Fishing and sightseeing on Utah's scenic Green River [column] (2024)

DUTCH JOHN, Utah — If you have a hobby, at some point in your life you hope to experience the best there is.

For me it’s fly fishing for trout. It took 71 years, but for two days last week I floated Utah’s heavenly Green River where hungry and large wild brown and rainbow trout attack dainty artificial flies in a sparkling emerald river that cuts through high-desert country that seems more beautiful around each bend.

As my brother and I passed through 16 miles over two days in a guided drift boat, I suffered mental anguish. I yearned to soak in the multi-hued rock walls, wildflowers and Douglas firs rising on both sides. Water danced over rocks and birdsong filled the canyon.

Yet, I needed to stay focused on any hesitation on my strike indicator floating enticingly in a dead drift. A fish strike takes but a split second before the trout realizes the bug that it has swallowed is not the real thing.

As our observant guide Cody Schwark noticed, stolen sightseeing glances caused me to miss out on some fish. But the scenery was too beautiful to be ignored. I regret nothing.

Here, in the early 1960s, at the base of the snow-capped Uintas Mountains, the perfect trout fishery was born with the building of the Flaming Gorge Dam, a hydroelectric and flood-control project. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated shortly before he was to dedicate the structure. First Lady Lady Bird Johnson performed the dedication on Aug. 17, 1964.

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Almost overnight, the warmwater Green River was turned into a coldwater fishery that could support trout and the insects they rely on. In 1979, devices were added to allow water at different depths in the reservoir to be released downstream, keeping the river at ideal water temperatures for fish growth and bug production yearround.

Trout were stocked a single time. Today, surveys show an incredible 15,000 trout per mile, a nearly unheard of density and nearly triple other blue-ribbon trout streams in the West.

Fishing is all catch and release and only artificial flies and lures are allowed. No bait.

Some days are tailored to the fishers who favor dry flies, hatches of rising insects causing massive strikes on the water surface. “There are days when you can actually hear the fish rising in the back eddies. It sounds like you poured milk on Rice Krispies,” Green River guide Gordon Tharrett said in an interview.

It just so happened that my two days coincided with minimum flows and cloudless days and we fished nymphs under the surface. By Green River standards, it was slow fishing. But I had never caught and released so many trout and none was under 16 inches. My brother Brett, a superior fly fisher, caught even more.

Caught on artificial flies no larger than an ant and on barbless hooks floating underwater in swift water, every hookup to me seemed a minor miracle.

The fish frequently leaped out of the water, their bodies bent in mid-thrash and glistening. It was a dance repeated over and over. And when brought to the net, the brush strokes of color and dots on each trout seemed painted by an artist.

It was enough to nearly bring a grown man to tears.

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The cost of hiring a guide and boat may seem outlandish to some but there is no better way to reach trout in their lies and cover so much water, compared to walking and fishing close to shore.

Because the river is so clear, we could see trout scattering like sheep as we floated overhead. Sometimes they were suspended in different points in the water, like depth charges. Occasionally, you would see the shadows darting to your fly, unraveling nerves.

Schwark, our guide, like other guides, has to be a person of many talents. They must be master boatsmen, navigating both low flows with protruding rocks, and whitewater. They have to be able to read the water and locate fish and determine which bugs and their artificial imitators to tie on, an assessment that can change by the minute. They have to successfully net what may be a customer’s fish of a lifetime.

Perhaps my most admiration for Schwark was his ability to unfurl alarming tangles in my line on errant casts. Not once did he cut the line and just re-rig, as I would have done after a few minutes of consternation. He would hunch over the lines like an engineer, figuring out which way to pull one through the other, unfurling another drop line.

We floated past history and ghosts from the past. We passed places where Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and the Hole in the Wall Gang hid from the law and grazed stolen livestock.

Just downriver of the Little Hole access is a sage-covered field where sets for a town and ferry were built for the opening scene in the 1972 movie “Jeremiah Johnson” starring Robert Redford.

We hooked up with Old Moe Guide Service, one of many in Dutch John, a town whose existence is tied to recreation on the Green. You are as likely to see a drift boat in a driveway as a vehicle.

By luck, we ran into the founder, Terry Hatch, 72. An old cuss of a guy who began rowing fishing boats when he was 14 and whose dad help build the dam, Hatch explained Old Moe is not himself, but a fish.

Old Moe was a 20-pound brown trout Hatch had caught and released on a fly rod on the Green River in the early 1970s. A couple weeks later, Hatch was shown snapshot photo of the massive trout an angler from Colorado had caught and taken to a local grocery story for a picture.

Hatch was so incensed at the act that he called the angler and demanded to know how he could kill such a beautiful old fish. The angler hung up on him.

After two days of hundreds of casts, being baked by the sun and eye strain from following little foam bobbers in the glare and waves, my brother and I are surprisingly drained.

Being exhausted never felt so good.