CODY, Wyo. — The message, couched in just enough mock anger to make you think about it, was brief and to the point.
This thing about Glenwood Springs being the best fly-fishing town in America was just so much male bovine dung. A much more deserving recipient, the missive continued, would be Cody, Wyo. Further, John Baughman declared, I should deliver my misinformed carcass up there and see for myself.
The article touting the fishy properties of the Colorado town had appeared in a spring issue of Field & Stream magazine as part of a highly subjective list intended to titillate city-bound readers and, of course, sell magazines.
This had been reported in a blurb on these pages and thus made its way by Internet to a certain computer in northwest Wyoming — the same infernal device that now delivered Baughman’s electronic jab.
That was late March. Now, after a series of distractions, months had melted into October. Not to worry, he said. Autumn in Cody, at 5,016 feet, isn’t much different from Denver. Find a weather window and good fishing will follow.
When I finally reached the Baughman home last week, I found crab apples still clinging to the trees, tomatoes on the vine, blooms in the planters.
But it was something else that really caught my eye. A map on an office wall showed two concentric circles radiating from Cody. Inside the 50-mile loop — roughly the distance from downtown Denver to Eisenhower Tunnel — I discovered both upstream forks of the magnificent Shoshone River, 7,000-acre Buffalo Bill Reservoir, the 30 downstream miles of the mainstem Sho-shone tailwater, the stunning and highly public Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone River, all the trout waters of the Greybull River, the lunker-happy Newton Lakes and enough smaller creeks to fill a season of exploration.
Stretch the string to 100 miles — which puts us somewhere between Buena Vista and Salida — and we’ve roped in the famous Bighorn tail-water below Yellowtail Dam, a rich reach of that same river upstream near Thermopolis, virtually all of Yellowstone National Park, most streams in the Bighorn Mountains and a dizzying array of alpine lakes dotting the Beartooth Plateau.
It’s a truly remarkable collection, one that will be described in part on these pages through a random series of articles intended to get the juices flowing on cold winter days.
Given his background, Baughman may be forgiven a bit of bias. Born in Pittsburgh, he has diplomas from Denver’s Thomas Jefferson High School and Colorado State University. But having spent the past 30-odd years in the Cowboy State, he is, at age 58, Wyoming through and through. Tall and lanky, Baughman looks like the Marlboro Man, only with a fly rod instead of a smoke.
A biologist by schooling, he rose through the ranks to become Wyoming Game and Fish’s fisheries chief, then the agency’s director from 1996-2002. His 1993 book, “The Most Complete Guide to Wyoming Fishing,” remains a definitive work on the practical aspects of the state’s waters. He next served a four-year tour in Washington, D.C., as executive director of the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, where “not a day went by when I didn’t think of Wyoming.”
Having spent all those decades sizing up his adopted state, Baughman retired straight to Cody in 2006.
His wife, Demity, a third-generation Wyomingite, offers the best explanation: “If the U.S. is the greatest country in the world and Wyoming is the finest state in the union and Cody is the top town in Wyoming, then that makes Cody the best place in the whole world.”
Case closed.
There may be some basis for such assertion. This small city of 9,000 commands the dramatic eastern gateway to the park and the sort of enveloping wildness Adam must have experienced before that nasty business with the apple.
Cody residents maintain a perpetual pique over the fact William Cody, Buffalo Bill, is interred on Lookout Mountain west of Denver instead of, as God intended, in the namesake town he founded in the 1890s.
But no matter what you read on gravestones, or in magazines, Colorado’s separate fishing parameters pale when compared with Cody’s. That should be consolation enough.
Charlie Meyers: 303-954-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com
