As you may know, Colorado's snow pack has been award winning this past Spring. Not every day does it snow two feet in Steamboat Springs on the first day of summer. That just didn't make sense, but you know what I mean.
But it has caused a bitter sweet problem. Colorado has lots of water. No doubt about it, we will have rivers and creeks flowing very well into late Autumn. That's a good thing. The bad thing is, it's July and the creeks and rivers look like they do in June, during prime run off time. It's making fishing tough.
Last week I went into the high country like I normally do during run off because it's a little more forgiving. Ha ha, not this year. This is normally a creek one can wade pretty easily this time of year. This isn't what I was expecting.
This turned out to be a search & destroy mission. Wading was not a good idea. The creek is normally 15 feet wide, and basically still is, but it's deep and running very fast. I walked the banks through the thick woods trying to find any soft water to fish. There were, but getting to most of them was very tricky. There was no casting involved, but the bow & arrow cast did fine. To be honest, most of the soft water was right along the banks, behind rocks or in little eddies. So all I really had to do was plop the fly in the water by hand. Any other way was over kill.
I used only one fly. And by that, I don't mean just one pattern, no, I mean just one fly, the Renegade. I just kept on retying it back on my tippet.This fly is a killer here on this creek, and today was no exception. I did manage a few fish out of this mess of turbulent water, a few browns and brookies. Here's one of the nicer looking brookies.
Not too long after this brown decided to introduce itself.
It was a tough day, and I'm not talking about the fishing itself, but the walking through the woods to find another little spot. The fallen timber got worse the deeper I went in, and and walking around with my 3wt cane rod, I was moving around carefully because one wrong move and you can easily break the tip off your rod in this stuff. to give you somewhat of an idea of the area, this is pretty much what I was facing.
I will have to say, that with all the moisture we have had, our state flowers, the Columbine's, are looking fantastic this year spread across the woodland areas.
Once the waters calm down, I will be heading into the Lion's Den again. Last year it was no disappointment with the fish and the bears back in there. I saw one fish last Oct. rise for my fly, and it missed it. It was a very large fish for this creek. A friend who was down stream of me didn't see it, but he heard the splash. So I have a fish to hunt down this year.