Words and Images by Tim Patterson

July 2007

Jon’s car is a blue Jeep Grand Cherokee with 139,200 miles on the odometer. The PERFORM SERVICE light on the instrument panel is blinking, but it always blinks. The back of the car is crammed full of gear – tents and stoves and packs, hammocks and fly-rods, stray pieces of tippet, a scuffed Chouinard Equipment ski pole from the 1970s, boxes of Microbrew, bear-spray, Gazetteers for Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, a cowboy hat…

“Where should we go?” asks Jon.

“I don’t know. When do you have to be back?”

“Not for a week or so.”

“Let’s drive the Chief Joseph Highway and see what happens.”

…..

Possibilities rise and coalesce as the highway climbs into the high-country of Northern Wyoming. Jon speaks:

“We need a focus for this trip, something to aim for. I’ve heard about a kind of trout…”

“Golden trout only live in remote high-altitude lakes with pure cold water, all the way up above tree-line in the Sierra Nevada and in the Wind River range here in Wyoming. I’ve always wanted to catch one.”

“I’ve never been to the Winds,” I say. “I’ve always wanted to go.”

We park alongside a creek and look at the map. The high peaks are only a few hours away.

The quest is on.

……

Riverton, Wyoming is a strip of big-box stores and car dealerships that squat square and neon on the darkened plain. I walk the sterile aisles of a Safeway supermarket, past couples in gray sweatpants filling shopping carts with frozen pizza and Diet Coke. Everyone looks so tired.

There are photos of Riverton troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan on the white tile wall behind the register. My eyes are drawn to a young marine wearing a navy blue beret that falls over his eyes, so that all you can see in the picture is the tip of his nose and his jutting chin and an American flag.

The cashier is a pasty-faced woman with glasses and mousy hair. She swipes Jon’s credit card and asks him to make an electronic signature with a special pen. I’ve never seen this before, and so I say, “Hey, that’s kind of cool.”

The cashier thinks I’m being sarcastic: “We’re not that backwards,” she says.

“I didn’t think you were,” I tell her, flustered, and then wonder if that’s really true.

……

Our path will cross the Wind River Indian Reservation. A dead landscape at dusk, trailers in dusty yards scattered with skeleton trees and the clutter of rural American poverty: hulks of rusted-out pick-up trucks and school buses, red and yellow plastic children’s toys, chain-link fences and ATVs. Chemical refinery lights flare, illuminating twisted pipes and tubes of smoking steel.  Read More...