You may have noticed an advertisement on the Casper Star-Tribune's Web site, trib.com, featuring fat and beautiful fish.

One shows beaming anglers offering up to the camera's eye what appears to be a German brown trout. Other images display the heavenly iridescent colors of a rainbow trout.

A barrel of oil is easy to value. Consult the New York Mercantile Exchange and watch the price shift moment to moment with vagaries of politics and global demand.

No such thing for rainbow trout.

One way to think about the value of a trout might be according to the inputs required to raise it. Calculate the cost of feed, a technician's time and transportation for the trout to a local stream, then divide by the number of fish.

But if a trout disappears, picked off by an osprey, or simply lurks beyond the reach of a fisherman's lure, is the investment lost because there is no certain return?

Then there are wild trout, considered by some an even a greater prize, for which the inputs are mostly clean water and Caddisflies. How should we assign value to these?

Perhaps a severance tax could be levied on trout, reckoned by the inch or by the pound. But if there is no yield, is there likewise no value?

I once went looking for golden trout in an alpine lake across Libby Flats. The effort resulted mostly in sunburn and mosquito bites. But I dreamed a dream of golden trout, and then pursued it.

Hunting and fishing have intrinsic value not easily reckoned by ordinary means. The same can be said for hiking in the hills, or picking up pieces of rock with bits of fossil fish embedded, from a lake now dry more than 40 million years.

Because something cannot be easily accounted in dollars and cents doesn't mean it has no worth. Indeed, it might be argued such things have the greatest worth, because they are beyond reckoning in the easy terms of counted currency.

From time to time, it's worth reminding ourselves that not everything of worth in Wyoming comes to us by the barrel.

It might come as well as a smiling fisherman, and the vision of a magnificent trout, hidden by a river's flow.