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Charlie Raper

Page history last edited by Judi Myers 13 years, 1 month ago

Charlie Raper was born in Florence, CO on Jan 1, 1938, to Myrtle and Chuck Raper.  He has one sister, Charlene.  When he was in 2nd or 3rd grade Charlie’s dad took his family on a pack trip with Mary Faler out of Surveyor Park (now White Pine Ski Area).   Charlie said, “That was where I first got into the mountains.  I’ve been in the mountains every since.”  When Charlie was in the 4th grade, the family moved to Pinedale and Charlie got a job as Mary’s ‘Chore Boy’.  He said,  “They’d just built a lodge, but Mary had me out in a camper by myself.  I heard noises, something sniffing around.  I thought a bear was gonna get me.  I was frightened to death.  Turns out it was a friend’s dog.  They’d arrived in the middle of the night & that dog was used to staying in the camper.  After that she let me stay in the lodge.  Mary had an operation and the doctor said she couldn’t drive.  She had an old stick shift Chevy and she had to go to town for supplies, so she wedged me in between herself and the door and told me when to push the brake and the clutch.  She mashed me into the door.”

 

When Charlie graduated from Pinedale High School in 1957 his dad had a timber operation on Halfmoon Mountain.  Charlie worked for him.  He said, “I about died!  I decided there had to be something else.”  There was.  He got a temporary summer job as a tractor & dump truck driver for the Game & Fish.  One day in the fall, Jack Conley was there trying to get the horses into the corral to pull shoes off.  Charlie went over to help and began pulling shoes off the horses.  Jack said, “You’re hired”.  By February Charlie’s job was permanent & Jack was his boss for 27 years.  Charlie said, “You didn’t have to have a college education when I got on.  So, even when I was in charge of other people I didn’t get paid like nowadays.  One of my first jobs was on a Soda Lake in the Gros Ventre.  They had valuable Cutthroats in there.  They put in a compressor to bring up warm water & keep the ice off.  It was 7 miles every day into the lake.  I had a ‘Tucker Kitty’ – it’s like a snowcat – and I’d usually break down & have to snowshoe part of the way.  I had to start a fire in the canvas shed to get the air compressor going.  I let it pump until the ice went off.”  Then Charlie went back 7 miles to where he was staying.  The next morning he’d get up & do it again.  “I stayed up there all winter.  It was a long winter,” he added.

 

For most of his 35 years with the G&F, Charlie was their packer & spawner.  He said, “I’d pack fish biologist from around the state up into the mountains.  We’d go to any lake that needed attention.  The outfitters would tell us.  I’ve packed out of Jackson, Lander, Cody, Buffalo and from South Pass to Green River Lakes.  I guess I’ve seen about all the high mountain lakes in Wyoming.”  During one 8-year stretch the G&F inventoried all of the lakes on the western slope of the Wind River Mountains.  Charlie did all the packing for the crew of 4.  They checked water quality, depth, flow, density of light, bugs, and inventoried fish.  They usually set gill nets out overnight, but if the lake was full of fish, they use fly rods. 

As an example of their work, Charlie said, “Bear Lake (east of Green River Lakes) is so deep we never found the bottom (years later Ron Remmick used sonar to register 300 ft deep) and it had 8” Rainbows and 8# Rainbows.  This told us there was very little spawning.  Rainbows are a soft fish except for some down by Kemmerer.  They are the fightingest and meanest Rainbows.  We picked them to use as brood stock to put in Bear Lake.   We stocked it every 3 years by airplane or helicopter.”

 

Charlie would begin spring spawning at Keyhole Reservoir for walleye, then Meadow Lake for grayling, Surprise Lake for goldens, Big Sheep Mountain Lake for Colorado River Cutthroat.  The fall spawning included Flaming Gorge for Kokanee, Soda Lake for Brooks and Browns and Jackson or Jenny Lake for Mackinaws.   When they went into Trail Lake for Splake, they only needed one female.  She weighed 32#s and gave 10,000 eggs – all they needed.  Splake is a male brook & female mac.  They don’t reproduce.  One ‘spring’ Charlie was spawning at Big Sheep Mountain on July 24.  The water just wouldn’t warm up.  Two days later he began the fall spawn at Flaming Gorge.  Charlie said, “I had 2 days between spring & fall spawning.” 

 

Charlie began harvesting eggs & sperm at Pinedale’s Soda Lake in 1957.  At that time it was only Brooks.  Later they planted & spawned Browns there.  Generations of school children have field tripped to Soda to watch the operation.  Charlie said, “Soda is unique because it is too alkali for anything to reproduce.  With light pressure we milk the females and squeeze the males for a ratio of 3 females to 2 males per pan.  We have to bring our own fresh water to wash them.  At first the egg/sperms are soft & mushy.  We let them set for an hour in the water & they harden so you could bounce them on a table.  Then you have 24 hours to get them to a hatchery & into the incubators.  It takes about 30 days for them to eye-up (meaning their eyes are formed).  Then I’d get a call to come out to the Daniel Hatchery and help pick out the dead ones with different size bulb syringes.  After that you could ship them anywhere on a tray with an ice drip.”  One problem at Soda Lake was that you could put 500 brook in a 4x4x8  ‘live-car’, but browns would go to the bottom & smother.  Charlie said, “I designed & built a spawning barge and we went from losing 200 browns/night to losing 20 in a whole season.”

