When I first moved to Wyoming over 25 years ago, I immediately failed as a fly fisherman. I simply couldn’t figure it out. It pains me today to recall those early days when I’d belly-crawl up to the lip of a pool and cast my fly line tipped with a hook and a chunk of nightcrawler – not a fly – to the unsuspecting Trout. It was effective. The air above the creek was aquiver with winged insects, but I used bait. And in those days, I didn’t subscribe to the catch-and-release philosophy. I took those Brook Trout home and released them into a skillet of hot oil.
But a minimum wage job at a local Wyoming fly shop put me in close contact with a few guys who evolved beyond bait fishing. Each of them carried a tattered copy of John Gierach’s “Trout Bum” in their dusty pick-ups. They taught me how to match the late summer hatch. “Before you start casting, look in the bushes at the insects, see what the Trout are feeding on,” they said. Or something like that.
Pretty soon, I was learning the names of patterns. Elk Hair Caddis, Yellow Humpy, Stimulator, Adams… I started leaving Laramie for extended adventures, which always included my Labrador retriever, Sweets. Sweets and I drove in my battered truck to the Wind Rivers, the Absarokas, and the Wyoming Range, where, just as the sunlight hit the surface of the rivers, the insects took flight. The bug blitz began in June with the big salmon flies, and lasted into September with the last of the caddis swarms.
I learned to identify them. Turns out, it’s not too difficult! They crawled up my waders, landed on my arms, and ended up in my tent by the stream. And I learned, very slowly, when and how to match what I was seeing with a dry fly. I began letting all Trout go – they’re just too pretty to kill. I’d return from the mountains, my face swollen from bug bites, my gas tank mere vapors, and my clothes stained by globs of dry fly flotant.
If you’re looking to take advantage of the Wyoming bug blitz, read on. I’ll introduce you to the top four dry fly patterns for fishing in Wyoming during summer.
1. Elk Hair Caddis
It would be a good name for a rock band. It’s been around since 1957, and if you don’t have a few in your fly box, you’ve been too busy chasing trendy fly patterns! The Elk Hair Caddis is an exercise in basics.
With a copy of “Caddisflies” by Gary LaFontaine permanently checked out from the university library, I learned to tie something that resembled the proven pattern. I pinched a bit of elk hair and notched it to the top of the fly with black thread. My flies were hideous versions of what LaFontaine had in mind, but if I dressed them with enough flotant, they worked.
Beaver ponds and creeks outside of Centennial are refuges from the scorching prairie winds of July. Go there in late July and pitch your tent. This is all part of the Medicine Bow National Forest, public land that invites travelers from all over the world. It’s free to camp in the dispersed areas. Or you can pay the fee and camp with the RVs and enjoy the meager benefit of a vault toilet.
The preferred way to know this landscape is to stay a few days by a Brook Trout stream. The Elk Hair Caddis, pitched into the tannic waters of a beaver pond, will elicit strikes from Brook Trout too small to fit a size 14 fly in their mouths. But if you stick with it and follow the stream further away from the gravel forest road, you’ll find bigger fish, some thick and gorgeous in their markings.
Watching a hatch develop is half the fun. You see a solitary adult caddis fluttering above the green water. Then two or three emerge from some slack water and dry their wings in the sunlight…
A Trout gulps something, but it was too quick to say for sure. The air warms. Caddisflies begin to hatch in earnest – five, eleven, twenty at a time! Pretty soon, the air over the stream is fuzzy with flight. Your fly will land amid other caddis, and it’s difficult to tell which is your fly and which is the real thing. No matter. When the Trout slash, you lift. You hope. And sometimes, there’s an honest tug on your line.
2. The Purple Haze, Purple Everything
Sometimes you miss the trend and find yourself way behind the times. That’s happened to me with haircuts, clothing, and music. I’m still listening to Gram Parsons on a CD from the ’90s! I’m slow to learn the new flies, too.
Unbeknownst to me, fly fishermen all over the West were using Andy Carlson’s Purple Haze since 2000, when it first hit the water. A seemingly simple fly that resembles a mayfly, the Purple Haze has gained an outsized reputation among dry fly fishermen. Carlson first unleashed it in Montana, specifically on the Bitterroot River. But it works all over the West. I couldn’t say when the pattern debuted in Wyoming, but there has been a notable obsession with purple dry flies when fly fishing here. Something about that color initiates Trout to feed. That’s the theory, at least.
I first used the Purple Haze after a somewhat strenuous hike into the less-visited section of Horse Creek in Fremont County. The Cutthroats were feeding in pods. I threw the humdrum hopper patterns at them for a while. Nothing. On a lark, I switched over to a size 14 Purple Haze and immediately started to catch fish – chunky native Yellowstone Cutts that were cold to the touch when I went to release them!
Diehard fly-fishers say the Purple Haze in size 18 can be used as a tiny mayfly, whereas a size 10 can be used as a searcher pattern, imitating large caddis or even stoneflies. There’s something about the color purple. And now it’s everywhere: the Purple San Juan Worm, the Purple Prince Nymph, the Purple Chubby Chernobyl… But the Purple Haze, to me, is the king. I buy them by the dozen, and in several sizes.
