Utah is one of those states we keep coming back to visit. Its public lands are so vast and beautiful with hiking, biking, off roading, sightseeing and yes, fishing!
The Provo River was our first TU Top 100 stop in Utah. We’d fished the Provo before several times, but this time, as a part of our “official” Ramble, we found it running super fast and off color. When we called our ‘go to’ fly shop in Heber City, Fish Heads Fly Shop, they actually suggested a different river for a guide trip and recommended how we might fish the Provo in the condition it was in. Their recommendations for the Provo were to find small eddies and pockets of water where fish could hide out of the raging waters. We took their advice and fished the middle section near town and had not great, but OK success. We knew what the river could produce from our earlier visits here, so we took their recommendation for a guide trip and headed elsewhere.
Heading west on US 40 out of Heber City brought us to the Strawberry River. The section we fished, a tailwater just like the Provo, was running much clearer and manageable for wading than what we’d seen on the Provo. We found some really nice runs with deeper water and landed some beautiful browns as you can see in the highlight video above. I’m confident when we return to the area, we’ll be hitting the Strawberry again.
Our final stop in Utah was to fish the highly touted Green River near Flaming Gorge. This area is stunningly beautiful with deep canyon walls above the dam and a TU Top 100 trout stream below. We put in for our “Flaming Green” trip with Ryan Dangerfield, guide, from the Flaming Gorge Resort. Ryan had decided we would take the “AB” float which means, while we floated the entire A&B sections, we only fished the second half of “A” and the first half of “B”. It was great seeing the scenery as we “scenic” floated the first half, but then it was game on. Lucky for us, we’d hit the Green in the middle of a famous hatch. The bug you see between my fingers in the video is a Yellow Sallie. They were on the water and being gorged on by beautiful, hefty trout all day. It isn’t often that you can tie one fly pattern on at the beginning of a day, and fish it all day. In fact, we fished it all three days we spent on the Green…. just a Yellow Sallie dry fly that looked remarkably like the one I was holding in the video…. yellow body with that hint of red on the end. Money!
We’d never fished the Green here before and after our experience, we’re planning on coming back regularly. Its reputation as a world class fishery was certainly enhanced for us by our time spent fishing it.
We hope you enjoy our Life Elevated video of fishing and other highlights from our time in the Beehive State.