 

Spawning Goldens is a similar but more delicate process.  Faler Lake holds it’s own in the reproduction of Goldens because it has a big, long outlet and after they spawn in the creek the fish can get back into the lake.  Surprise Lake, on the other hand has a 6” drop & the fish can’t return to the lake after spawning.   So, for 30+ years, Charlie spawned at Surprise.  First, he & whatever crew he had, had to be camped up at Surprise Lake just as the ice was going out.  Charlie went in on horseback as far as he could get and then snowshoed the rest of the way.  In the early years the guys would fight for the privilege of getting into the mountains & being on his crew.  But in later years, Charlie said, “they were all educated & couldn’t handle the wilderness, so I just did it alone.  A Golden’s hide is so thin, it’s translucent.  If the water gets to 50 degrees in the live cars, they’ll die.  They can’t take stress so you had to be gentle.  I wouldn’t let anyone wear gloves to milk them.  The eggs went in a cream can and then to quart jars packed in boxes for the trip out of the mountains.  I had a mule named Apples who packed all the Golden eggs.  He was the best pack animal ever, but he could not be broke to ride.  Later the G&F decided to rent horses and you never knew what you were getting.  You couldn’t trust them with those eggs.   Golden eggs are priceless - worth about $24 each.  You’d get about 1000 eggs/female.    The last year I worked up there we harvested a record 270,000 eggs.  The state needed 80,000 and the rest were traded to other states.  I heard they got 20,000 eggs the next year and zero eggs since then.    Having the same job for 30-some years, I learned  to watch for certain conditions when the fish would run.  Ya kinda learn how fish think.”

 

Charlie and his brother-in-law, Bobby Ditton, crossed Brooks & Browns, something that never happens in the wild.  They are called Tiger fish and the ones in the show pond at Daniel Hatchery got up to 12#.  Charlie added, “Some of these fish showed up in Soda Lake.  They were the ones Bobby & I crossed.  They were aggressive.”

 

With all this mountain time, Charlie encountered his share of bears.  Back in the 60s & 70s there were no grizzly problems, though.  Charlie said, “We had outfitters here & there and those problem bears got taken care of.”   Later in his career, Charlie went on 4 pack trips in a row where bears were a problem.   He resolved to pack a serious rifle on the next trip and take care of any bears the way the old-time outfitters did.  When he discovered that he’d forgotten all his firearms, he sat under a tree all night, guarding the food supply with an axe!  

 

Another time he’d packed some guys into the mountains and they were worried about bears.  Charlie told them, “If one of you perishes up here, the other can just find a rock the shape of a horse’s back and put him over it.  I’ll come up and pack him out.  But I can’t do it if he’s long & stiff.”

 

One time he had a young boy up at a mountain lake watching for the spawning to start.  Charlie said, “A bear had been bothering the kid and had even clawed a slit in the tent & was looking at him.   When I got back up there, that boy was clear out of his mind.  Crazy.” 

 

Crazy might also describe the time he was up in the mountains with 2 other guys.  The rain was so bad they had to pack wood from one camp to the next.  They couldn’t find anything dry.  They hung their clothes on the tent’s ridgepole and there were shadows everywhere.  In the middle of the night one guy yelled, ‘There’s a bear in the tent’.  Charlie continued, “I reached for my pistol and my flashlight.  When I turned that light on, those 2 guys were facing one another with their 44s aimed & ready to shoot each other.”

 

Another time Charlie was camping with Ralph Huddleson & his son Timmy.  It was rainy & wet.  In the night Timmy heard something.  Then Charlie heard it – a clicking noise.  He said, “It was a bear clicking his teeth.  He was just walking the trails.  We followed his tracks for 5 miles down the trail the next morning.  I had a big-footed horse and his hoof marks weren’t as big as that Grizzly’s.”

 

When asked about wintertime, Charlie said, “With my first boss there were almost no days off spring, summer or fall and I could take comp time.  So, that left me with most of winter to go snowmachining.  Sledding was my way of life.”  Charlie has the trophies to prove it and continues to go out on his machine as often as possible.  He added, “If I can’t take care of myself in the mountains, the wolves can just have me.  I tell people not to worry about me until the 3rd day and even then I’m probably no where that they can ever find me.”  Charlie retired in 1992 when an article was written about him by Cody Beers for Wyoming Wildlife.

 

Charlie married JoAnne and they had 2 children: Lane & Kelly.  He married Duene and they had Barrie.  He married Kathy and they had Sunny.  Barrie’s daughter, Kasey, is Charlie’s only grandchild.  Charlie enjoys his daily lunch at Rendezvous Pointe.  By Judi Myers, Feb, 2011

 

 

 

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