We wrapped up our tour through the Southern Rockies on another beautiful stretch of water. No natives were targeted here, but I had heard word from a friend that we should fish here if we had the chance, and given how it looked on aerial photography, I couldn’t disagree with that statement. It looked fishy as hell.
I started off the day with a rough looking rainbow and Blake got himself a couple of browns early on. About an hour in I started to get dialed in, and caught a lot of browns when that happened. They were small to start the day, but seemed to pick up size as the day progressed.
At some point during our day we were the subject of many a passing tourist’s camera as a train rolled on by. I was able to catch another ugly rainbow and even a brook trout shortly after – that’s a slam back East, lol!
Blake motored through some tough fishing and ended the day with a solid brown. It’s rare when it happens, but I think I topped him in size and numbers that day. We made the long walk back to the car, cleaned up as best we could, and then made the drive back towards Colorado Springs – passing through a rogue hail storm along the way.
As is customary on all of these trips we found a couple breweries to try out before calling it a night. For those interested, I thought the Bristol set up in the old school with the other vendors was pretty interesting, as was their crowd – very eclectic – Urban Animal had the better beer though – either are worth the stop.
As the title suggests we needed one more trout species to finish the New Mexico Trout Challenge – so that was the plan for the day – catch a rainbow trout in New Mexico. It sounds simple enough, but you never know how the day can go. I know more about native trout species than I do transplants, so the first thing to figure out was where the best place to do that would be – especially somewhat close to where we were in southern Colorado. We figured that may be in the Rio Chama so we drove to Chama and stopped in for breakfast before we started fishing.
We tried to head to some easy public access close to town and got confused when the road leading us there had a gate on it – which turned what I thought was easy, drive-up access into hike-in access. I wasn’t sure this was a good stretch of river and I’d hate to waste time hiking in to crap water, so we opted to head elsewhere. Not finding much in terms of easy public access in town, we decided to stop at a local business which had river frontage and asked them if we could access the water from their property – thankfully they agreed and we were able to start our rainbow quest.
Blake was able to get the monkey off his back early with his first fish being a rainbow. My first fish was a brown, so I had to sweat it out a bit. We were maybe an hour into fishing, but I was able to catch a rainbow as well. He actually took a big Chubby Chernobyl – trout on top are always my favorite kind of trout.
We kept fishing for a bit, wading up from our access. Although the river was surrounded by private land, most of the river frontage was not developed, so you really didn’t get that sense you were in town. It was nice stretch of water so we didn’t feel the need to rush out of there.
We caught a few more browns alongside our lone rainbows. Content with completing the NM trout challenge and the few browns we caught, we opted to head back into southern Colorado and set up camp for the night, closer to where we planned to fish the next morning. After setting up camp we were able to hit another stretch of water near the camp site. It was a recreation area where a stream flowed through a meadow into a lake, a beautiful setting, we figured there’d be trout there too.
Not long into the fishing I stuck a really nice brown. Outside of that brown the fishing was not great. I caught a stocker rainbow towards the lake, but the in the stream itself the fishing was tough. The brown trout certainly made the short evening session worth it, but so did the scenery.
A cold beer, a hot meal, and a campfire sounded like the perfect way to end day 4 so we headed back to camp. The next day would be our last day of fishing. As you’ve probably figured out, I’m a very goals-minded fishermen. I like to have some sort of checklist of things to punch off throughout a day or throughout a trip. With all of those goals I had in mind for this trip accomplished we now had one more day of fun fishing. Of course, it’s all fun fishing, but there was no pressure to catch anything specific heading into tomorrow. I had a river picked out that I had gotten one good report on, but I wasn’t able to get a lot of info on it otherwise. It looked pretty awesome on aerial photography, so it’d be another fun day of exploring on day 5.
On day two we continued fishing our way through the New Mexico Trout Challenge. We packed up camp and headed to a nearby lake that held both Rio Grande cutthroat and brook trout, at least according to my prior research. We both needed a brook trout and Blake still needed an RGCT before we could move on and try our luck for anything else. The stream we would pass on our way out supposedly held all four species of fish, so the idea was to knock out brook trout and RGCTs at the lake and rainbow trout in the stream and finish out the Challenge before we left for southern Colorado that afternoon.
We hiked around to the far end of the lake, away from the parking lot, looking for where the feeder stream entered the lake hoping to target fish there. In my limited experience with trout in lakes, the inlets and outlets of those systems tend to hold fish. That area of the lake was a little difficult to access, but after some bushwhacking we made it through. Sure enough, Blake caught a gorgeous brook trout behind me to start things off and after a bit of probing, I settled down in a spot where I could see fish moving about.
I caught a few Rio Grande cutthroat in that spot before I caught my first brook trout. I had found a pocket of cutts tucked up under some bushes and was teasing them out by swimming a nymph through the area they were holding in. After catching those I motioned to Blake to come over and give it a shot, which took a bit longer than expected, but he did manage to get on the board with an RGCT of his own.
The lake was a success and we accomplished what we needed to there, but curiosity got the better of us and we had to follow the stream on up and see if we couldn’t find any more cutts above the lake. It was a tight stream and finding good places to actually fish the stream was challenging; when we did find good holes they were occupied by brook trout. After catching a few of those we decided to head back to the truck for lunch and then make our way back down the mountain.
After a cold beer and a sandwich we went to fish the stream that paralleled the road we came in on and see if it did indeed have rainbow trout. It was small stream of it’s own, but it held plenty of trout, they just weren’t the kind we were after. We caught several gorgeous little browns. Brown trout, we learned, are very common in northern New Mexico.
It was at this point we decided to make a move upstream and head for some potential cutthroat water. I didn’t know of much more public water downstream, which is probably where the rainbows were, and I’d rather be catching native fish anyway, so we made our way back to the truck to keep following the stream up the road. When we got back to the truck Blake realized he didn’t have his phone……..this could be a problem. So we backtracked. Both of us searching anywhere we thought he had walked, fished, stopped to change flies; wherever. We learned that we covered a fair amount of stream in a short amount of time. Nothing was turning up. We surmised that should it have fallen in the water there would be no way we’d find it, it’s in a black case. Maybe for this very reason I shouldn’t have my phone in a black case. I was getting nervous. I know Blake was already nervous, but I had played it cool. Finally, with a gigantic sigh of relief, he found it! It was next to a laydown that he had to step over and it had slipped right out of his shirt pocket.
Something to keep in mind fishing shirt designers – we need cavernous chest pockets with legitimate closures – phones just keep getting bigger, that’s what we use to take pictures. Pants pockets get wet when you wet wade so storing my phone in the chest pocket makes sense. I’m not storing it in my waistpack – that takes too long to access. Figure it out. I have one or two fishing shirts that are adequately designed, too many are not.
After the successful scavenger hunt we did indeed make the move upstream and the I caught a beauty of a Rio out of the first hole I walked up on. The stream opened up a bit more in this stretch, the canopy wasn’t so tight, it felt like cutthroat water, but we caught a variety of different trout – still no rainbows though.
After a little while we made another move, this time to Southern Colorado, onto our next campsite. The rainbow trout would have to wait until another day. On day three we would target native Rio Grande cutthroat in Colorado in a watershed that was kind of the whole reason for this trip in the first place. I had seen pictures from a few different folks of the fish and the stream we would be headed to next and I had high hopes for this place; which is not something I ever want to do, because anything can happen. I always try to downplay everything, but this place looked badass and I was really excited to see if it was or was not.
Mountains to Marsh 