This is about bugs. Big bugs. Ugly bugs. Bugs that swarm and eat whatever is in their path. These bugs have disgusting bug orgies and threaten human civilization, or at least threatened human civilization that one time.

Mormon crickets are not, strictly speaking, crickets, but that’s a little like saying that brook trout are not, strictly speaking, trout. It’s true enough, but not important. Mormon crickets are a bug, and they look like a big cricket. If you need to be precise they are a katydid, and sometimes in the spring–not necessarily every spring but some springs–they swarm. Their reproductive strategy is orgies.

The swarming males secrete a spermataphore, which is both sperm and nearly a third of a boy’s body mass. That secreted body mass is food for the girls. The spermataphore is called by entomologists–I kid you not–a nuptial gift. The females eat the nuptial gift and are both fed and fertilized. With every nuptial gift the girls have dinner with their date.

The females bury their now-fertilized eggs in the soil and march off to die. It’s a short but romantic life, but Kris wanted to know how the females got pregnant through their digestive tract? All I can say is that Many are the Wonders of Our World, Many are the Mysteries of God’s Plan, and all in all it’s probably a necessary quirk of evolution. These are big ugly girls, and the boys aren’t handsome either. Nobody’s gonna kiss ’em. They gotta take their romance as it comes.

Mormon crickets are more than two inches long. When they swarm they are everywhere you look. They can’t fly, thank goodness, because flying swarms of Mormon crickets would be a real horror, but what they can do is creep through the sage and down to the river, crawl along through the brush and the grass and the pathways, wander bankside from hither to yon, and best of all (and most relevant here) they can fall into the water.

Mormon crickets look a lot like Gulf Coast water bugs, American roaches, but even the roaches aren’t as big as the crickets. The roaches may not even be as hideous, though until now I’d have bet that every year water bugs were going to be the county grand champion of hideous. Oh my goodness Mormon crickets are ugly. Big and ugly. Hideous.

But not to trout. In the water they are to trout a DoorDash of protein, tasty and efficient for any trout big enough to swallow a three inch bug.

And this brings us to the ugly truth about fly fishing for trout: it’s not actually about casting skill, or beautiful rivers, or even stylish fishing clothes from Orvis or Simms . . . It’s first and foremost about what trout eat, and what trout eat, first and foremost, are bugs. If you can make a fly look like the bug that trout are eating, and make it float somewhat naturally, then you will like as not catch feeding trout.

Artificial flies can be pretty enough, but they mostly mimic bugs, and most bugs for most of their lives are just plain damn ugly. Of course ugliness is in the eyes of the beholder, and finding a bunch of big ugly bugs committing mass suicide by throwing themselves into a river screaming help! help! help! is to a trout a beautiful thing. It should also be a beautiful thing to every fly fisher.

That’s why I am so enamored with Mormon crickets. How tasty they are to trout! How beautiful they are to me!

We started fishing early, before the crickets really started moving, and our guide, Eli Koles with Western Rivers Flyfisher Guides, first rigged my rod with an underwater nymph below a surface foam cricket. I caught fish, mostly on the nymph, and they were good fish, biggish browns. Then around lunchtime the crickets got active. Eli parked the drift boat at the bank, and we watched the crickets march along in twos or threes or half-dozens. It made for a queasy lunch. These are some mighty ugly bugs.

After lunch Eli cut off our nymphs and in the afternoon we only fished with big foam cricket imitations. Everything was crickets. All of our fishing was on the surface.

I fished my foam cricket in softer current downriver below the boat. I don’t know what Kris was doing. I was watching my cricket, not Kris, not Eli, not the shoreline . . . it was just me and that cricket floating together down the river. Did Kris catch fish? No idea. Watching that bit of floating brown foam 30 feet below the boat was all I was good for.

And because the flies were so big we weren’t catching mediocre fish. The browns that came up for crickets were, I swear, all north of 18 inches. I caught one rainbow, and it was easily 20″. No no no no. It was easily 21″. It’s getting bigger as we speak.

If you read much about fly fishing–and only baseball can match fly fishing for the ruination of good paper–you will sooner or later read something about the Green River below the Flaming Gorge Dam, and you will read about the three river sections named, imaginatively, A, B, and C.

A is closest to the dam and is about 7 miles long. To float A, you put in close to the dam. B is about eight miles long, and is, believe it or not, immediately downriver from A. We fished B because, after I’d carefully studied the qualities of the river and considered the various alternatives, Eli told us where we were going to fish. We fished B.

