South Fork of the Snake – The Fishing

OK, the real reason we camp and float the river – the fishing. An example of the type of fishing that can be had occurred the morning of the last day of my two floats. Nick and I woke up at 7:30, cleaned up the mess the raccoon made, packed up the tent and supplies and we were on the river by 9:00. We had 14 miles to float to the take out at Byington. The entire float was 24 miles so we had over half the float to go. Never the less, we took time to stop at three promising looking places. The first two places we caught six or seven fish but the last stop we caught 23. Most were white fish, but we caught some rainbows and the last couple were nice browns.

On the first float I started out fishing a hopper/dropper system. There were a lot of grasshoppers in the brush around the shore. The dropper was a bead head hare’s ear. I caught one nice cutthroat and had a couple more rise. After pulling into first camping spot called Pine Creek, I spent an hour fishing around the island and didn’t even have a rise. My daughter Karen caught the best cutthroat of the trip on a bronze fox spinner.

The next morning I switched to a nymph strike indicator system. South Fork Angler’s had recommended a few flies and one was a rubber leg. There were lots of stone fly nymph shucks on the rocks along the shore and even a couple of live ones scampering around. I placed a large one, size 6, as the point fly and a smaller one, size 10, as a dropper. These flies have multi-colored chenille, light brown and dark brown. The legs were barred yellow and brown. The flies were also well weighted and looked very buggy. Using these I started catching quite a few more fish, usually 5 or 6 at every good looking spot at which we would stop.