Hooked on fly fishin’

If you travel to fly fish, it’s all about timin’. Obviously, the weather conditions, speed and level of the river and water clarity determines if you are going to catch fish.

Low water, high water and rains have ruined some of my trips to Montana, Colorado and Wyoming over the past two decades. There was also a forest fire that eliminated one of my usual stops for the past three summers.

The trip this past summer – 15 days in July – went smoothly. The final plan made three months ago went almost perfectly. I fished every spot in the plan on the exact days written on my calendar.

There were fun days with no real weather issues fishing the Frying Pan, Cheesman Canyon of the South Platte and the Miracle Mile of the North Platte. Even the meals went according to plan, although I don’t give Jeremiah Gage any suggestions on meals at his Loveland, Colo., home.

The two meals at the Gage pad were classics. There was a pork parmesan over a bed of pasta the first night, followed on night two by beef tenderloin with a side of smashed taters. I brought the steaks from Richard’s Country Meat Market in Fayetteville. You give Gage great cuts of meat, there will be a great meal.

When Jim Daniel was along for three days of the trip, there were two fantastic meals. We had the famed chicken fried steak at the River Rock Café in Walden, Colo., with some wonderful dark beer. The next night was prime rib at the Silver Fox in Casper, Wyoming.

There was good food during the five-day window to host Jean Ann, my wife of 44 years. She flew in to Aspen to avoid the 17-hour truck trip through Missouri, Kansas and most of Colorado. There was no fishing on her stay as we explored one of our nation’s most expensive cities and hiked nearby high altitude trails.

The trip to Aspen was courtesy of Fayetteville Hog fan Bill Eldridge. He’d read the tales of my western fishing trips and reached out last winter with an offer to use his ski condo at Snowmass Village. It was fabulous, as was his scouting report on the Aspen area.

The only balk in the food plan came after an on-line view of the menu at the restaurant in Hotel Jerome, the Aspen landmark Eldridge touted. He said even if I decided dinner was too pricey, walk through the lobby and soak in the old west flavor.

I thought maybe I’d take Jean Ann to the bar in the Hotel Jerome. That plan was abandoned when I learned you leave $100 in “earnest money” to reserve a booth. That won’t get you more than a taste of their scarce bourbon.

Eldridge insists that we stay in Snowmass again next year because we didn’t hit all of the cool places on his to-do list. A day trip (or over night) to Leadville and the drive over Independence Pass didn’t make the cut, nor did a visit to the John Denver memorial in Aspen.

We did take the gondola ride to the top of Aspen Mountain, a cool 11,150 feet. There was a 7-mile round-trip hike to the base of Maroon Bells, twin 14,000 peaks above Aspen Highlands. Both were on the list.

There was a cruel twist to the hike. Jean Ann had only been in town 18 hours. I was four days into my stay and comfortable at 8,500 feet. She works out with a personal trainer and is fit. I had trained for a month, but not nearly what Jean Ann has done for years. I sailed up the mountain and she wanted a break every 150 yards.

The timing for that break in my fishing was not bad. It was much hotter than normal with afternoon temperatures in the high 80s, clearly unlike most Aspen summers. But there is not much humidity and it was always comfortable.

The heat probably forced us back to the condo a little early one afternoon and discouraged taking a steep hike to see Doc Holliday’s grave atop a Glenwood Springs mountain.

There was also some bad timing for the last major stop of the trip, to fish with guide Michael Graham on the famed Miracle Mile of the North Platte around 50 miles south of Casper, Wyoming. We arrived at the launch ramp to see three shocking rafts manned by Wyoming Game & Fish. It was day three of their survey.

There was not one bite for the first four hours on the Miracle Mile, but there was excitement when the shocking rafts departed soon after lunch. There was a 500-yard section of un-shocked water below their ramp.

Daniel landed a 25-inch rainbow the only time his indicator moved all day. Almost

immediately after that fish was released, I got a 22inch rainbow, the only take I had. There were plans to fish that run several more times, but we ended our float two hours early when we saw several lightning strikes from a storm rolling our way.

That early exit and our bad fortune to arrive after three days of shocking through the best fishing runs stayed with me for several days, especially on the drive home across Kansas. That segment of the trip is depressing.

All of that was washed away a few days later when reports began to pop about a natural disaster, a 30-minute rainstorm that dumped 2.5 inches into the famed Cheesman Canyon. I had just been there.

Pat Dorsey, legendary guide from Blue Quill Anglers in Evergreen, took Gage and me on a 10hour trip up the canyon and back just seven days before the storm. Sediment from decomposed granite has filled most of the named iconic fishing holes that produced wonderful wild fish for us one week earlier. The path of the river has changed in many areas.

Cheesman Canyon is in for a long, tough recovery. What happens to those beautiful trout is as cloudy as the water flowing in new places in that section of the South Platte. Dorsey fears that the tiny rocks now covering the bottom have choked the bug life that produces epic dry fly fishing during many months of the year.

The rockslides have covered some of the famous boulders in the river, like the Peanut Rock, the standout feature of the Rainbow Hole. Gage and I caught six trout there. Tiny rocks that flowed down the hillside like the fan of an avalanche now hide that massive stone.

I ache for Dorsey. He is joined at the hip with Cheesman Canyon. It’s his baby. He’s written books on that famed fishery.

It was the second time I fished the canyon with Dorsey. He is one of the best and most famous guide in the west. A fisherman asked for his autograph when he came around a bend and saw Dorsey guiding us.

