OVER THE BORDER

Wyoming’s North Platte River blows out of shape just as the brackets are being set for March Madness. What follows is a chaotic brew of brown sludge, fuzzy with Styrofoam bait tubs, pine duff, a few Nerf footballs, a wreckage of lawn chairs, and more water than anyone knows what to do with. Only fools and parvenus look forward to the flush.

When the flush arrives, outfitters offer “flush specials” and post vague statements about the unique opportunities that arise in high water. I can’t tell if they are lying or being funny.

A shoulder-season streamer fest on Utah’s fabled Green River gets this author away from high water and Wyoming’s beatdown wind.

By Dave Zoby

Utah’s Green River may provide challenging conditions during late winter and early spring, but you can be guaranteed of two things— you won’t see as many anglers on the water as you might during summer, and the trout will be there.

Last year I passed on those specials and made a beeline for Utah. Dave Brown and I loaded up the boat, made up a cooler of snacks, and coaxed my two Labs, Rocket and Henderson, into the camper shell by salting thoroughly the bed of my truck with pork-flavored chewies. At Rock Springs, the wind howling and impaling trash to the heads of sagebrush, we made our turn south. In a few miles the land began to change from humdrum Wyoming black brush to complex red stone rimrock that brought Edward Abbey to mind. Already weighing heavily on our snack load, I mentioned to Dave that we had made an unforgivable error—we forgot to buy beer in Wyoming.

The land was unapologetically eroded, carved out by eons of wind and water. We crossed the border and swerved toward Dutch John, population 145. I had been there before, 20 years ago with a skinny girlfriend who smoked 100s and listened to Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot almost continuously. And there’s another memory of 10 years ago, when I attended the annual cicada hatch on the Green. The hatch lasted about 45 minutes. I recall the experience of trying to cast a Chernobyl Ant to rising trout while scores of summer river floaters sculled by on inner tubes. I saw sunburns that I have never been able to forget.

But this was different. It was still winter and the lodges offered half-price rooms. This was March, remember. There was vague talk of blue-winged olives. We stopped at Trout Creek Fly Shop as the sun was setting into the juniper maze and rock outcroppings. I bought a case of watery micro beer that wouldn’t fit the bill. The variety pack offered weak IPAs, porters, and even a smoked stout—all of them with less alcohol than children’s cough syrup. Utah laws.

Snow had been piled in the parking lot of the fly shop. It leaked in the sunshine. A parade of mule deer trickled from the hills. A few drift boats were parked indefinitely, snow on their covers. We organized a shuttle and were told we were the only ones floating that day, except for a pair of hard-core guides who were attempting a 17-mile hero’s mission, the A and B sections of the river. There were no restaurants available, no places to socialize. So we checked into our rooms and walked the dogs over the rotting snow of a cross-country ski trail.

We launched the next morning at exactly 7 a.m. We locked my old dog, Rocket, in the camper and took the pup. Henderson had never been to sea, and I wondered how he’d do. The only people around were a few guys in white trucks who had something to do with the Flaming Gorge Dam. I took to the oars and pushed downstream, but not before looking up at the impressive structure that held billions of tons of water. There was a weird electric hum in the atmosphere. I briefly imagined Ed Abbey’s fictional Green Beret, George Hayduke, poking around the structure, testing its huge bolts and iron doors with mayhem in mind. Haydukery, they call it.

The Green is likely the clearest river I will ever fish. Swimming pool quality in some places, you can anchor and watch trout cruising the weedbeds, picking off scuds and midges at their leisure. Browns and rainbows teem in the sandy bights and swirling eddies that carve the canyon. Population estimates, if you believe the press, claim that there are up to 15,000 trout

per mile. It’s hard to believe those numbers, but if you stare into the Green and begin to calculate all those moving shapes, you get the picture. We were floating the A section, from the dam to Little Hole, the area with those absurd fish numbers.

We parked the boat in one of the first bays we came to. The river was up to 4,800 cubic feet per second, a pretty good clip for late winter. I tried nymphs for a while, drifting them past the noses of solid 16-inch browns and rainbows. Nothing moved them. I got bold and tried some size 20 wine midges, and zebra midges, the ones that came highly recommended at the fly shop. But I spent most of my time trying to thread the tippet through the eye, usually not a big deal. In the diffuse canyon light, I could not close the deal.

Dave, a die-hard streamer fisherman, plunked his weighted line into the current and quickly came tight to a brown trout that dazzled us with its colors. Dave was using a sculpin pattern with big red eyes, called Sculpzilla. Another trout chased his fly on the next cast.