3. New Age Hoppers
I mentioned the humdrum hopper patterns one still encounters in their fly boxes – I own a bunch of hopper patterns that I’ll never fish. I have no idea what frame of mind I was in when I bought them, but there they are: dull, unimaginative, impaled to the foam in my collection! Surely, I can’t throw them out. Or can I? I doubt I’ll ever get desperate enough to use them.
Hopper patterns have undergone an evolution that makes the styles of the early 2000s unappealing. Visit a fly fishing shop – say the Ugly Bug in downtown Casper, Wyoming – and you’ll see whole drawers dedicated to a new style of foam hopper. New materials, innovation, and a bit of manic genius have transformed your uncle’s hopper into a dazzling new prospect. Sparkle material woven into the body, double and triple-stacked layers of foam, googly eyes, realistic leg materials, and even faces drawn onto the head of the insect are common now. There are almost too many to choose from.
Hoppers are great late summer patterns. Usually, you hear the genuine insects clattering in the sagebrush as you stroll to your favorite stream. Grasshoppers are terrestrial insects and avoid water at all costs. But the stiff Wyoming winds blow them into the water, and the Trout key in on that. The Morrish Hopper and the Fat Albert are tied with multiple layers of foam. They’re so buoyant that you don’t need to dress them with messy flotant.
On a dry, windy day in mid-August, I was driving from Jackson Hole to Casper. I was in no hurry to get home, so I stopped in Dubois at The Perch, a boutique coffee house that seemed out of place amidst all of the overtures to cowboy culture and Western-themed gift shops. I decided to drive over to the park behind the National Big Horn Sheep Center and let my dog, Henderson, swim before the long, hot drive across the Wind River Indian Reservation.
There were tiny hoppers all over the park. They sprang up from the flattened grass and ricocheted off my legs. As Henderson galloped back and forth to the river, I saw clouds of hoppers striking his black coat. I knew what to do.
I rigged up my little 4 wt fly rod, selected the smallest Morrish Hopper I had (size 12), and went to work on the Brown Trout.
4. Green Drake Parachute
The largest mayfly available in Wyoming is the Western Green Drake, an almond-sized insect that hatches in late June and, if we’re lucky, continues through July. Snatch one from the nearby bushes and you’ll find an elegant, olive-hued mayfly with a thick thorax. If you lift a few river rocks in July, you might find a large nymph preparing to emerge any day now. They’re powerful crawlers, and so big you might mistake them for stoneflies. On the wing, they’re unmistakable.
Better yet, in the last hour of a summer day, the females gather above the pools and slides. They hover there, dipping to the surface to lay their eggs. At moments like these, it seems that every Trout in the river is feeding in great, splashy events!
A green drake hatch isn’t that rare if you know where and when to look. Timing has more to do with how many miles you’re willing to put on your truck – and whether or not you believe the rumors floating around the local Wyoming fly fishing shops in, say, Pinedale and Jackson Hole…
The Green Drake Parachute is the fly of choice. Anglers in the know will dress the wings in flotant, but leave the body undressed so that the fly rides in the water like an adult trying to dry its wings before taking flight. It’s not a dirty trick – it’s a hard-won nod toward entomology.
It’s not always about taking big fish. Small Cutthroats and Brook Trout will try to slurp a size 10 Drake pattern.
This Fourth of July, after a parade in downtown Saratoga, I walked up a forest road that paralleled a roaring creek. Though my main objective was to walk my overweight Lab and get a bit of exercise, I carried a 4-weight and a box of dries. The force of the creek was too robust, but as I plateaued into a chain of meadows, the water slowed and I saw them… Swarms of female green drakes gathering in the final moments of the day. Alone in the Sierra Madres, I was the only one to see them dance above the water, unless, of course, you count Henderson.
I rigged up and tied on a Green Drake Parachute that I had been carrying around for 10 years. The Brookies slashed at it, unable to get the big fly in their mouths. Henderson, intent on the feeding fish, waded out and whined in excitement. I kept casting content to watch the Brook Trout try and fail to eat the bug. But then something larger – a Brown perhaps – slurped the fly and sped off toward a log jam. The strong current, the weight of the fish, the shock of it all! I was unable to keep the Trout from breaking my tippet in the jumble of logs. Henderson, witnessing the whole thing, swam out and ruined the pool.
If I wanted to get out of there with any light left, I had to get moving. I made a mental note that the next time I was in a fly shop, I needed at least another Parachute in size 10. Maybe I should buy a dozen. Who knows, one of these days, if I keep mobile and in proximity of cold-water streams, I might stumble into another drake hatch on some lonely, high-mountain creek.
What are your favorite dry fly patterns? Does the Wyoming bug blitz match your hatch? Maybe you have some Wyoming fly fishing stories of your own... We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!
