Casper is the closest town to the famed Grey Reef section of the North Platte river, about a half hour drive from town. The Grey Reef starts at the dam below Alcova reservoir and flows north towards and through Casper. The Grey Reef section is a half hour south of town just downstream from Pathfinder reservoir and as mentioned in the Miracle Mile blog post.
After leaving Lander I needed some quality time on the water and with some big trout. I arrived at my camping spot right below the Alcova reservoir dam. This was a good place from which to launch my raft “Chase” and float as far as I wanted. The campground was just dry camping, meaning no hookups. Marge did pretty well with the solar panels and battery bank. I don’t think I had to use the generator at all. Yay.
The fishing would be terrestrials (grass hoppers & crickets), mayflies and typical nymphing rigs. After arranging for shuttles (guy who moves my truck as I float) on my first morning, I set off on my adventure. The fishing started off pretty spotty, with areas that I would get pounded, and other areas yielding no takes with great drifts. In one short stretch of riffles my grasshopper was hit 3 times by 3 great fish, of which I caught the last one. But it was fun, Boom, Boom, Boom. Some other areas were soft water and you could see the fish gorging on mayflies. Running an Adams or Purple Haze over top of them usually led to a hookup. Of course I tried pulling streamers for big boys but rarely had any success with that technique.
The river was generally wide, slow and calm. The floats themselves were kinda boring, and the long stretches of no fish made me question the greatness of this area. But the good areas, wildlife and average size of fish made up for it. One of the really cool things about this section of river was all the antelope on the side of the river. They weren’t too spooked by me or my blasting music from my bluetooth speaker.
Like a few rivers I have been on, this one is in the plains and in the afternoon the wind can really pick up. And, like those other rivers, for some reason the wind really likes to blow up river. This of course makes it really difficult to fish and yet more difficult to row the boat downstream. I often found myself rowing hard, battling the wind and actually not moving downriver at all. Ughhh I just look at those moments as a free workout. Yes, Im buff now.
Ugh, I cant stand my own voice…
The town of Casper was actually pretty cool. Much bigger than I expected. I enjoyed a few good dinners and met some cool people. I just missed a pretty cool music festival on the top of one of their local mountains. They have some cool restaurants and stores in their cute downtown.
I thought this one looked like the garage from the cartoon movie Cars.
Thanks Casper! I will be back fer sher.
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