Been looking forward to Chadd's next instalment as much as us? Here it is.
The fish of the Wind Rivers don’t ask much. They don’t require precise imitations or championship casting. If you’ve got a fairly suggestive fly, tied with care, and your cast is not a complete embarrassment, a Wind River trout will not refuse you. If they are sipping midge emergers from the surface film and you open your flybox and the best you can do is an Elk Hair Caddis, tie it on. All reasonable offers will be considered.
I once spotted a Wind Rivers brook trout of about eleven inches perched at the top of a pool where the water spilled in over a tangle of logs. I covered him with a caddis and he took a swipe at it as soon as it touched down. This happened almost too fast for me to see it. All I knew was he missed the fly, so I left it there and he came back to it. This time I saw him rising, but I must have tensed or flinched because I inadvertently repositioned the fly and the fish missed a second time. By now the fly was almost to the tail of the pool and it had come under the influence of some drag that I could not mend out. The fly was practically at my feet, and in another two seconds it would drop out of the pool, but the brookie came back, came straight at the fly, and in so doing came straight at me. When he saw me he flicked around 180 degrees and I thought the jig was finally up, but it was not up. The fish came to the fly a fourth time and plucked it from the tailout just before it slid from the pool.
This is your basic Wind Rivers trout.
I don’t mean to imply fishing for Wind Rivers trout is easy. You must, of course, go to them. This means shouldering a pack with supplies for five days or so and walking under that burden for a number of hours until there are no more roads or wires or cellphone signals. The air is thinner. There may be snow or there may be mosquitoes. Oftentimes both. You must filter your own water and sleep on the ground.
There are other ways to get there. You might hire a teamster to lash your supplies to a pack animal so that you don’t have walk beneath a heavy load. For a little more money the same teamster will lash you yourself to an animal so that you don’t have to walk at all. You may engage additional hirelings to put up your tent and cook your food, too, but whether you make these efforts yourself or pay someone else to, the obligations will be met before you make a single cast.
You might not remember the first fish. It will be lost among the many others you catch that day, perhaps from the very first waterway you encounter. Your first big Wind River fish will stay with you longer, mainly because you’ll catch lots of the small ones at first. The 10–12-inch fish seem to act as sentinels or footmen to the larger fish, allowing you to pass on only after your stalking, casting, and fly selection turn careful and sly. Many of the streams and lakes of the region hold primarily large trout, but you will have to hike farther, climb higher, or blaze your own trails to find them.
Wind River trout are of many species—in fact, most of the trout species are represented. Rainbows from the west coast, brook trout and lakers from the east coast, brown trout from Eurasia. Golden trout of trophy size are rumored in some drainages. It’s what my friend Brad would call a “smorgasbord fishery.”
You’ll find cutthroat, too, but only the Colorado River cutthroats are natives. Any Bonneville, Yellowstone, or westslope cutts you hook are, technically, out-of-towners.
After a few trips, you may wonder how these many species arrived in that remote mountain range, hundreds or thousands of miles from their native waters and a long way even from the nearest paved roads. How were all these fish assembled in the same place?
Once you begin your investigation, it won’t be long before you hear the name Finis Mitchell.
The Man of the Mountains, the Lord of the Winds—Finis Mitchell is surrounded by legendry. He was revealed to me like a high backcountry lake, first glimpsed through mist and trees, becoming clearer as I rounded each bend in the trail.
Actually, it wasn’t as dramatic as that. I was eating lunch at a fast food when a friend mentioned him.
“Heading to the Winds next week,” I said.
“Oh, really?” asked my friend.“Hey, do you know much about Finis Mitchell?”
“Finis who?”
“Mitchell. He’s the guy who supposedly stocked all the Wind River lakes with trout back in the 1930s.”
“No,” I said. “Never heard of him.”
“He wrote a book about it, how he populated the whole place with trout by himself. Supposedly carried them up in buckets on horses. I’ve been meaning to read it, but it’s sort of hard to find.”