C is furthest from the dam and has the fewest fish, but it’s also the least fished. It’s about 11 miles long.

My suspicion is that the A, B, and C designations don’t really have much to do with the peculiarities of the river or the fishing, but everything to do with where somebody some years ago built reasonably spaced boat ramps. The truer designations would be “the part of the river below Boat Ramp One, Two, or Three.” Unless you’re familiar with the river, then once you get out of sight of the dam you won’t know where you are anyway, and as for fishing, I’m convinced that at least when there are Mormon crickets, anywhere on the Green River is everywhere the best fishing in the world.

Eli told us the story of the Miracle of the Crickets, which was that one time that Mormon crickets threatened civilization. Ok, it wasn’t all of civilization, but it was 1848 Mormon civilization in Salt Lake Valley. Mormons came to Salt Lake in 1846. In 1848, along with their second spring’s crops, the Mormon crickets came. Having properly filled out the paper work to qualify as a Biblical plague, the Mormon crickets started eating everything in sight.

The newly-settled Mormons faced starvation. The indigenous occupants of Western Utah, the Goshute, Paiute, and Shoshone, almost certainly included roasted and dried crickets in their diet, and would have seen the cricket invasion exactly like brown trout saw the cricket invasion: a God-send of tasty morsels. To the Mormons though eating crickets was like drinking Coca-Cola, or worse. There are emergencies when drinking Coca-Cola is permissible to Mormons, but none of the Mormons seem to have considered eating the crickets.

Then the miracle happened. California gulls came out of nowhere and gorged on crickets, then regurgitated the indigestible parts and gorged some more. That’s why seagulls are the state bird of Utah.

To be honest I wouldn’t have eaten a cricket either. At least I wouldn’t have eaten a cricket outside of a hip Oaxacan restaurant.

The Green was particularly high when we floated–I think over 4,000 cfs against a normal flow of around 900. The high flow had nothing to do with rain, but was purposefully released to wash invasive smallmouth from their spawning beds. It’s a smart strategy, and Eli didn’t think that the high flow affected fishing. There were other guide boats on the river with us, and sometimes I would watch them across the river, still fishing nymphs under bobbers. What the hell were they doing? Why were they fishing tiny underwater nymphs when there were all these beautiful, giant, edible bugs on the water?

Eli said that Western River Flyfishers emphasized floating flies instead of nymphs when possible, and seeing other anglers still fishing nymphs made me really happy we’d lucked into Eli. Eli and all those beautiful, giant, edible bugs.

At day’s end when Eli rowed us across the river from the far bank to the final take-out, he told us to skate our flies across the current. It was the very last possible fishing of the day, and it was a fishing method that is guaranteed to work only when you read about somebody else doing it. This time it worked for me. My fly got slammed. I set the hook. I played the fish to the boat and then Eli released it. It was a great fish.

Do you see that photo right there? Do you know why that is the greatest fishing photo ever taken? I, of course, am the angler, but that’s not what’s important. I probably could have tucked in my shirt a bit better, and my sun buff doesn’t really match my shoes. My pants are a bit droopy. My rod is bent, but that’s not what’s important, either. What’s important is the guy standing in the water by the drift boat at the take-out. Look at that guy’s face. I have been waiting for that jealous face my entire life.

And that guy, that guy right there, had to watch. Not that I would ever gloat.

Hee hee hee.

Man, I could have kissed those beautiful bugs.

This wasn’t my first trip to Utah. When I was five, my parents spent the night in an old—and even then it was old—hotel in Salt Lake, a place I’ve searched for but which seems to be long gone. We could  see Temple Square lit at night from our hotel room window, and it was beautiful. Then the temple was probably the largest building I’d ever seen, and that was probably the first hotel I’d ever stayed in. It’s no wonder I have a thing for old hotels and their windows, and for Salt Lake.

Since they arrived in 1844, the Latter Day Saints, née Mormons, are so linked to Utah that it’s hard as a gentile not to drive around Utah thinking constantly of religion, speculating whether the pierced and tattooed 22-year old at the next table is LDS, and wondering what the heck were those pioneers thinking?

I could never be a Mormon. They don’t drink iced tea, either sweet or unsweet. They don’t drink coffee. That just wouldn’t work for me.

