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| Hiking in all of our gear |
This week we electro-fished the
wonderfully named Jackass Creek in Grand Targhee National Park. The sites we
were surveying had only been electro-fished once before and the notes on how to
find the sights were pretty vague. One description informed us that the
beginning of a unit was near a “large split pine”. There were around a million
large split pines on the creek. Luckily, we had some GPS coordinates.
Unluckily, the first day, we plugged in the wrong coordinates and spent around
an extra hour crashing through the woods before we realized we had hiked way too
far carrying all of our heavy gear. Oops. On the bright side, the wildlife
sightings were great! We saw a baby skunk, some snakes, a bird’s nest, and best
of all; Matt found a full set of epic moose antlers!!
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| Yellowstone Cutthroat! |
Hands
down, the stars of the show at Jackass Creek were the Yellowstone Cutthroat
Trout. These were the first YCT
we’ve caught this summer and they are stunning fish. We learned that the population
at Jackass creek is unique because it is the only pure and original YCT
population left in the Henry’s Fork Watershed. The rest of the watershed has
non-native brook or rainbow trout mixed in, or has been seeded from Yellowstone
Lake. The fish we caught were incredibly wild and very difficult to measure and
keep in the bucket. We also caught more of them than had been caught the last
time this creek was surveyed, so that is potentially very good news for the
cutthroats. It was exciting to
explore this remote part of the watershed full of bear signs and
cutthroats.
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| Matt and the Antlers |
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| Bird’s Nest |
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