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Rio Grande Cutthroat Country – Day 1

October 17, 2023
Adventure, Camping, Coldwater, Exploring, Fish, Fishing, Fly Fishing, Freshwater, Hiking, Outdoors, Retail, Travel, Wade Fishing
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Blake and I flew into Colorado Springs in July to target Rio Grande cutthroat trout and finish out the New Mexico trout challenge we started a couple years ago in the southern part of the state with the Gila trout.

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.

Gila Trout in New Mexico

June 29, 2021
Adventure, Coldwater, Conservation, Exploring, Fish, Fishing, Fly Fishing, Freshwater, Hiking, Outdoors, Scouting, Sightfishing, Travel, Wade Fishing, Waterfall
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As a native trout nerd, it would be hard to live with myself if while I was on a trip to the White Mountains in Arizona I didn’t sneak off one day to chase Gila trout in New Mexico. We were planning on switching campgrounds anyway, might as well trek into New Mexico in the morning and see if we can chase down some Gilas first. New Mexico is the state I most associate with Gila trout, for Arizona it’s Apache trout.

Looking East off Hwy 180 south Luna, NM

It was about a two hour drive to get to a trailhead where we could hike along a stream that held Gila trout in it at some point upstream. Much like the Gila trout stream in Arizona, this creek was ephemeral, bone dry at the trailhead, so we’d be hiking until we made it to water that was suitable for trout to live in. The valley we drove into was very unassuming, even as we parked, but it didn’t take long during our hike for it to transform into one with spectacular scenery.

In about a quarter mile we entered into a narrow slot canyon with steep vertical walls composed of volcanic rock of many different colors, colors that I don’t typically associate with the rocks where I find trout, but not at all out of place in the desert southwest. It was an amazing landscape of sandstone and rock spires with a trickle of a creek running through it.

Our day was made just experiencing this canyon on our feet. Having a fly rod in hand was lagniappe. We made it to a point on the creek where small waterfalls cascaded into pools that were several feet deep; it started to look like good trout habitat. The water was crystal clear, some of the clearest water I’ve seen in a stream. Lots of small fish could be seen in each pool, not trout at first, but other smaller species, longfin dace being one of them as I’d come to later find out. It wasn’t long before the trout showed up as well.

We fished the pools we could with pretty good results, no shortage of fish brought to hand. The places that looked like they should hold trout did. We had a good time bouncing from one hole to the next. Eventually though the holes dried up and we had run into a couple of other anglers walking out that said as much. I didn’t realize we’d hit a dry run on the creek and I didn’t know how long it would last so we had to make a decision of whether it was time to hike out or keep going. We hiked up a little ways trying to find water again and all we found was a little pocket, but that pocket had about a dozen trout in it with some being noticeably bigger than what we had caught thus far. It was exciting watching Blake work a small streamer in the hole, dancing it around, especially when a bigger fish darted out from under the rock on the right and smashed it.

I pulled one out too and then we made our way back to the vehicle stopping to fish a few holes we passed on the way up.

You always hear “pictures don’t do it justice” and that line fit the bill here. It truly was an amazing experience hiking and fishing in this canyon and it’s still hard to wrap my head around the fact that these trout continue to persist in this fragile, arid ecosystem. Drought and wildfire will always be a threat to wipe out their existence and that’s just crazy to think about. It was time for Blake and I to head back to Arizona and find a new place to camp, hopefully on the water or at least close to where we’d access the next place I wanted to fish in the morning, which from everything I read promised to be the best wild trout river in the state of Arizona – how could we not fish there?!