Driving around Utah (and northern Arizona as well) makes me wonder how any Utah or Arizona kid, LDS or gentile, could ever be anything but a geologist. It is all about the rocks, the movement of rocks, the composition of rocks, the colors of rocks. . . The region includes some of the most magnificent and dramatic geologic formations in the world.  Those mountains and canyons can rival the moon and the stars for grandeur, and for inspiring amazement can even rival homegrown tomatoes. Utah is all about the rocks.

We started from Durango, Colorado, and drove by the Four Corners Monument where we stopped to step into Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. We took a side trip to Utah’s Monument Valley in the Navajo Nation, and then fished in Arizona at Lee’s Ferry. We left Lee’s Ferry and drove west through the rest of Arizona to the southern entrance of Zion National Park at Springdale, Utah. From Springdale we drove northeast through most of Utah to the Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area. At Flaming Gorge we fished the Green River. 

How far did we drive? A fur piece, more than 1500 miles. We got our money’s worth from our rental Kia. We saw a lot of rocks. I thought about going back to school to become a geologist, because how could any old man driving across Arizona and Utah not identify with old rocks?

Some History

Before Europeans, there were Utes, from whence comes the name Utah. The Utes were also in Colorado, but Colorado was busy naming itself after the Colored Reddish River. The Utes self-designation was Núuchi-u, but the State of Núuchi-u apparently didn’t roll off the tongue, so Utah. After contact with the Spanish, the Utes became a horse culture, and warred with the Mormons and the U.S. from 1853 to 1879. There are only about 5,500 Utes left, primarily on reservations in Utah and Colorado.

New Mexico’s Kit Carson admired the Utes, but apparently disliked the Navajo, though as I recall he adopted a Navajo daughter.

Pagre, Ute, Library of Congress, 1902.

The other pre-European people in Utah were Goshutes, hunter-gatherers who ranged from Western Utah into Nevada; Southern Paiutes, hunter-gatherers who by 1900 were reduced to about 800 people; Western Shoshone, who are closely related culturally to the Paiutes, Goshutes, and Utes, and who have litigated extensive land claims against the U.S.; and the Navajo, latecomers who weren’t related to anybody except the Apache and raided everybody else (including the Spanish) for slaves.

Of the Europeans, Spanish explorers arrived first, but decided all of Utah was uninhabitable desert. The Mormons left Illinois for Mexican Utah in 1847, bringing with them in the first year polygamy and about 2,000 vanguard pioneers. After being violently driven from Missouri and Illinois, the pioneers liked uninhabitable desert because nobody would bother them. Ultimately about 70,000 LDS pioneers made the journey to Utah. About 2,173,000 of Utah’s current 3.3 million inhabitants are Latter Day Saints. That’s a smaller total percentage of the population than it used to be.

Torleif S. Knaphus, Handcart Pioneer Monument, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, 1945, unnatributed photo from Wikipedia.

Along with the rest of the Southwest, the U.S. took Utah from Mexico in 1848 after the Mexican-American War.

Joseph Smith received his revelatory golden plates on a hill in New York in 1823. Religious unorthodoxy had been part of North American culture since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, but Mormons stood out because of their relative success, their reliance on the Book of Mormon and prophetical pronouncements in addition to the orthodox Bible, the perception by the larger public that its founders engaged in more than the usual levels of religious hucksterism, the violence that drove Mormons from Missouri and Illinois (including Smith’s assassination by gentiles in 1844), their autocratic leadership structure, and plural marriage. Don’t forget plural marriage. With the LDS that’s kind of a theme.

C.C.A. Christensen, The Hill Cumorah, 1850. Joseph Smith received the golden plates from the Angel Moroni in 1823.

By the time the U.S. annexed Utah, Mormons were already there. As early as 1847, in anticipation of the U.S. takeover, church leaders had established the proposed State of Deseret, with its own provisional government. Deseret was huge, and included most of Nevada and Utah, significant parts of California and Arizona, and bits of Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and New Mexico. Deseret did not include any of New Zealand or Argentina, though those are also excellent trout fisheries.

Overlay of the boundaries of the provisional State of Deseret, Wikipedia, 2011.

After annexation there was frequent friction between Washington and Salt Lake City. Outside Utah Mormons weren’t all that popular, particularly after the church’s public avowal of polygamy in 1850. On their side, the LDS taught avoidance of outsiders. In 1857, President James Buchanan sent troops into Utah to squelch Brigham Young’s claims as territorial governor. Young responded by declaring martial law. In the midst of Mormon fear of U.S. invasion, a Mormon militia massacred a group of 120 peaceful gentiles from Arkansas passing through Utah to California. There has long been speculation that the cover up of the massacre was directed by Young. It was a particularly ugly bit of business.