Daniel booked my trip with Dorsey in January after hearing him speak at a Denver fly fishing show. Daniel waited until the end of the seminar to visit Dorsey and make a phone call to me. Dorsey had only two available dates in July six months out. I got one. I was lucky to get anything. Most clients book him again the next year for the same dates.

The fishing trip in Cheesman Canyon was not without problems. We’d just begun to fish after the one-hour hike up the canyon when Dorsey noticed a piece of grass floating past our spot.

“They have upped the releases by 50 cfs,” Dorsey said. “That is pushing some debris like that grass. The fish will be nervous for about an hour, but it may actually help us after lunch.”

It was almost one hour later that I got one of those fat, strong wild rainbows famous for that canyon. It was the start of a real hot streak. Jeremiah landed a nice brown trout, probably as big as my 18-inch rainbow. Both trout excited Dorsey.

“That’s a big fish,” Dorsey said just the take and a flash of a pink flank on my rainbow. “Yes,

that’s a really big, strong fish.”

It took a couple of minutes to get that one into Dorsey’s net. I worried that it was too much of a fight on a hot day for the survival of the fish and declined to hold it. Maybe we should skip the photo shoot altogether?

“No, this water is 47,” he said. “What we just did caused no harm.”

So I got one photo of Dorsey holding my Cheesman Canyon trophy. I’ll treasure that picture. The saying trout fishers use to promote their travels still applies. Trout live in beautiful places and they are just as beautiful as their neighborhoods. The back drop for trout photos in the canyon is pretty neat.

There was one more guide trip in Colorado. After fishing the Frying Pan two days, I got a halfday trip on the Saturday morning before my drive to Loveland and the Gage pad. It turned out I got one of Taylor Creek Fly Shop’s veteran guides, a transplant 25 years ago from Lafayette, La.

I actually visited with my guide the first day of my trip when I fished near his clients. We broke for lunch at the same time and visited briefly in the parking lot behind our trucks. After getting his clients situated in folding chairs for lunch, we walked towards each other to share fly choices.

I offered for inspection a box full of what I call my Arkansas tailwater flies.

My new friend said, “Those are different than what the guides in our shop use, but sometimes different works here. Keep fishing them. I saw you catch some really nice fish. And, you are in a good spot. Stay there. You are dialed in decent enough for someone new to the Frying Pan.”

That was the end of the conversation. Five days later I got a call from the shop.

“Clay, this is Critter and I’m your guide for tomorrow,” he said. “They say at the shop that you have been here a week, so where are you fishing?”

Turned out, Critter was going to take me to that same spot, his favorite place to take clients. To my surprise, Critter was the same guide I’d visited with my first day. We both laughed as we met in the shop early on my last day in Aspen and bonded immediately.

“I’m going to show you the area you fished and you won’t ever fish it the same again,” he said. “I think you are going to learn some things today. You can catch fish here without me, but you are going to catch a lot more than you did earlier this week.”

Boom, we did. We fished Critter’s secret fly and did it with a high stick nymph style popularized in Europe. I normally drift fish with my fly line on the water. We caught fish five feet from where we stood with that tight line nymph rig.

You don’t write about secret flies, so just know that Critter has something that the other guides in that river may not know about. I caught five times the number of fish with Critter than I’d been catching in my three previous days on that river on this trip. That’s why you hire a guide when you go to a new river.

Critter – and he looks like one – honored me at the end of our day. He asked to look in my fly box again, and then asked if he could take a few. He was most interested in a pheasant tail variant tied by the late David Knowles and given to me last spring to field test. Knowles called them PT Prism Midges because of the collar dubbing. Critter also took some mental notes about my root beer and ruby midges, the best flies on the Norfork and White rivers.

This trip wasn’t all about fishing, even when Jean Ann left. Daniel and I hiked a drainage we plan to elk hunt in September. That was near Buffalo Pass on the east side of the Continental Divide. We hiked a trail that was not passable on horse last fall. It is now for at least five miles. We will ride horses to get to some dark timber for the hunt. There will also be some hopper fishing in the creeks around camp. Most of the freestone creeks in the west are at higher flows than normal.

There were three major hikes over a nineday period. All were at altitude and none shorter than six miles. The most strenuous was with Dorsey in Cheesman Canyon. The last bit of the hike out was a climb over “Heart Attack Hill.” I stopped to rest twice on a tough vertical stretch.

I think I scared Gage on some of that hike, with my vigorous attempts to pump bad air from my lungs. He thought I might be croaking. There was also a slip on some loose gravel that probably bothered our guide and Gage.

When we left the trailhead for the two-hour drive to Loveland, Gage made me promise that we will do easier hikes to fish in the future.

“You will be 70 next summer and you don’t need to hike Cheesman Canyon any more,” he said. “When you slipped, I thought you’d broken a hip or something bad and I wasn’t sure how we were going to get you out.”

I wasn’t hurt and was never in danger again. Dorsey took great care when we made six or seven river crossings. It wasn’t fast water, just slick rocks. He stuck out an arm for me to grab. It was like an iron bar. Watching us inch across the river might have worried Gage, but it was just a guide taking it easy with an old man. If Dorsey was worried, he did not express it when we made it to the parking lot.

“I took an 80-year-old man up the canyon last week,” Dorsey said. “You can still do it and you did great today, just like the older guy.”

As of this writing, Dorsey had postponed guide trips in the canyon until it’s clear what the rockslides did to the fishery. A good flush from the reservoir is much needed, but that may not happen any time soon because lower reservoirs are already full.

That’s bad luck for anyone booked with Dorsey for a Cheesman Canyon guide trip. It’s enough for me to forget about the shocking rafts on the Miracle Mile.

Rainbow trout