Fishing Forum

Got home yesterday afternoon from an amazing backpacking, fishing trip into the WIndrivers in the Bridger wilderness area. We took our scout group of 12 boys and stayed for 3 days. A person could spend a life time up there and probably not make it to all the lakes. What an awesome place!
Trips like this one make all the pains of being a scout leader worth while. We packed into one lake and set up camp there and then hiked into 4 other lakes that were close by. There were several more but we ran out of time. Fishing was better in some than others. It was a good experience for the boys being able to catch there dinner for.
One of the lakes we went to was loaded with tons of 8" to 14" brook trout. I lost track after a couple of hours how many I caught and released. A couple people also caught grayling. We caught some beautiful little cuthroat also but I could never get a very good picture. I hope I can make it up there again in the near future. I will let the pictures do the rest of the talking for me!
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Yeah you just can't beat the Wind River Range. I grew up near Pinedale so a lot of my time as a youth was spent in those mountains. Did you have any problems with bears? Seems like we always had a bear in camp. By the way that is a sweet looking grayling!
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We saw some fresh tracks about half mile from camp but he never gave us a visit that we saw. That is the first grayliing I have seen in person. I was amazed how beautiful it was.
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Beautiful grayling!! My hat is off to you for being a scout leader and for taking the boys on such a great trip. Way to build good men!



Do you mind if I ask what your approximate elevation was? I only saw the one snow bank in your pictures. I am wondering what the snow level is getting to in the back country.

Had many of the boys been on a high country hike before? About how long is a good distance for an initial hike into a base camp? (sorry for all the questions.... hubby wants to know for our scouts)Thanks!

Skeeters??
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Trail head was about 8600 ft and our base camp was about 9600 ft. It was a great hike for our boys because we had a lot of 1st timers. We hiked in about 7 miles to base camp and most of the kids had on 35 to 45# packs. I would suggest something similar in elevation change if you have some newbies. The gradual climb made it much easier. We went on an 8 mile day hike last year and gained 2500 ft in elevation and a few boys struggled pretty bad just with day packs on so we wanted to do something a little easier this year.
A couple of the lakes we hiked into from our base camp were a little steeper but we only had to hike 3 or 4 miles round trip to get to them. Skeeters got pretty bad with the rise in temps. Make sure to have plenty of spray and maybe even a face net.
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Awesome. I'll be there in about a month. That is a great greyling picture. It's hard to capture their color.

Windriver
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Thanks windriver. Hope you have as good of a time as I did when you go. I am already trying to figure out when I have time to go back again this summer.
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Thanks for sharing about your trip. I've never seen a real picture of a grayling, just illustrations! I'd love to catch one! I'm surprised there wasn't more snow up there at 8500-9500 feet.
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Thanks for sharing, amazing view. glad you all had lots fun. nice fish
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