I-80 Interlude

After all these years, I finally get to hotspot. Anyone who has ever suffered through the four-hundred-mile godforsaken slog from Casper, Wyoming, to Echo, Utah, on I-80 knows it to be one of the most desolate drives in America. If you’re not being run off the freeway by stimulant-powered semi-drivers, it’s only because snowfall or 60-mph crosswinds have forced them to commandeer all the rest areas. 

Two decades of road-tripping between Colorado and Oregon have given me a reluctant familiarity with this stretch of torturous asphalt, which—if it’s open at all—takes at least six hours to cover but can just as easily take ten. It’s an arduous task, even with a good Crime Junkie podcast. But all that changed in early April of last year, at exit 41, just north of Lyman, Wyoming. A heroic discovery: fishing access, to good water on the Blacks Fork River, at an I-80 rest area.

In addition to nearly half the state of Wyoming being federal public land, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department (WGFD) operates two programs that provide public access to fishing on private land. The first includes more than fifty Walk-In Fishing Areas (WIFAs), where WGFD has negotiated short-term easement agreements, typically between one to five years. (Generally speaking, the longer the lease, the more money the landowner makes.) WIFAs are part of the larger WGFD “Access Yes” project, which also includes Walk-in Hunting. 

The second program creates Public Access Areas (PAAs), which exist either on state-owned lands managed by WGFD, or on permanent or long-term easements. Lyman’s I-80 rest-stop PAA sits on state-owned land, and WGFD’s website lists more than two hundred combined WIFAs and PAAs throughout Wyoming. The glorious Lyman rest-area fishery was not listed, but perhaps they figure: If you can’t find the Blacks Fork six-hundred-feet from an I-80 rest stop, then you don’t deserve to fish it. 

The access gate to the river was mostly hidden behind tall grass, but in less than thirty minutes of actual fishing, I landed a small brown and a decent rainbow. No one else was fishing. After my lab, Lily, got in her requisite swim, we were back on the road, with just over an hour of I-80 left to endure. 

Blacks Fork Brown

I felt so rejuvenated! How hadn’t I ever noticed this before? It was inconceivable to me that, over the years, I had not hit every dismal, windswept rest area along this stretch of I-80. Had I only stopped at night, or had I always parked between semis or Sprinter vans that blocked my view of the “Fishing” sign? Maybe the sign itself was new? It’s a short walk to the river from the rest area, but you can’t see the water from the parking lot, so, without the sign, it’s unlikely any random traveler would just grab a rod and march off through the sagebrush.

Those unfamiliar with Wyoming may be wondering how someone could feel comfortable hotspotting such a small stretch of a distinguished river. It’s not like the Blacks Fork is unknown, after all; it’s a 175-mile-long trib to Utah’s Green, one of the most famous tailwaters in America. But Lyman sits forty miles east of Evanston and fifty miles west of Green River—big towns by Wyoming standards at roughly 12,000 residents each. No one will be pissed that I gave up their rest-area honey hole: this is a public service to I-80 road-trippers, truckers included.

Besides, there’s another moral to this story beyond rest-area awareness. With public access to our public lands being, shall we say, less certain than it once was, it’s worth reminding folks how much good water in the West is accessible via these private-land leases run by state agencies. In 2023, Wyoming’s Access Yes program provided additional fishing opportunities on nearly one hundred miles of streams and more than four thousand acres of lakes. 

I called and spoke with Allen Deru, who recently became the WGFD’s Access Yes Coordinator for the Green River Region. He described just a few of the many nearby access points in the area he covers, including one farther south on the Blacks Fork, several on the Green, one on the Bear River just north of Evanston, and a couple south of I-80, in Carbon County, along the Little Snake River.

“A lot of these spots are really nice places to fish,” Deru said, “they just don’t get the use they would in other states because there’s so much public land in Wyoming. They get fished by the few folks that know about them, but they all should probably be used a bit more.”

Deru’s sentiment is not uncommon among western state-wildlife agencies. Colorado’s Public Access Program now has more than a million acres, more than tripling in the past five years. And Utah’s Walk-in Access program offers more than fifty miles of privately owned streams. Yet both states struggle to attract anglers away from more crowded A-list waters.

“In my region, we have access areas all the way from Rawlins [two-and-a-half hours east of Lyman], up to Star Valley [two-and-a-half hours north]. They are just little stretches of stream that don’t get fished much. But there are lot of quality opportunities on those waters.” 

Indeed there are—even when they are accessed behind the “Pet Area” of a freeway rest stop.