Begrudgingly I admitted that the streamers would be the method du jour. But I didn’t have a sinking line, and my streamer box had been ravished, lost to time and neglect, so I had to go through the humiliating ritual of borrowing a reel and saying something cheerful about how the first thing I was going to do when we got back to Casper was order a new spool and a corresponding sinking line. (It was a bald-faced lie.) Dave offered me a fly called a Peanut Envy. Then he said, “Let’s go hunt some fish.” And that’s how it was, like hunting. We drifted downstream with the bow of the boat aimed at one bank or the other. Dave braced into the front and slapped his fly inches from the red rocks that framed the canyon. More often than not, fish chased his fly on the retrieve. Sometimes they threw back their pectoral fins and charged the fly. Other times, they skulked and faded back into the dark recesses of the canyon never to reappear. Every three casts or so resulted in a strike or a chase. Henderson was becoming increasingly interested in fish. He crowded me when my time came, and leaned dangerously over the gunnel to get a look at these things.

Ryan Mosley, the Flaming Gorge project leader for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, says that the Green River browns are all wild, while the rainbows are mostly stocked. “Brown trout averaged fifteen and a half inches when we did a survey in 2012,” he said. “As you go downstream, into the B and C sections, the densities are lower, but the trout are substantially bigger . . . and there’s less pressure.”

Dave and I caught mostly browns. They are absurdly buttery, speckled beings that showcase red polka dots and haloed markings. I photographed them madly but never quite captured their hues. No one else was around as we lunched on cold cuts in a patch of winterized cliff roses. I stood in the river beside the boat, water up to my thighs. There was snow here and there, but it was falling away, losing its battle with the sun. The fish came in streaks, four and five at a time, a brief lull, then more streamer action than either of us had ever seen.

Along the way, Henderson jumped ship to pursue a yearling merganser. Dave roughly pulled the dog back aboard, just in time to get our affairs in order before the dreaded Mother-in

You can fish from the bank or a boat during spring with good success, but if you’re pulling streamers, you can’t beat a boat’s versatility. Hit the banks with a variety of fishy imitations, and you might end up with a giant brown or ’bow in the net.

Law Rapids. We came out okay, but at no time was our future existence guaranteed. There were, regretfully, some terse arguments and accusations. I can say now that I never damaged Dave’s boat, but I gave him a scare when it looked as if we were going to rip its peritoneum over a particularly nasty white boulder. We missed it by inches and Dave quickly downed a weak craft beer to somewhat still his nerves.

After the float, we stopped by the fly shop to talk hatches and fly selections. I still held hopes for some dry fly action. Johnny Spillane, former Olympic skier and owner of the Trout Creek juggernaut, told me that we were wise to hit the Green during the late winter shoulder season. “In winter the canyon and river are gorgeous,” he said. “You have some of the best fly fishing in the Lower 48, and there’s virtually no one here. I’ve never understood why so few anglers fish the Green during the shoulder season,” he added. “Even when the weather is awful, you can have prolific hatches of midges and blue wings—the river boils with rising fish.”

The next day was supposed to be warm and overcast, the perfect combination for drys. I was hoping for the scenario Johnny described—a reckless topwater feeding frenzy. But when the fish, I learned, are chasing streamers, why would you want anything else? One of the guides who didn’t have a trip gave us some advice, sold us a few sure bets.

Back at the lodge—the place was literally empty. I walked the dogs over the rapidly deteriorating ski trail while Dave worked on moose fajitas. The moose, served rare on fresh tortillas with a glob of avocado and a dollop of sour cream, was Dave’s most accomplished meal so far. But nothing could help that Utah beer. By the second day we knew what to expect, which rapids to avoid, and what flies to use. I stayed with the Peanut Envy. Dave tried a Goldie, a J.J. Special, a black Sex Dungeon, and various festive cone heads that made my standard Woolly Buggers and Meat Whistles look like throwbacks to the 1990s. Dave showed me how to tie a nonslip mono loop so my streamers might swim more freely. Years under the spell of indicators and ninefoot leaders had taken their toll on my fishing intellect—I had become, willingly, a one-trick pony. Streamer fishing is a whole other world, and I wondered why I just didn’t give myself over to its allure. With the huge streamers that have come into usage these days, and my failing eyesight, shouldn’t I go on over to the winning team? A brown trout rocketed out from some of the streamside scarp and gulped down my fly as if to prove the point. And so it went. The crystal clear river, the call of the water ouzel, the flapping preflight of young mergansers, a pup learning the ropes, and near constant action. Sometimes we cast to individual fish and watched them come out of their feeding lanes to blast the streamer. Other times, we flipped our flies toward the depths of the river on a whim and were rewarded with the pulsing, dogged power of a wild fish.

As we passed through one set of rapids, I made a lazy cast into the white water, just for the fun of it. I thought I finally snagged bottom, and would lose the only fly I had fished for two days. Goodbye four-dollar Peanut Envy. But instead of bottom, it was one of the few rainbows we hooked, a chunky fish (think tuna shaped) that leaped once and then dived. The line spun off my (I mean Dave’s) reel. We were in fast water and couldn’t slow down. I wanted to photograph its bright flanks, its pre-spawn splendor, and I fought it carefully. The fish swam to the back of the boat, and the sinking line got tangled in the anchor. I waddled to the stern and freed the line and thought the match was over. But, just as Dave dipped the net under the fish, the Peanut

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