Jackson, Wyo. – The grandest view in American angling hasn’t changed since Jack Dennis was a boy, but the fishing next to it has. Remarkably, it has improved.
“There used to be 900 fish per mile back then. Now it’s close to 2,000,” Dennis said of the official Wyoming Game and Fish survey.
That’s not just any fish. This is the Snake River cutthroat, a trout so beautiful it should swim in an aquarium – or at least the river that flows past the Teton Mountains.
Fine-spotted beauties that seem to have leaped from an artist’s easel, and the nation’s most spectacular mountain range. It’s a match made in heaven, or at least northwest Wyoming – pretty much the same.
Now casting his way into his seventh decade, Dennis grew up in Jackson, where his Jack Dennis Sports has been a fishing fixture as long as anyone can remember. What Dennis remembers is a time when the river below Grand Teton National Park rambled freely, before wealthy newcomers built rock dikes to protect trophy homes from the river’s wanderings.
“We went from 35 spring creeks to 12 in less than 10 years,” he said of a time when the Snake River lost much of its spawning potential. “But now many of them have been restored. Some of the ranchers deserve a lot of credit for spending their own money to get them working again.”
Restrictive regulations and a prevailing notion that it would be a sin to kill a Snake River cutthroat have done the rest. This protective ethic is essential in that these fish don’t live long. The combined rigors of spawning and northwest Wyoming winter crop most around their fourth birthday, when they reach about 18 inches. A few mossbacks reach 3 or 4 pounds.
On the three separate floating sections of the Snake River in Wyoming, you get to pick your very distinctive pleasure potion. There are no wrong choices. The section above Moose, Wyo., inside the park follows a totally natural streambed and affords the most spectacular views of the Tetons.
The mountain panorama continues through the middle reach downstream to Wilson Bridge, a segment with more and bigger trout, but a channel often pinched by those pesky dikes. Where it enters its canyon below Jackson, the Snake becomes a river few anglers ever see beyond the highway, a whitewater adventure interspersed with the largest trout of all.
Few can resist the stunning spectacle of the upper river, those towering mountains spinning with each bend of the river, each change in the light.
“At some point, everyone forgets to watch his line,” laughed Scott Smith, a guide at Dennis’ shop who has floated the river for 12 years. “Sometimes an indicator will stay underwater 10 seconds before the fisherman realizes he has a bite.”
On the last day in March, dark specks on the snowy slopes of Jackson Hole Resort materialize as skiers as we float past. Although the water temperature never rises above 40 degrees, trout and whitefish rise to midges and the flies that imitate them.
Although a solid baetis hatch and the absence of anglers add luster to this pre-runoff period, the Snake mostly is a river of summer and autumn.
“I don’t get really excited until August,” Smith said, ticking off a serial emergence of caddis, Western Brown stoneflies, Hecuba mayflies and a spectacular September baetis hatch. I’d say September is the best time on this river.”
Dennis readily concurs.
“You get all the leaves turning gold and lift a nice cutthroat up against the backdrop of the Tetons. It doesn’t get any better than that.”
Charlie Meyers can be reached at 303-954-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
