2 Days in Paradise

At the crack ass of dawn i loaded up my jeep and set out for driggs, idaho where a friend of mine (andy) is a guide on the s.f. snake and some other rivers/creeks. i arrived at his place at around 10am, he loaded up his gear and we headed for a sweet little stream called bitch creek. bitch creek is loaded with yellowstone and some snake river fine spotted cutts, some of which exceed the 20" mark. unfortunately we did not get into any of the really big tanks but managed to land some nice 14-15 inch fish. now the decent down to the creek was long and steep but the climb back up was flat out miserable, at least for a person as out of shape as myself. it killed me. we decided to go to alocal bar & grill and grab some dinner and a beer and then head over to the lodge that he works for and see what was happening on the teton river. good news for us, there were no guides on the teton, so we had it mostly to ourselves. the windy had really picked up which was not ideal for fishing. the teton in this area is like a spring creek, big and flat. we took on of the lodge boats and cruised upriver about a mile or so and since it was so windy we pulled into a little feeder creek and decided to wait and see if the wind would subside. 2 beers later and the wind was dying and we started to see fish rising. by this time it was getting late and we had to have the boat back to the lodge by dark so it only left us roughly an hour andhalf to fish. we slowly worked our way down the left bank and soon after i was into my first teton fish. it was a nice yellowstone cutt. we just rigged up one rod and switched up between fishing and steering the boat so andy took the rod and landed a big fat rainbow. we each lost one other fish. itwas almost dark so we headed back for the lodge. the plan for the next morning was to get some breakfast around 9, pick up a friend of andy's, who also is one the guides and is really good with sticks and drive to palisades dam on the south fork of the snake and float to the first pullout, which was a 6 mile float. since i have never rowed a drift boat i got to fish the entire time while andy and josh switched back and forth about every 3 fish. the weather was perfect, the fish were pretty cooperative and the beer was going down to damn good. andy took the biggest that day that was measured i believe at 21", nice fat rainbow. josh and i took a few nice fish as well. unfortunately for me i hooked what would've been my biggest of theday about 50 yards short of the take out and ended up losing him just below the take out. it was a great 2 days of fishing some killer water.