As part of the Compromise of 1850, Congress created the Utah Territory, including most of what is now Nevada and Utah, with a Washington-appointed territorial governor. After the discovery of silver in Nevada, Washington separated Nevada from Utah in 1861, and granted Nevada statehood in 1864. Utah would not gain statehood until 1896, after the LDS disavowed plural marriage in 1890. Prohibition of plural marriage was written into the Utah constitution as a condition for statehood.

Overlay of the Utah Territory, 1850, Wikipedia.

A Study in Scarlet and Riders of the Purple Sage

My mother, who was born in 1917, adored Zane Grey, and except possibly for Ernest Hemingway, he was America’s most famous fly fisher and big game angler before World War II. Even today I fish a Zane Pro 8-weight made by Hardy Brothers of England. Before World War II Grey was certainly America’s most popular novelist, and Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) was his most popular novel. It was also the most popular Western novel of all time, though Owen Wister’s The Virginian is much better. Riders of the Purple Sage was filmed six times, first in 1918, and most recently in 1996. Its title gave its name to a pretty good band.

Grey was also a serial philanderer and dentist, in order of frequency.

In Riders of the Purple Sage, in Southern Utah, evil Mormon polygamists led by evil Bishop Dyer attempt to force the marriage of the beautiful Jane Withersteen–an unprotected heiress–to evil Elder Tull, who already came equipped with two other wives. The hero, the rugged stranger and former Texas Ranger Jim Lassiter (with whom Jane is in love), has a six gun and his own creed. You can guess the rest of the plot from there. It involves a good bit of galloping horses.

Meanwhile, back in England, in 1887 Arthur Conan Doyle had published the first full-length novel featuring Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet. A Study in Scarlet, is also set in part in Utah. Evil Mormon polygamists led by evil president Brigham Young attempt to force the beautiful Lucy Ferrier–an unprotected heiress–to marry either the evil Joseph Strangerson or the evil Enoch Drebber, sons of Mormon leaders. The rugged Jefferson Hope (with whom Lucy is in love), attempts to intervene. Hope and Lucy flee, but Lucy is recaptured and forced to marry Drebber. Lucy dies of heartbreak one month later.

The Bristol Observer, Lucy Ferrier and Jefferson Hope, 1890, Illustration for A Study in Scarlet.

Richard Gutschmidt, Lucy Ferrier and Jefferson Hope, 1902, Illustration for A Study in Scarlet.

For the next 20 years, Jefferson Hope pursues Drebber and Strangerson, finally catching up with them in London and murdering both. The game is afoot, Holmes is the consulting detective, and Hope conveniently dies of an aneurism the night before the commencement of his trial, because really who wants to see him punished for righteous vengeance?

Whatever the fairness of Conan Doyle’s and Grey’s depictions of the LDS (and the depictions are less than fair), these were extremely popular novels that reflected views of their times and reinforced those views. They also got something right: early Mormonism didn’t have the most enlightened views of women. Joseph Smith is thought to have had as many as 49 wives, some as young as 14. Brigham Young had 56 wives, at least one as young as 13. Of course the early Mormon marriage rules are so complicated, it’s hard to say whether they were married, sealed for eternity, sealed for life, or something else I don’t understand. In any case there’s some theocratic me-tooism going on, and it weren’t right, not even in 1850.

One does wonder whether beautiful heiresses are still a dime a dozen in Utah. As far as I know we didn’t meet any. One suspects that if there are any, they now have some tattoos and piercings, and a mountain bike.

Politics

No state is more closely identified with the Republican Party than Utah, largely because of the close identification of the LDS with the Republican Party. That wasn’t always the case. Utah has had, believe it or not, Democratic governors in relatively recent history, from 1925 to 1949, and from 1965 to 1985. It has had a Democratic U.S. Senator as recently as 1977, and from 1933 to 1941, during the Great Depression, both senators were Democratic. I’m pretty sure though that every public official in Utah is now Republican, including the dog catcher.

