Casting Wyoming kiddos out of the classroom

WASHAKIE RESERVOIR—Eliah Duren’s fingers pinched a clear plastic cup. 

Rainbow trout fry writhed inside. 

The classmate critiques started coming. Too many fish. Too little water. They’d been confined for too long. Duren’s fellow seventh graders urged him to complete the release. A reservoir awaited a few dozen yards away. 

“That’s a Travis Scott concert right there,” Eli Washakie said of the crowded cup.

Another youngster was more blunt: “I think they’re gonna die soon.” 

Duren held his ground. 

“They’re part of my family now,” he joked. “I can’t just let them go.” 

The calls to free the fry persisted. Moments later, the diminutive salmonids swam off. 

The middle school banter on the banks of Washakie Reservoir was set in motion by Trout Unlimited’s Trout-in-the-classroom program. The swarms of fry that swam off this spring morning spent their earliest days of life in seven tanks distributed around the Wind River Indian Reservation. 

“We have all five reservation schools represented here,” said Jeremy Molt, Shoshone and Arapaho Fish and Game’s youth coordinator. “This is one of the only programs where you’ll see all the reservation schools coming together — usually, they don’t do anything like this.”

Rearing trout in classroom tanks for their eventual release is the bait that gets kids hooked on lesson plans about watersheds and fisheries, Trout Unlimited’s Cory Toye said. Mike Mazur, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fish biologist, commended the effort. 

“They’re trying to reconnect the kids back to natural resources: Get them outside, exposed to something other than a screen,” he said. “Especially for tribal people, the connection to the natural world is really important.”

On May 7, the middle and high school students, usually cooped up in classrooms, relished the chance to get outside.

Eli Washakie hiked up the way and found himself a mule deer antler. 

St. Stephen’s seventh grader Jaednrainc’h Aiirn turned her attention to rock collecting. 

Cousins Al-Jay Spoonhunter and Chloe Whiteplume hung out lakeside. Although two grades apart, they were united by the field trip and messed around with fishing rods to bide the time. 

Whiteplume, a ninth grader, worked on her fly casting, which she picked up from her science teacher, Mike Duffy. Spoonhunter flung a lure from a spinning rod. No trout took either’s bait, but the cousins cast and cast and then cast some more, keeping each other company.