Catching Five Species of Fish on the Green River in Wyoming

I couldn’t resist getting out one more time with another nice November day.  The forecast said it would be in the high forties in Kemmerer. 

I mentioned this to Ron and we made plans to hit the Green below Fontenelle again. 

I drove down to the bank of the river at weeping rocks similar to what our “friend” did on our previous trip.  

This time, we did have the river to ourselves.   

We rigged up with prince nymphs, glo-bugs and streamers.   

We caught several of the usual mid-size rainbows that we usually catch in this section and a lot of White Fish.   

Then a cast on the far side of the river produced a slightly larger fish.  At first I thought it was just a larger rainbow and thought nothing of it.  

As I brought it to the net however, I could tell it was not a rainbow, but a Lake Trout.  

I didn’t expect that.  This added excitement to the day.  Although this Lake Trout only measured 19 inches which is small for a Lake Trout, it let us know that there was a possibility larger Lake Trout had swam upstream from Flaming Gorge to spawn.

Moving downstream a bit to the deeper, slower water seemed to produce mostly White Fish, which also seemed happy with either prince nymphs or glo-bugs.

There were a couple other stretches of the river I wanted to try.  We packed up and went to the first of these, in the deeper water just past the Slate Rock Campground.  

Here we managed to catch two more species.   

Ron caught a Cutthroat and I caught a Brown.   

Ron also caught a Lake Trout in this stretch.  That makes five species that we caught on this trip: Rainbow, White Fish, Cutthroat, Brown and Lake Trout.

We still had one more stretch to try; the stretch where I hooked into that monster brown at the end of the day on the trip with the guide.  This stretch is a pretty consistent depth, about mid-thigh deep.  There was ice along the edge that we had to break through to get into the water to wade.  I hiked upstream to the bend where there were some riffles but didn’t have any luck.  I also hiked downstream to the next bend where there were more pronounce riffles but also nothing.  I also fished the consistent depth water in between but still no strikes.  

Ron however, caught the largest fish of the trip in this stretch; a 19 and three quarters inch, thick bodied rainbow.