Before the Great Depression, the Mormon Church evidenced no particular political preference, but that changed with Mormon President Heber Grant and his First Counselor, J. Reuben Clark. Clark had been a federal civil servant and ambassador to Mexico under Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, and Clark and Grant both despised The New Deal as rampant socialism. They actively campaigned against Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt also supported the repeal of the 18th Amendment, the Prohibition Amendment, which Heber Grant could not forgive.

On Roosevelt’s death, Clark said “The Lord gave the people of the United States four elections in order to get rid of him. They failed to do so in these four elections, so He held an election of His own and cast one vote, and then took him away.” Clark and Grant really hated Roosevelt.

Los Angeles Times, Heber Grant and J. Reuben Clark, 1935.

The law school at Brigham Young University is named in honor of J. Reuben Clark.

As an alternative to the New Deal, Clark and Grant felt that the church could provide private aid to Utahns, at least to Mormon Utahns, and Grant instituted a church welfare system in 1936. It is still an important part of the church’s mission, but at least during the Great Depression it wasn’t enough. Most suffering Utahns still largely depended on socialist aid from New Deal agencies. Still, by actively campaigning against Roosevelt, Grant and Clark had set the future tone for church leadership, and subsequent leadership continued the church’s strong ties to the Republican Party.

After John F. Kennedy, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir only sang at the inaugurations of Republican Presidents.

In 2020 Utah delivered for Donald Trump big time, 58.13% to 37.65%. Joe Biden only carried three counties in Utah, Grand, Salt Lake, and Summit. Grand contains the Greenie enclave of Moab, but has fewer than 10,000 residents. Summit also tends Green with Park City, and has about 25,000 residents. Salt Lake is the most urban county in Utah, and consistent with most urban areas nationally Biden carried Salt Lake by about 59,000 votes. In the rest of Utah Biden got trounced. In Duchesne County, population 19,596, Trump received over 87% of the vote. If Duchesne County ever has a treasure hunt, it should include “Find a Democrat” as one of the treasures.

Weather

It’s hot and dry in Utah. Except when it’s cold and dry.

Utah may be consistently Republican, but there’s considerable variance among its temperatures. St. George in Southwest Utah is 120 miles from Las Vegas, Nevada. Its average July high is 102°, while the average low is 76°. In January, the average high is 53° while the low is 32°.

Compare that–really hot and reasonably cold–to Park City. In Park City January highs average 25° and lows 12°, while July averages are 71° and 52°. I’d call that really damn cold in winter and a mild Houston winter in summer. Salt Lake City slots neatly in between, with January averages of 37° and 23°, and July averages of 92° and 65°.

There is no place in Utah where every now and again the temperature won’t hit 0. That’s cold.

St. George gets average annual snowfall of .01″, and rain of 8.1″. Park City has average annual snowfall of 57.4″, and rain of 7.7″. Statewide, average rainfall is less than 15″, though there’s considerable variance from place to place. Whatever the average, there is absolutely no probability of it ever being muggy in Utah. Just think how bad that is for their skin.

We saw some rain in Utah, right yonder on the purple sage.

Geography

I’m going to be stupidly simple, and for further explanation see my description of Arizona. In Eastern Utah there is the Colorado Plateau , drained by the Green, Colorado, and San Juan Rivers, and in western Utah there’s the Basin and Range. The Rocky Mountains run through the center. There’s a lot of different stuff going on, and it’s all magnificent. There’s the Great Salt Lake Desert in the northwest, including the Bonneville Salt Flats where I could have really opened up our rented Kia. There’s the Rocky Mountain Wasatch Range and the Uinta Mountains. There are six national parks, eight national wilderness areas, eight national monuments, six national recreation areas, and the Navajo Nation’s Monument Valley. There are some great state parks. It is a place of unbelievable natural beauty and geologic magnificence.

We drove through Utah with an open copy of The Roadside Geology of Utah, and learned that the major population corridor, up I-15 along the Wasatch Front, from Provo through Orem and Salt Lake to Ogden, is on track for a major geologic upheaval. It could happen at any time. I wouldn’t move there if I were you, but it’s probably ok to visit.

Google Maps.

Where We Planned to Fish

We planned to fish in the far northeast corner of Utah on the Green River, in the Flaming Gorge Recreation area. It’s hard to get to, though Kris and I had been there with our kids once before, almost 30 years ago. I have no idea why we were there unless I wanted to scout the Green River for fishing. I know we were driving from Yellowstone to Salt Lake City, but that’s not a direct route. It doesn’t matter. It was beautiful then and it’s beautiful now.