Chasing Spawning Brown Trout Up The North And South Shoshone River Forks

Chasing Spawning Brown Trout Up The North And South Shoshone River Forks

- Vic Attardo

As I scrambled down a hill filled with sage and stiff brown grass, I could see the river’s width and volume were less than a quarter of what they must have been during spring run-off. The flow below me consisted of thin braids through a wide expanse of dry bottom. I’d been told not to let the low water put me off, that migrating brown trout had come up from a reservoir miles away and were attacking streamers in the holes and runs.

Regardless of how the fishing turned out, the Absaroka Mountains offered a breathtakingly beautiful backdrop for the South Fork of the Shoshone River, one of two branches that flow through the sharp mountains before meeting up just outside the town of Cody, Wyoming.

I’d driven some 35 miles past the Buffalo Bill Cody Reservoir on a winding two-laner, passing through towering rock formations that could only be aged in geologic time. Along the way I’d had to slow for a herd of pronghorn crossing the road, and I had just spoken with a conservation officer who warned me that a grizzly had been spotted that morning on the very road where I was donning my waders.

The back of the officer’s truck stunk to high heaven with the remains of a road-killed deer he picked up so the bear would not come back for easy pickings. When I told him I was from Pennsylvania, he gave me a firm warning about giving any grizzlies a wide berth. I knew I was already doing one thing wrong by fishing alone in bear country.

A gravel road provided limited access to the tributary flow. I took it down into the mostly dry river valley, and when I finally did get a streamer in a run that had looked good from the road, it was smacked by an 18-inch brown that did what brown trout are not supposed to do; it jumped again and again across the thin braid of water.