Adam Eakle, (Roughin’ It Outdoors) has a nice profile on bonneville cutthroat brood stock management in Little Dell and Mountain Dell reservoirs. Looks like there are some pretty nice trout in there. Wish I could embed the video, but instead check out the link:

Little Dell Bonneville Cutthroat Trout

Mountain & Little Dell’s Bonneville Cutthroat Trout via KUTV

I am a sucker for photos of the old west. This offers a great view of the amazing scenery in the mountains of Colorado. The mountains almost look like a movie set or something man-made. In fact it reminds me a bit of the Thunder Mountain Express ride at Disneyland. Cool photo.

Shorpy :: History in HD – High-Definition Historical Photos

via Cripple Creek Short Line: 1901.

This is a great post on the Utah on the Fly forums with some nice how to video on some unique fly patterns.  Check it out and get out fishing soon.

Fly Fishing Utah – The Utah Fly Fishing Resource

via Strawberry Fodder.

What warbler is this?

On a recent trip to the Snake River in Wyoming, I spotted this cute little yellow bird, which I had guessed to be a yellow warbler, but looking closer I think it might be a Nashville Warbler.  The pictures aren’t the greatest, but hopefully someone out there can weigh in with an opinion. Comment below. Thanks. Other views: Jumping to a branch, eating a worm, and not very focused.

The Utah DWR has released 3 more river otters on the middle section of the Provo River, with the stated goal of establishing a population of 25-30 otters on the section. Also recently, the DWR said that overpopulation of trout is stunting the growth of the the trout population on that stretch of the river (KSL 5 TV).  Perhaps this is an attempt to reduce the trout population.  Interestingly, the DWR reported the same stunting of growth on the Green River which already has a steady population of otters, so perhaps they may not be the answer, or at least not the complete answer. I don’t really have anything against otters and have spent time enjoying watching them in the past on the Green River.  In fact one time I was guiding my cousin on the Green and we had stopped to land a fish.  I mentioned to him as we sat that there were otters on the river and maybe we would see them. I stood up to pull my anchor and to my surprise a whole family of otters were standing on a rock near the boat watching us.  Pretty funny.

20" Snake River Finespot, the fish of the trip

It’s always hard to post the last day of a trip partly because of how busy life gets when you are back and partly because I think it is hard to admit that the trip is finished.  Well, this trip ended with a bang.  After 2 days of beating the water into a lather with not many fish to show for it, we headed to the Snake River for a shot at redemption…and we found it.  After picking up our licenses, we hit the river about 9:30 AM.  We decided that our best hope lay at the Wilson Bridge. There is a great shelf at the foot of the bridge that we fished for about an hour getting chases on streamers and landing a few smaller trout on a dry and dropper rig.

I set out up stream and immediately found some amazing water and saw that there was a healthy green drake hatch underway, so I switched to an olive wulff and a beadhead PT dropper.  The results were nearly instant.  I hooked and landed a nice 16″ cutthroat and then another about 12″ inches long.  I walked the bank and cast nearly straight upstream and found the fish within about 1-6′ from the bank. I next hooked a little whitefish on the dropper.  Another hundred yards upstream I got a HUGE trout to take my fly, but somehow my knot came undone and I broke him off.  What a bummer.  I kept on with a few more fish in the 10-12″ range.

Paul and I met up again and found another monster … Continue Reading

Today was another SLOW fishing day with a lot of walking and casting.  We started out on the Henry’s Fork in Box Canyon.  I hooked into a pretty big trout that unfortunately I didn’t land.  I landed a couple of little fish.  One big drawback was that the water was milky and made it tough to see what was going on.  On the plus side there was a tremendous hatch of mahogany duns, blue winged olives, and caddis, but it didn’t really seem to get the fish looking up.  We had fun watching an osprey fishing and saw some other cool birds.

We decided to move to the Madison and see if we could do any better. The water there was really nice and I was able to land a nice brown trout on a little bead head pheasant tail I was dropping behind an elk hair caddis.  Paul hooked and flung way may be the smallest trout ever taken on a fly.  It was smaller than my index finger (see the web album link.” Thankfully the scenery and company makes up for the very slow fishing.

7th Annual OOF Day 2

Today we floated the Madison River from Palisades down to some other place I can’t remember the name of.  On our way to the river from West Yellowstone we stopped at an old favorite fishing spot, but my new mecca, the fly shop at Slide Inn.  The streamer selection there was unbelievable.  You have to love a shop that has more streamers than any other flies.  We picked up some crazy articulated flies and started out the day with high hopes.  Fishing was very slow going. It took us a while to get into some fish.  I ended up catching two nice rainbows on a black conehead sculpin.  Otherwise we hooked only a few more fish for the entire 11 miles of floating.  We worked hard and landed a brown trout, a big whitefish, and a bunch of small rainbows.  In all the day was nice, but the fish were few and far between.  Now, where to fish tomorrow?!

7th Annual OOF Day 1

My good friend’s production company recently produced a video for the new Toshiba product called the Libretto (links here and here).  He wanted to put some fishing photos in part of the demo so he borrowed a few from my collection.  You’ll notice from :15-:20 a photo gallery with three fishing themed images. The images are the brown trout, me standing on a log in front of the Tetons, and a group of buddies I fished with recently, I don’t know who the bikini girl is, she certainly wasn’t fishing. I guess this 5 seconds will be deducted from my overall 15 minutes of fame budget.  Hopefully that leaves me enough time to still do something awesome.  Click for the full video:

Zion National Park vintage poster

A recent article in the Deseret News brought together two of my favorite things: vintage graphic art and Zion National Park. I really love seeing these old photos, especially of the one where the little kid is hanging on to the rope for dear life. I think the poster to the left is super cool and I always try, but never really succeed at making cool vintage designs.  Hard to be the actual images.  Thanks Deseret News for sharing.