I didn’t look for the book right away because it was time for my trip, but while I was up there, I thought about the fish. Browns, brooks, and cutts—all caught on the same day. For the first time it occurred to me that these fish were most likely descendants of fish put there by some other guy. Did that matter?
The book is called Wind River Trails. I got a copy shortly after I got back. It wasn’t hard to find. Without even knowing the title, it took mere minutes to find and order it on Amazon, and it cost only a few dollars. “Obscure” is probably a better characterization than “hard to find.” I’d been going to the Wind Rivers for several years before hearing about it, and I know people who’ve been going there for much longer who still have never read it.
Although it contains hiking and fishing information about most of the major drainages in the Bridger Wilderness, the information in Wind River Trails is quite dated. It was first published in 1976 and even the most recent version is nearly fifteen years old. The typesetting and illustrations have a clunky, decidedly DIY aesthetic—it appears to have been formatted on an electronic typewriter, and the maps are all hand-drawn with pencil. All of the writing is Mitchell’s own, and it’s full of bad grammar and purple prose. Scattered among the trail descriptions and other technical information you’ll find verses of Mitchell’s poetry and some rather bland aphorisms:
We don’t stop hiking because we grow old, we grow old because we stop hiking.
A far cry from Confusious-level musing, and not really even true—makes you wonder if he was trying to pad out certain pages. This next one will induce slightly less eye-rolling, but it’s not exactly the sound of one hand clapping, either:
Too many of us follow endless trails. Unless a trail leads somewhere and ends, it is but a circle.
For the most part, these writerly transgressions can be overlooked, however, because the story contained in Wind River Trails is astonishing, and not always in a good way.
It begins with Mitchell coming west with his family in 1906 at age six, after his father traded a 40-acre spread in Missouri for 160 acres at the foot of the Wind River Range in what would become the Bridger Wilderness Area in Wyoming.
“The range was our back yard,” said Mitchell.
Farming the high rocky soil of Wyoming was unprofitable, however, and the Mitchell family turned to other forms of subsistence. Finis worked for the railroad for awhile, but after the Great Depression began, he was laid off. That’s when he started a fishing camp on Mud Lake near the Big Sandy Opening.
Mitchell and his wife ran the camp, providing guiding services to tourists for free. They made money by charging for meals and renting out horses that they’d borrowed from locals.
“I had lived here since 1906 and I knew everybody,” said Mitchell. “We managed to borrow ten horses with six saddles and four pack saddles. We charged a dollar and a half a day for the horses.”
Those prices may not sound like much, but Mitchell claims between the horse rental and the meals in camp, they kept the bills paid.
“Believe it or not, that first summer we made three hundred dollars and fifteen cents,” said Mitchell. “You’d be surprised at how many people would like to eat with us.”
The Wind River Range is home to approximately 800 miles of stream and no fewer than 4,000 lakes. The lowland state of Minnesota is known as the “land of 10,000 lakes,” but Wyoming has legitimate grounds to protest that designation. Maps of the Wind Rivers have an almost lacy appearance, owing to the multitudinous lakes, and in the early 1930s the vast majority of these were uninhabited by trout. Mitchell did not fail to notice this nor what it meant for his enterprise.
“When we set up our fishing camp,” said Mitchell, “there were only about five lakes that had fish in them. These were all cutthroat trout, native to the Rocky Mountains.”
More species of fish in more lakes would mean more fishermen and more business at the camp, and so after the first year, Mitchell began ordering fingerling trout of all kinds from the Wyoming Board of Fish Commissioners, which at the time was eager to stock its many waterways with fish.
“The hatchery brought fish to us in five gallon milk cans, twelve cans at a time,” Mitchell reported. “We would put these twelve cans on six pack horses, a can on each side and pack them into the mountains.”
It wasn’t a simple endeavor. Many of the trails Mitchell trekked were 20 miles or longer. The cans were covered with burlap so that the water could be aerated by sloshing about. However, this meant the horses had to be kept moving all the time, even during the loading process, and the cans had to be refilled periodically along the trail. There was doubtless some mortality among the fingerlings; it’s hard to believe any of them survived.
