Another casualty of Wyoming’s warmest winter on record is Pinedale’s renowned Bob the Barrel.
Every year, the Pinedale Lions Club places the bright yellow barrel known as Bob on ice-covered Fremont Lake. That usually happens at the end of the Big Fish Winter Derby, held during the first weekend of March.
People buy tickets to place their bets on the date and time Bob will break through the ice and float to shore.
All proceeds from the Fremont Lake Ice Guess Off go toward the club’s community programs, such as providing free diabetes testing or vouchers for eyeglasses and exams in Sublette County.
This year, Bob won’t be breaking the ice on Fremont Lake. There isn’t any ice to break.
“Fremont Lake didn’t freeze this year,” said Pinedale Lions Club member Jason Essington. “That forced the cancellation of the Big Fish Winter Derby and prevented placing the barrel, too.”
Bob has been bobbing to shore every spring for at least 85 years. That means 2026 will go down in history as one of the few years in a century without a Bob.
The Two-Week Window
Nobody knows exactly when the Fremont Lake Ice Guess Off started. According to Essington, the earliest record of the annual fundraiser dates to 1940.
“We found a Barrel Guess ticket from 1948 recording the dates and times of Bob’s arrival between 1940 and 1947,” he said. “The two-week trend held even then.”
The most likely time Bob breaks the ice and reaches the shore is the last week of April and the first week of May. Mike Nystrom won the 2025 Guess Off when Bob was spotted bobbing near the Upper Fremont Lake boat ramp at 6:25 a.m. on May 3.
“Your guess is active until the next guess,” Bob Goltz, the Pinedale Lions Club member, told Cowboy State Daily in May 2025. “It might have come in at midnight or 2 a.m. We don’t know. All we know is who had the valid guess between 6 p.m. Saturday and 11:30 a.m. Sunday.”
The current Pinedale Lions Club members have kept the tradition going for almost 45 consecutive years, excluding 1981 (no ice) and 2018 (no barrel).
“I wasn’t involved in 1981, but lore says that was the year the Big Fish Winter Derby was moved to Half Moon Lake due to the lack of ice on Fremont Lake,” Essington said. “I haven’t verified that lore, but I know Half Moon isn’t big enough to support the derby at its current size.”
When the Pinedale Lions Club cancelled the derby on Feb. 7, they said Fremont Lake was “a little short on the critical ice component” due to “this non-winter weather.” That left no hope for Bob.
“We appreciate everyone who participates and look forward to a more normal winter next year,” they said.
'Disastrous' Season
It’s been a bad season for ice fishing enthusiasts. The Big Fish Winter Derby is one of many Wyoming ice fishing events cancelled this winter.
Saratoga and Meeteetse canceled their annual ice fishing events for the same reason that the Pinedale Lions called it quits: no ice.
Many of Wyoming’s best ice-fishing spots have been open water for most of the winter season. Richard Biby, the manager of Rocky Mountain Discount Sports in Riverton, told Cowboy State Daily that a friend of his made a point to go jet-skiing on Boysen Reservoir in January.
“I usually do really well with ice fishing gear this time of year, but I haven’t sold anything,” he said.
The 2026 Boysen Reservoir Ice Fishing Derby was cancelled on Jan. 8 due to “poor conditions.”
The best and only places available would be high-mountain lakes. It’s been more consistently cold and snowy at Wyoming’s high elevations, but even those spots have struggled with warm temperatures and a lack of moisture to offset snowpack losses.
Even if those spots are frozen over, the ice might not be thick enough for safe ice-fishing. The Wyoming Game and Fish Department recommends that people don’t venture out onto an ice-covered lake or pond unless there’s at least 4 inches of clear, solid ice, and at least eight inches of cloudy ice.
The usual struggle for ice fishing derbies is determining whether the ice is thick enough to support dozens of people. This season, it’s been a moot point since there hasn’t been any ice.
“Usually by New Year’s Day, the ice is completely covering the lake and is thick enough for it to be safe to go ice fishing everywhere,” said Georgia Epperson, co-owner of the Boysen Marina. "But not this time."
A Wild And Crazy Winter
Pinedale resident Paul Ulrich regularly takes his dogs for walks around Fremont Lake. The lake hasn’t been entirely devoid of ice this season, but like most of Wyoming, it was too warm for anything to stick around.
“There was some ice on the lake a few weeks ago, but it was clearly unsafe to walk on,” he said. “It certainly didn’t cover the entire lake.”
Ulrich said this has been “the warmest, craziest winter” he’s ever experienced in his 15 years in Pinedale.
Fellow Pinedale resident Dave Bell’s winter memories go back even further, but with the same assessment.
“I’ve been here for 32 years, and I’ve never seen anything even close to this before,” he said. “It’s actually really frightening.”
Bell said he got a video from a friend pointing out all the birds he could hear chirping outside his home near Big Piney. It was a springtime chorus at the point where the region is usually quiet.
“All the robins, bluebirds, killdeers, and spring birds are arriving,” he said. “Either they’re in for a terrible, rude awakening, or they know something we don't know.”
Bell noted that Pinedale can usually rely on a series of winter storms between December and February that bring a lot of snow and cold temperatures. This year, the months came and went with next to nothing to show for it.
“In a normal year, we always get a snowstorm around Christmas,” he said. “That didn't happen. Then, we usually have a cold snap in January and another in February, where we get some snow. That never happened this year. It’s really weird, and beginning to get really worrisome.”
Fishy Forecast
As far as fishing goes, most would say Wyoming’s ice fishing season has been a total loss. Even if the next few months are spectacularly snowy, it’ll be too little, too late.
Meanwhile, Ulrich was already looking ahead with trepidation. Ice fishing is all well and good, but his bread-and-butter is the upcoming fly-fishing season.
“I’m a fishing guide on our beautiful rivers in the summer,” he said. “If we have abnormally high temperatures, low precipitation, and snowpack going into summer, it can make fly fishing very difficult in late summer.”
In addition to being abnormally dry, Ulrich said it’s been “unusually windy” around Pinedale. That makes it even harder for any substantive moisture, rain or snow, to stick around.
“What moisture we do get is drying out even quicker because of those winds,” he said. “Anytime we got snow this winter, it melted in a few days. It’s sucking moisture straight out of the ground.”
Low water levels and high temperatures during the warmest months of the year are a bad combination for fly fishing. A bad-to-nonexistent ice-fishing season could lead to a similarly poor fly-fishing season, which would be a huge economic hit across Wyoming.
“At this point, we're all praying for a very wet and rainy spring,” Ulrich said.
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
