Picabo Angler

Silver Creek is spring water rising from the ground across the south valley, and the outfitter’s own page for it describes dainty mayflies as the predominant insects, hatching through spring, summer and fall on a schedule regular enough that anglers can set their watch to the timing of hatches and rising fish. Brown and rainbow trout are the quarry, some of which push to thirty inches. Both wading and float-tube fishing are used. Party sizes are kept deliberately small: no more than two guests per guide on this water, with an exception only for highly experienced anglers, and a hard maximum of two in the float-tube section regardless of ability. Trips run as full days of up to eight hours at $695 for two, four-hour half days at $575, and a three-hour summer evening outing at $495.

Picabo Angler treats the Big Lost as two fisheries and publishes a page for each. The lower river is the cottonwood-lined tailwater below Mackay Reservoir, where access is patchy because of private ground; it is a wade fishery, nymphing is the norm, and the shop calls it one of the best places anywhere to sight nymph to big trout, with rainbows and brook trout growing large on cold, nutrient-rich water. Published hatches there are midge, crane fly, pale morning dun, trico and baetis with spinner falls, and it is sold as a full day only because of the drive and the road in. The upper river is the high-desert freestone watershed above the reservoir, true backcountry water fished with large attractors and bushy dries, nymphs worked through boulder-strewn runs and streamers tucked under overhanging limbs; seven species are available up there and the shop promotes a Lost River Slam, all seven in a single day, over fish that generally run eight to twenty inches. The upper river goes out as a three-quarter or full day.