If you haven’t completed a Cutt-Slam yet, now’s the time to get it done. The Cutt-Slam is like other grand slams in the hunting and fishing world. It requires you to get one of each of four different subspecies of a certain type of animal.
In this case, the four subspecies are Wyoming’s native cutthroat trout.
In our state, we have Bonneville, Colorado River, Snake River and Yellowstone cutthroat trout.
The trick to it is that you have to catch them in their native waters. Generally speaking, you can find Yellowstones in most of the northern half of the state. Snake River cutthroats live in and around the Snake River on the northern part of the west side of Wyoming. Bear Rivers are also found around their namesake on the southern end of a narrow strip on the western border. And Bonnevilles hang out on the southern part of the drainages west of the Continental Divide.
You can complete a Cutt-Slam in a summer, but doing it in a day can be a bit of a whirlwind. And you have to be a better angler than I am to accomplish it in one shot. But Al Langston and Chris Madson have done it. I don’t know if they’re the only two. All I know is that it is possible.
But as I said, you have to be a better fisherman than I am. Most of the time, when I go fishing, the only thing I catch is my left earlobe.
Neither Langston nor Madson are that pathetic. In fact, they’re pretty good. I might even go so far as to say they’re trout whisperers. These guys could catch a lunker in a mudpuddle in the supermarket parking lot.
You don’t have to be a trout whisperer to complete a Cutt-Slam. And you don’t have to do it in a day, or even in a summer. There’s no time limit for it.
The only requirements are that you catch the fish, take a picture of it with recognizable bits of the scenery in the frame, label the pictures, and send them to the Game and Fish. You don’t have to have the fish mounted. You don’t even have to keep ‘em. You can catch and release, if you want to.
Get going on your Cutt-Slam. You’ll get a nice, frameable certificate and a bunch of memories as a reward.
