July 2022 - 36

By evening the lights from Turpin
Meadows are too much to resist. Laughter
rises. Wranglers turn the trail ponies out
for the night and you can nearly feel the
ground tremble under your feet as the herd
goes scattering up the hillside.
East Fork of the Wind
I still have a few friends in the Greater
Yellowstone Ecosystem. But not the kind
you drop in on without calling first. Lately,
they've been answering my voicemails with
texts like, " Sorry, we're in Flagstaff for the
weekend. Let's catch up soon. " They live at
the doorstep of an amazing and wild place,
and yet they find reasons to travel elsewhere
continuously.
My friends are getting older, and sleeping
on the ground near a trout stream is losing
its appeal. But sleeping on the ground, I
argue, is one of the last free things in a world
that is leaning more and more transactional.
In late August, I want to cram in one more
The Buffalo Fork near Turpin Meadows is a great place for late-season fishing. The author often finds large schools of
whitefish stacked up in deep pools.
school in huge numbers so if you find one,
likely, you've found the lot.
Whitefish are native to Wyoming; I don't
know why more of us don't search them out.
They take nymphs, especially the hare's ear and
pheasant tail iterations that so many modern
fly anglers carry in abundance. I have spent
many groggy afternoons on the Buffalo Fork
casting a nymph rig upstream and watching it
zing through the emerald water when a thick
whitefish falls for the fly - and fall they will.
I always bring an ice chest with 20 pounds of
cube ice, the idea being that one of these days
I'm going to catch a half-dozen or so whities,
gut them on a log and bring them home to
smoke. But with a full stomach from Turpin
Meadows, the thought of eating is unappealing,
and, inevitably, I release them all.
36 | July 2022
trip before the snow flies. Often it has already
snowed once or twice up high, but not in any
serious way. Turning at the Wyoming Game
and Fish Department's Spence/Moriarity
Wildlife Management Area sign and driving
about 6 miles places an angler in the middle
of some serious trout water. This drainage
supports whitefish, brookies, rainbow and
cutthroat trout. I've heard rumors of big,
hook-jawed browns drifting upstream from
the main branch of the Wind River, but they're
just rumors as far as I can tell.
You have many options in this area -
Wiggins Fork, Bear Creek and the East Fork
of the Wind. There is dispersed camping
and many streams to access, all from this
gravel artery. Brookies and cutthroats are
fall spawners so, if you time it right, you can
encounter some fish in their most brilliant
colors. They bloom with absurd slashes of
orange and red, particularly the males.
Henderson and I found a pod of feeding
cutthroats in the 10-to-12-inch range. They
were in a pool under a cut bank. I worked
them over, left to wander for an hour and
returned to catch the evening hatch. I saw
a pair of bow hunters walking the steep side
hills, stopping every so often to blow a plastic
bugle tube. Seeing them reminded me that
it was Sept. 1 and the summer was gone.

July 2022

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