The Regulation of Wyoming’s Guides

Photo: Alex Stulce
A few years ago, the Wyoming legislature passed a law requiring all nonresident big-game hunters to have a licensed guide or resident hunting companion when hunting federally designated wilderness areas. All hunting guides in Wyoming are licensed through outfitters, who are licensed by the Wyoming Board of Outfitters and Professional Guides.
If you look for any laws about fishing guides, however, you’ll come up empty. That’s not terribly surprising, since Wyoming is staunchly anti-regulation. But hunting is big business, and regulated as such. Wyoming’s world-class fishing is big business, too, even if it doesn’t fill the Game & Fish’s coffers the way nonresident hunting tags do.
This is all likely to change, as a new law is being pushed that would give the Wyoming Game & Fish Department the ability to regulate guides.
House Bill 5 would give the Game & Fish “the authority to regulate commercially guided fishing. That could include such measures as registering guides’ drift boats or restricting the number of boats allowed on a stretch of river at certain times,” according to Cowboy State Daily.
Some fly-fishing guides testified in favor of the bill. Colby Spencer, of Pinedale, told the Wyoming House Travel, Recreation, Wildlife, and Cultural Resources Committee that “in the last four years, there have been an unbelievable amount of people on our rivers in Sublette County and around the state,” per Cowboy State Daily.
Guides, anglers, and biologists have also reported significant impacts on fish in rivers, such as in the Gray Reef and Miracle Mile sections of the North Platte.
Chris Hayes, a guide on the Green River, is quoted in Cowboy State Daily as saying he’s worried that if the trend of no regulation continues, clients will be left “catching a handful of mutilated, run-of-the-mill-sized-fish.”
Wyoming Game & Fish recently compiled a report about hooking injuries on the North Platte, and the impact too much fishing pressure is having on that storied river. That report notes that 21.4% of trout caught in the Miracle Mile had a “noticeable injury” due to being caught and released multiple times.
It’s not only for the fish’s sake that fishing guides need to be regulated. An outfitter can currently set up shop and offer trips without insurance, or requiring its guides to have first-aid training.
The National Forest Service requires insurance and first-aid certifications for guiding on its land, and it does limit guide trips. But many of Wyoming’s famous rivers flow through state land, which has created this current free-for-all.
I’ll admit this is anecdotal, but I live within an hour of two great tailwaters. One flows mostly through National Forest land, and receives a fair amount of pressure from commercial and private boats. On the whole, the fish are healthy, and noted for their size. It’s crowded, but not the way Yellowstone or the Henry’s Fork can be. There’s still elbow room, especially if you walk a half-mile from the road.
The other tailwater flows mostly through state land, and in the three years since I’ve lived in this part of Wyoming, I’ve watched the boat traffic at least double. Three new fly shops have sprung up in the closest town, and anyone with a boat is calling themselves a “guide.”
All that pressure has turned a once-peaceful river into a mob scene, especially in spring and early fall. I haven’t noticed a decline in fish size or abundance yet, and I’m not sure if that’ll happen, since this river gets stocked and also receives a fair amount of natural reproduction. Just last June, I counted over thirty boat trailers at one launch, on a river that’s not more than 50 feet wide. Boats were stacked three or four deep in the best runs. It looked like the Madison River.
Now, I’m not complaining about people fishing, or about guides getting out and earning their money. I used to run my own outfitter. But as most anglers can attest, there needs to be a balance in all things, and too many people fishing in one spot can quickly overwhelm a resource.
Or, as Thomas Shanor, an attorney and former fishing guide from Casper, Wyoming, is quoted in Cowboy State Daily as saying, “unfettered use of a public resource doesn’t work. It doesn’t work with oil and gas, it doesn’t work with agriculture, logging, mining, hunting, and we can’t ask it to work with fishing.”
Limits on big-game hunting guides and harvest have long been supported by conservationists, because we recognize the need to balance natural predation and loss with our desire to harvest game meat. As a whole, the North American style of game management is a resounding success, and it’s thanks to hunters being willing to accept levels of regulation.
Why shouldn’t the same apply to fishing? Especially when trout fisheries are arguably more sensitive to habitat degradation than big-game species are?
I’m no fan of additional regulation and burden from the government, but in this case, I think the regulation of Wyoming fishing guides will benefit everyone in the long run. Montana and Idaho regulate their guides, and while their fisheries are more crowded than Wyoming’s, I don’t think it’s fair to call any of them worse-off than the great rivers we have here in Wyoming.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments.