Jessie's First Trout

Jess caught her first fish!!!

Jess and I were supposed to go climbing today…we we’re going to do Irene’s Arete in the park, a classic six pitch 5.8. But after hearing that the conditions were still a little alpine-ish on the descent, we glommed onto Bruce for a little float trip on the South Fork of the Snake River.

Bruce and Kat Smithhammer are our summer roommates in Jaime Musnicki’s house. They are building a house in Victor right now, and it’s almost finished. They hope to move in sometime soon, but we really like living with them. Kat works as a program coordinator for NOLS Pro and Bruce is a fly fishing guide and author.

The South Fork of the Snake runs near Swan Valley, out on the other side of Pine Creek Pass. It’s a gorgeous river that is running quite high right now…about 12,000 cfs or so. It’s a spectacular river to float and fish. Biologists from Idaho State recently determined that there were 7,000 fish per river mile.

We floated about 12 miles, sat through a thunderstorm, fished along the banks, and drank a fair bit of cerveza. The fishing wasn’t incredible, but the company and scenery was perfect. I learned a ton about fly fishing, mostly about how to nymph, which I’d never done before.

And Jessie caught her first fish, a beautiful rainbow/cutthroat trout. She caught it while nymphing from shore. When it struck, she raised her rod up high and started yelling "What do I do, What do I do?" I was no help, but fortunately Bruce came over and made sure that the fish was treated well. At one point the trout slipped out of Jess' hands while it still had the nymph in its mouth, which resulted in this picture: