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.