An unusually warm and windy winter means some ice fishing derbies in the southwest corner of the state are a no-go this year.
The Wyoming Game and Fish Department recently shared news of the cancellation of the Burbot Bash at Flaming Gorge Reservoir, the Sulphur Creek Fishing Derby at Sulphur Creek Reservoir and the Kemmerer Lions Club Fishing Derby at Viva Naughton Reservoir.
The weekend-long Burbot Bash started back in 2011 and draws an average of 700 anglers to the area from Wyoming, Utah and neighboring states. The bash started as an effort to keep the gorge’s invasive burbot population in check.
“ Burbot are very ugly, eel-looking fish. A lot of people call them poor man's lobster,” said Jordynn Hewitt, the tourism manager for Daggett County. “They're terrible for our ecosystem because they eat smaller eggs and fish.”
Burbot are native to some lakes in Wyoming, but not the Flaming Gorge. They’re primarily nocturnal, so bash-goers hang out on the ice at night and cast their lines to reel in the slippery critters. Hewitt said that the cancellation was a “very hard” decision to make, but the lack of consistent ice on the gorge was difficult to ignore.
“ It’s just patchy. You could hit a piece of ice and then open water, and it's not staying as well,” she said. “It's very windy, so where there is ice building, it's just getting blown off.”
The event often draws a lot of folks who’ve never fished for burbot or been to the Flaming Gorge Reservoir. And while people can still fish for burbot from a boat on the open water, doing that at a scale in the hundreds didn’t make the most sense.
”We just saw a boat fishing at night with that capacity of people to be a potential safety hazard,” said Hewitt. “We really had everyone's safety in mind.”
The bash usually brings a spike of economic activity to the surrounding businesses in the winter, which tends to be a slower season overall.
Anglers also make a dent on the burbot population. According to Hewitt, last year’s competition reeled in over 4,600 of the problematic fish.
John Walrath is the regional fisheries supervisor at the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s Green River office and oversees all fisheries activities in the southwest corner of the state. Burbot were illegally introduced to the Green River drainage a few decades ago.
“ They're a very effective predator,” said Walrath. “There were two big impacts that were really observed by anglers just shortly after they became established in the reservoir. That was the disappearance of crayfish and juvenile smallmouth bass.”
The Flaming Gorge had a reputation as a quality smallmouth bass fishery, boasting home to the state’s record catch in 2003. But populations of smallmouth bass have declined there since burbot was detected. Crayfish are critical forage for the bass species and have also been on the decline.
Walrath said this is only the second time the get-together has been cancelled. From his perspective, the Burbot Bash is a big opportunity to educate the public about the ecological impacts of spreading a species from one body to another, where it wasn’t previously found.
“ Burbot are a good example of what we try to avoid as managers and it's created a lot of work for us,” he said. “It's created a situation where the sport fisheries that a lot of anglers go out and target, they've been negatively impacted.”
Game and Fish has also embraced other regulation changes to help manage the burbot-induced population imbalance. According to Walrath, that includes listing burbot as a non-game species, making it illegal to release the fish back into the water alive, allowing the use of light while fishing, and making it so that anglers on Flaming Gorge can use up to six lines at a time to catch burbot.
Wyoming Game and Fish also recently launched a new program focused on the harvest of lake trout less than 25 inches, which is being put on by the Flaming Gorge Chamber of Commerce. The Lake Trout Angler Harvest Program runs until April 30 and aims to remove more of the smaller lake trout to support populations of bigger lake trout and other fish, like kokanee salmon and rainbow trout.
When it comes to ice in southwestern Wyoming, Walrath said conditions are “way behind” in comparison to a typical winter, with only sparse coverage in some spots and much thinner depths than usual at higher elevation spots like Big Sandy and Viva Naughton Reservoir.
At Flaming Gorge, that discrepancy is on full display.
“Some of that ice was melted and froze again and melted and froze again over the last couple of weeks, so that makes it really variable,” he said. “It might look like it's thick and you might be on a thicker piece, but a few feet away it might be really thin.”
Walrath urged anglers to use extreme caution when venturing out onto that type of ice. The fisheries supervisor advocated for going ice fishing with a buddy, as well as telling someone where you’re going and when you’re coming back, and recommended wearing a float coat or life jacket, checking thickness as you go and sticking to known ice at night.
The Burbot Bash is back on the books for 2027, and Jordynn Hewitt with Daggett County Tourism hopes people will pencil it into their calendars.
“Give us another chance next year. Hopefully Mother Nature will cooperate,” she said.
The first annual “Freeze the Gorge” polar plunge will also take place at Flaming Gorge on March 14.
