Foam hopper flies – do you fish em?

[Zach Matthews]

Mike, you are officially killing me since I will not make it to the Park this year.

[Zach Matthews]

This is what I am talking about:

http://cgi.ebay.com/COLORED-ORTHODONTIC-Elastic-Latex-BANDS-3-16-/370276807238?cmd=ViewItem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item563637b246

Double them over to make them tighter.

Anyone doing any foam burning to smooth it out?

Or hit up your dog groomer:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=200388861267

Zach

[Mike Cline]

Mike, you are officially killing me since I will not make it to the Park this year.  I love Yellowstone; love everything about it — the history, the fishing, the wildlife, and the element of risk.  

Zach

Zach, if you love the history, you might like this story I told a somewhat adversarial editor friend of mine on Wikipedia the other day.  We were bickering about a Yellowstone related subject so I decided to share my experience with him.  It is a great place.

Original Research of the 1st Order

Unfortunately interactions between Wikipedia editors can sometimes seem impersonal. We don’t often remember that other editors see the world through their eyes, not our own. To that end Gavin, I wanted to share with you what I did this fine Sunday morning. I went fishing, leaving the house early at 4AM. My destination was the Gardner River just inside the northern boundary of Yellowstone National Park. The fishing was good, but the experience was even better. As I have done many times before, I traversed the Gardner Bench—a triangular and xeric landscape bounded on the NW by the Gardner River, the NE by the Yellowstone River and the south by the gentle slopes of Mount Everts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ConfluenceGardnerYellowstoneRiver.jpg
The confluence of the Gardner and Yellowstone Rivers, from the Bench, Sunday July 11th, 2010

My destination was the south side of confluence of these two rivers, a location etched in the history of Yellowstone, but a place that bears no mark of what occurred there on September 13th, 1869. Three men with nothing more than a few weeks supplies, some pack horses and blankets crossed the confluence and made their way across the Gardner Bench into Rescue Creek. The Cook–Folsom–Peterson Expedition had entered what would become Yellowstone National Park in but a few short years. As they crossed the Gardner River and looked south into Wonderland (a name that would eventually glorify the park in its early years), Cook, Folsom and Peterson were gazing into Terra incognita. As they left the river, if they looked back north they would have seen a skyline dominated by Electric Peak and Sepulcher Mountain, mountains that were unnamed and unexplored as they traversed the Gardner Bench. Mount Everts another unnamed and unexplored mountain would guide their right flank whilst the Black Canyon the Yellowstone dominated their left. They were unknowingly pathfinders for the more comprehensive Washburn expedition the following year, a group of 18 men who also crossed the Gardner Bench into Wonderland. It was as if Gardners Bench was Alice’s rabbit hole into Wonderland. In 1871, the Hayden expedition chose a better route into the interior of Wonderland and the Gardner Bench became just another landscape. The Army built a small firing range on the bench in the 1890s and while its remnants can be found tucked alongside a small hill the bench is a wild place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SouthAcrossGardnerBenchYNP.jpg
Dawn on the Gardner Bench looking south into Wonderland, July 11, 2010

The Gardner Bench today has not changed much in 140 years. There are only a few games trails that traverse it. There are no signs, no markers, no memorial to the men who traversed it into Wonderland 140 years ago. It is, as the crow flies, but a half mile from the highway that brings millions of people to Yellowstone every year, but very, very few people ever traverse the Gardner Bench. Anglers have trails along the rivers and hikers take the Rescue Creek trail at the base of Mount Everts to walk into remote regions of the park, but there is little need to traverse the Gardner Bench. When I do it, as I did this morning, I do it at dawn. I do it because when I gaze south across the Gardner Bench into Wonderland, I am seeing the same thing Cook, Folsom and Peterson saw 140 years ago. It is not terra incognita today, but at dawn crossing the bench takes me back 140 years.

I thought I’d like to share this with you.–

[Author]

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