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.
I used a mix of sources to plan this trip out, but New Mexico Game & Fish and the Western Native Trout Initiative make it very easy to find where you need to go to target these fish. I’ll be very honest and admit that it takes some of the fun out of it with how free and available information is to find these days. This is not necessarily a complaint because the more people that care about the fish the better and the only way to really care about something is to experience it, so in that way the available knowledge is appreciated, but the process just isn’t the hunt that it used to be. I can pretty much figure out in a night what use to take me weeks. It’s still rewarding to put in the effort to travel out and catch something you’ve only seen online, I don’t think that will ever change.
We started our day with a stop at The Drift Fly Shop in Pueblo and the guy working behind the counter couldn’t have been any nicer. He wasn’t able to give us much intel on the area we were headed, but he was very pleasant and engaging. We stopped at another shop later in our trip that was in the area we were fishing and we didn’t get that same feeling. It was pretty much just a big circle jerk of guides who looked at us like we just broke into the place. There was one young guy that sold us flies who at least tried. I just hate when fly shops give me bad vibes, I mean we all enjoy the same thing, why would my presence put you off? Fly shops can go either way in my opinion and if you’ve got a good local one take advantage of it.
After the customary Wal-Mart stop for supplies we continued onto our destination, which was in northern New Mexico, where we set up camp and then hit the nearby trailhead to hopefully take us to some RGCTs on day one. The drive was a pretty one; I’ve never been to the southern Rockies, it’s such an interesting mix of mountains and desert. We passed dust devils, prairie dogs, and pronghorn on our drive, and I loved every bit of it!
It did not take long at all to catch a fish. In fact the first hole I stopped in a brown whacked my dry. I think Blake’s experience was similar. It’s been customary for us to take a picture with the first fish just in case we never catch another, so we put check marks next to a New Mexico brown trout on pretty quickly on day one.
The stream was a tight one with a pretty good amount of elevation change and a healthy amount of brown trout. If you could find a place to get a cast off you generally had a really good shot at catching a fish, they were there, casting to them was just tough. North Georgia prepared us for this though! If you can fish a blueline up there you can fish a blueline anywhere.
I vaguely recalled a barrier on this stream in my research and we hiked the approximate distance I thought it was from the trailhead, but we did fish a fair amount below it to start. We ended up finding the actual barrier falls on the hike back out, but as you can see above, I was able to find a Rio Grande cutthroat trout somewhere above it – my first one!
We quit fishing not long after that fish simply because we ran out of daylight. It’s been a while since I’ve hiked out of somewhere in the dark but this was one of those days. We probably covered more ground than we should have, especially on day one, but I was fueled by adrenaline and excitement, it would have been tough to pull me off the water otherwise.
Mountains to Marsh 