The mother-in-law is in town, so the fishing day started with a hearty breakfast. Sometimes mother-in-laws are alright. Especially when they cook a great morning meal and don't give you a guilt trip for leaving to fish while they are in town.
Thankful for the food and graceful escape, I raced to one of my favorite stretches of water for a summer day of fly fishing for cutthroat trout in a small Colorado front range mountain stream. This is one of those streams that has a very small window to really catch the confluence of weather, stream flow, insect activity and, most importantly, fish activity. I appreciated the opportunity to go see if the time was right.
The time was almost right. Not perfectly right, but right enough for a great day on the water. Due to the snowpack this past winter and some summer storms, flows are still a little high, but insect and fish activity made up for it and the weather was just about perfect for a fly fishing trip. Fish were mainly interested in dries (humpy's and adams), but a few picky trout required an emerger pattern (barr emerger) to fool them.
Stretches of this stream further down basin have received their fair share of rainbow stockings, so these trout are all some degree of cutbow mix, some appearing more cutthroat than rainbow, and some more rainbow than cutthroat. That impurity might bother some, but for me cutthroats are so pretty that even a mix of the two specifies is still hard to regard as anything less than beautiful.
The morning and afternoon past much too quickly and soon it was time to head back to the car for the drive home. It was again a beautiful day out on the water catching plenty of moderately sized cutthroats. I really needed an escape to the foothills and this Colorado creek provided just what I needed. If you need something similar, this would be a great time to pursue it. Enjoy your summer days of fly fishing if you can can get out. Cheers!
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