Return To Tatooine: Pursuit of Yellowstone Cutthroat Part II

I had to do it. There’s no way I was about to leave Utah without making one last trip up to the Raft River mountain range; as disappointing as my first trip may have been.

I was much better prepared this time around. I’d found and talked with two different people who had been there recently and both actually pointed me towards the same stream. This stream is unnamed on all maps, and therefore overlooked by most fisherman. It was super close by to a stream I fished on my first trip, so I was relatively familiar with the area. Luckily, this stream isn’t too deep into the mountain range, so the roads to reach it weren’t quite so hairy.

The weather didn’t look too promising as I approached, storm clouds formed over the Naf Dancehall Bar. After a two hour drive, I parked the car up on a ridge (once again, didn’t feel like driving through a stream) and hiked about a half of a mile to the destination.

The stream wasn’t much, narrow enough to jump across with a long stride and canopied with brush in most places. This place called for some technical “fishing”; casting was out of the question and I’d been advised by a number of people that dapping is the only plausible method. That is, letting only about a foot or so of leader extend past the eyelet and using the rod’s length to reach tight quarters. Because of this, stealth and a careful approach were of the utmost importance. I spooked a couple of trout upstream before finally getting the approach just right.

A successful approach required you to get on all fours and crawl towards a likely hole. This meant you were fishing blind at most spots ie had no clue whether or not the hole actually had trout in it or not, so I fished any and all spots that appeared “trouty”.

After a few unsuccessful pools, I came up on a bend in the creek where I was almost certain an undercut bank created a deep holding spot. On my elk hair caddis’ first pass through the bend it got absolutely smashed by a trout that shot out from under the bank, I hooked it briefly but it got off soon after. No worries, the next few drifts through the pool all yielded aggressive surface strikes. It’s hopper season and these fish were hungry man.

It wasn’t until the fourth or fifth strike that I was able to successfully land my first Yellowstone cutthroat. I was ecstatic to finally catch such a rare and elusive species of trout.

Given the size of the stream, most of the trout it contained were proportionally small and could fit in the palm of your hand. That didn’t matter much to me, small trout are trout all the same. I caught 2 more Yellowstone cutthroats of this size from the same bend before moving on.

I kept making my way upstream until I spotted a deep hole sitting directly beneath a small waterfall. I was able to get close enough to scope a trout swimming in the deep pool much larger than any others I’d caught or spooked. It hit my dry fly almost the instant it touched the water and was on for a few seconds before tearing free. I thought that’d be my only chance, but to my surprise this trout hit my fly 5(!) consecutive times before I finally connected solid with it. Like I said, these trout were hungry and opportunistic feeders who receive nearly zero angling pressure. I never measure my fish, but from the pic you can see that it stretched from the tip of my fingers to well past my wrist (and a bit longer if I would’ve straightened it out) Matching a tape measure up with the photo, the fish was 9 1/2 to 10 inches long, double the size of nearly all the other trout I’d seen or caught that day.

I released the anomaly trout and decided to end the trip on that note. Definitely a successful second trip up to the Raft River mountains and (spoiler alert) the last trout I needed to complete the Cutthroat Slam!

Still planning on doing write-ups on the Bonneville, Colorado River and Bear River cutthroats, so stay tuned for the rest of the series.

On an unrelated note, I’ve been getting a lot of supportive feedback on this blog from friends and family and I really appreciate that. I’m in the process of setting up an email subscription list that will let you know when I make a new post. Hoping to have that up and running by next time. Thanks to everyone for their support of this project thus far!