At first Jim Sorensen was just messing around trying to capture the rise rings of one surface-feeding trout.

Then he got hooked. 

The setting of his obsession? A spring-fed slough on the west bank of the Snake River, right in the Wilson resident’s backyard. Near the outflow, cutthroat tend to school up. When the hatch picks up some late afternoons, the camera-wielding accountant heads for the cover of a nearby willow tree. 

“I just sit there,” Sorensen said. “If you fish, you know there’s that anticipation when you put that cast out. Whether the fish rises or not, there’s still that moment of anticipation. It’s kind of the same thing.”

Distorted by an underwater upheaval of its own making, a frog-faced Snake River cutthroat trout rises to an easy meal in Wilson resident Jim Sorensen’s backyard trout pond. (Jim Sorensen)

Much like fishing for high-country cutthroat, photography is not a highly technical endeavor. 

“Turn it on at high shutter speed,” Sorensen, “and start firing away at 400 millimeters.” 

Many shots come in blurry and get deleted on the scene. Other times, everything lines up. 

“It’s pretty interesting how the water moves across the trout,” Sorensen said. “And the laminar flows. Their tails will create this flow of water behind them.” 

Sorensen’s summer photography project is not set in some manicured, temperature-controlled trout pond. Tied into the Fish Creek watershed, it’s a springfed system with no surface inflow that seems to support self-sustaining populations of native Snake River cutthroat, brook trout and mountain whitefish, he said.

Aqueous turbulence abounds in the aftermath of a cutthroat trout’s insect snack in a backyard pond north of Wilson. (Jim Sorensen)

Toothy terrestrial critters and birds of prey are known to take advantage.  While Sorensen was on the phone describing his project to WyoFile, a weasel scampered over a backyard bridge, disrupting his focus. He’s also documented fish-eating otters and great blue herons through his lens. And once, via a remote trail camera, he captured footage of a much less likely trout hunter. 

“One night it picked up a great horned owl that caught a brook trout,” Sorensen recalled. “In one scene you can see it flopping across the shallows with the fish, then it brought it up and sat underneath the camera. It was a decent-sized brookie.”

Mike Koshmrl reports on Wyoming's wildlife and natural resources. Prior to joining WyoFile, he spent nearly a decade covering the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s wild places and creatures for the Jackson...

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  1. Nice article. In the divisive times we live in we could use more stories like this.

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  2. Reply