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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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