But survive they did. Mitchell’s camp did, too. In fact, it grew big enough for Mitchell to hire his father and others. Farming on Wyoming’s soil may not have worked out, but farming her waters did. Mitchell went on to become a sort of one-man chamber of commerce for the Wind Rivers. For years he gave presentations and wrote for newspapers and magazines, revealing the Bridger Wilderness to the public but also reporting his own accomplishments—15,000 miles of Wind River trails hiked, 276 peaks summited, and 12 cameras worn out by snapping an estimated 120,000 photos of the area. He kept hiking and climbing in the Winds until he was 87, when he apparently decided he really was too old for hiking. He passed away in 1995, just one day short of his 94th birthday.
When viewed from today’s perspective, it seems incredible that any conservation organization would allow a partially employed and mostly uneducated former railroad worker to dump bucketfuls of non-native trout into otherwise pristine wilderness lakes. What is harder to grasp is the scale and scope of Mitchell’s efforts. In the seven years Mitchell ran his fishing camp, he stocked more than 300 lakes with 2.5 million trout. Hundreds more lakes were passively stocked by virtue of connecting streams.
When confronted with such numbers, one wonders why Mitchell is considered a regional legend instead of an environmental criminal. That kind of tampering would never be tolerated today—if I were to stock even a handful non-native fish into a public lake, I’d probably be thrown in jail.
Of course, such was the policy of conservation agencies of that era. Just as wild prairies were once valued more for their potential as cropland, lakes and rivers were likewise viewed as potential fish farms—hence the term “planted” fish. Rivers without sport fish in them were considered “sterile.” Nor was Mitchell the first to undertake stocking in the region; the Wind Rivers’ foothill streams and rivers were already stocked with non-native species by the end of the 1880s.
“Everyone seemed to want big trout,” Mitchell confessed. In his view, he was simply meeting demand and improving the countryside for those who would come after him.
And so it’s unproductive and unfair to characterize Mitchell’s legacy as either legend or crime—it must be both and neither. Mitchell isn’t around anymore to stand trial for his actions, but of course his actions were not considered criminal in his day. If we can learn something from what he did, that is enough.
In his article “These Waters Were All Virgin,” Jeffery Nichols provides an excellently nuanced examination of what Mitchell’s efforts meant to Wyoming, the Bridger Wilderness, and the Wind Rivers.
He wrote:
The consensus on Wind River trout has been a useful one: it helped Finis burnish his credentials as a conservationist, it helped wilderness advocates garner support for statutory protection, and it served to promote Wyoming fishing and tourism. (...) From an early age, Finis took much-needed food from the Winds to supplement his family’s marginal farming, like millions of other Americans. At another desperate time, he manipulated the ecosystems of mountain lakes to make them provide him a livelihood and recreation for those to come, as many others had done in other waters. But throughout his life, the Winds also meant beauty, spiritual solace, and recreation.
The last time I went to the Winds with my son Klaus, we fished a river in one of the drainages that Finis Mitchell stocked with his milk-can fingerlings. We’d been at it for less than an hour and were doing quite well when Klaus hooked what he called “a really big one.” I never got a clear look at the fish, but in the ensuing excitement, the top section of Klaus’s 4-weight broke.
We sat on the streambank and discussed ways to fix the rod, but without tools or materials, there was little to be done. Instead, we stuck together and took turns fishing with my rod. At the end of the day, we’d caught close to 100 fish between us, many of which were fifteen inches and up. Beautiful fish and wild despite their antecedents, captured one sunny day among the peerless grandeur of the Wind River Range.
Klaus and I don’t talk much about that trip. Whenever the topic comes up, we can only grin and shake our heads. There is nothing we can say about it to improve its quality in our memories, so we don’t try.
That day came out of milk cans covered with burlap, lashed to the side of packhorses borrowed from local ranchers by Finis Mitchell. Finis Mitchell gave us that day. He didn’t mean to, but he did.