July. Its entire shoreline is undeveloped. It is big (136 square miles) and deep (400 feet at deepest point). It laid glass calm on the windless, overcast day.

Known as the Lake Area of the Park, there is an entirely different repertoire of thermal features, far different from the pure-white gushing geysers of Old Faithful. Here, the brew of earth, water and volcanic heat becomes acidic. The result is other-worldly, a glimpse of what Earth’s chemistry once was. 

Some of Yellowstone's Volcanic Activity Are Current Events

Huge bubbling mudpots. Steaming pools of green and yellow hues from heat-loving bacteria, the only form of life compatible here. The strong odor of sulfur envelopes aptly named Sulfur Caldron. These are visible along the fringes of the land; it’s said that as many thermal features vent beneath the depths of Yellowstone Lake as are in all the rest of the Park put together.

We walked a long boardwalk where many of these thermal features can be seen close at hand. It is startling just how current Yellowstone’s volcanic activity still is. This didn’t all happen 640,000 years ago and then subside. One named the Black Dragon's Caldron formed suddenly in 1948. Its central vent has moved 200 feet to the west since then. Earthquakes, hundreds of them, reshaped the underground plumbing in the 1990s. New features spring violently to life, others fall dormant. An entire hillside of trees changed almost overnight when the soil temperature soared to the boiling point, cooking the root systems.

Yellowstone Lake is actually a wide spot in the Yellowstone River. The river begins outside the Park about fifty miles to the south on Two Ocean Plateau, unseen save for several hundred visitors each year who venture into its wilderness backcountry. Its water pauses in Yellowstone Lake before gravity takes over once again. For seventeen miles, the Grand Loop Road follows the river from its lake outlet to Yellowstone Falls, readily accessible to all Park visitors.

The Yellowstone River Rushes Headlong Over LeHardy Rapids

The landscape here is dramatic, majestic. The wide expanse of Hayden Valley makes the river appear calm, diminished. Pull off at a turnout and walk to the river’s edge, you find quite the contrary. This is one serious, get-out-of-my-way river. It is big, wide, and powerful. The cascades at LeHardy Rapids and a riffle stretch around the big bend at Sulfur Caldron are the only visual evidence for miles that this river is on the move.

Where it’s going is over Yellowstone Falls and down through the magnificent Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. It is breathtaking. We’ll be visiting there soon.

String Quartet, Lake Yellowstone Hotel

We enjoyed a wonderful dinner at Yellowstone Lake Hotel to celebrate our anniversary. A string quartet played beautiful music in the hotel lobby. The setting is very reminiscent of Mackinac Island in Michigan. A scenic evening cruise on Lake Yellowstone narrated by an entertaining young man from Texas capped the day. 

Last of the Evening's Sunset at Kepler Cascades

We chased an incredible sunset on the drive home around Yellowstone Lake and on to Old Faithful. Once again, the camera’s lens doesn’t capture what played out for us.

Fishing the Solstice Sunrise, June 21st

Our time off is finally synchronized. June 21^st was our first day off together since Heidi has been here, so we spent an overnight in the town of West Yellowstone. An hour’s drive just outside the Park’s West Entrance, we rented a cabin in town at Sleepy Hollow Lodge. I stayed there with buddies on fishing trips in 2007 and 2009.  No fishermen there this time though. We shared continental breakfast the next morning with half a dozen Asian tourists, we were the only ones speaking English.

Sunrise over the Madison River, June 21

I couldn’t resist the opportunity to get up early and fish a little before breakfast. I was headed back into the Park by 5:45 to fish a favorite place on the Madison River. Summer sunrise is such a beautiful time of day, the early morning light and cool, still air.  Three million people visit Yellowstone every year, yet few get up early to experience an entirely different sense of place.  A car passed by my fishing spot every couple of minutes. Three hours later, the constant stream of daytime visitors heading into the Park had begun.

A bit chilly for late June morning

Early mornings of the summer solstice are all the more special, the longest days of the year. The fat of the summer lies ahead, a time of endless possibilities for doing things and going places.

On the way to the river, I passed a small herd of bison greeting the morning in their own way. A dozen calves cavorted along the riverbank like school kids on a playground.

Bison along the river at sunrise

My destination was Grasshopper Bank on the Madison River, made famous by legendary angling authors Ernie Schwiebert and Charlie Brooks three decades ago. It gets its name midsummer when its trout rise to imitations of grasshoppers and other terrestrial insects.

It has personal connections for me. In 2009, I fished there with Mike Rogers, Dave Parker and Jim Zyla. In 2011, it was Dave, Mike, and his son, Charlie.  A couple of nice trout were caught each trip. Dave had a really big trout on the line for a while one of those trips. Another evening, he and I witnessed an epic evening hatch of some miniscule insect that drove the trout nuts. Drove us nuts too, we never figured it out.

Snow left above the treeline, Madison Range

I fished for more than an hour working nymphs and streamers around logs lining the riverbank and down into troughs in the uneven bottom. The current carves around large beds of rich green submerged vegetation. It was pleasant fishing this beautiful river on a morning like this, but the sun was well up and I hadn’t produced even a half-hearted bump from a trout.

I picked up and walked two hundred yards downstream to where the slow pool breaks over into a wide shallow riffle. My motivation was more nostalgia than any hope for a fish. This is where Dave hooked that big trout years ago. The clock wasn’t in my favor, for I had to be back to the cabin in time for breakfast with Heidi.

Fishing is as much about optimism as about opportunity. Anglers have to believe that the next cast is going to bring a strike, when odds are it will not. You can make a hundred or more casts between strikes. It’s a fisherman’s corollary to Henry Ford’s quip, “whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re probably right.”

In higher water, fish hug the 'Rip Rap' in the soft pockets of eddies

The water levels are much lower this year than any of my past trips here. Good holding water for fish was skimpy. I methodically cast to them all. Behind midstream boulders; against the rock retaining wall along the road known as the ‘Rip Rap.’ Then, to all the possible lies around what’s known in my mind as ‘Dave’s Island.’ Nothing.

There’s another angling rule: ‘you can’t catch fish unless your hook is in the water.’ Turning back toward the car, I kept casting. My second or third cast into last-chance water (shin deep, featureless), I felt the jolt of a bigger fish.

Summer solstice brown trout, Madison River

It hit a black wooly bugger, a go-to fly for this trip (any trip). I put this fish in the net, a nice deep-hued brown trout of 16” or so. Nice sense of accomplishment. A quick snap of the camera for photographic evidence, held him in the soft current until he could swim off on his own.

I can’t imagine a much better way to greet the summer solstice.