Author Archives: frontrangeflyfishing

Our First Class III Float

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On Tuesday, after breaking our car camp conveniently located next to the crappers, we floated the Pumphouse to Radium section of the Colorado River in our new used fishing raft.  It’s got a lone stretch, maybe a hundred yards, of Class III water, and it’s safe to say we went into this with a healthy respect for the river and its unforgiving nature.  Floating the Bighorn is one thing – Class I+ at best at the flows we floated – but Class III is another animal.  Granted, you’d have to REALLY screw up to flip your boat or wrap it, but it’s still a possibility on the Pumphouse section, and that was enough to make me moderately nervous.

In the end, we came through just fine.  Frank’s buddy Brett, who has floated this stretch on his raft many times, was with us, and that helped the confidence levels (he’s actually a full-on badass when it comes to rivers, having run most of the Grand Canyon on a raft and the Gore Canyon section of the Colorado on a kayak (I know! Gore fu%king Canyon, right!?)).  We all shared time behind the oars equally, but when it came time to run the Class III “eye of the needle rapid,” I really wanted to give it a shot.  Hilariously, I nailed this section pretty much perfectly, then managed to put the bow of the boat on a small boulder a hundred yards below the crux of the needle.  There’s a lesson there, though I’m still not sure what it is.

And oh yeah, Frank caught a monster Brown, 20 inches easy:

Until next time…

The Gift of Time

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This site/blog has been, well, defunct.  It’s been far too long since our last post.  It’s not that we weren’t fishing – we were.  Perhaps not as often as we’d like, but we’re always fishing.  It’s just, you know, life kinda gets in the way.  Between parenthood and careers (both of us), hip surgeries (me), business travel (Tim), a job that stressed me out that I have since resigned from (me)….

It’s tough to feel creative at 9pm.

We can’t ever promise this blog will consist of any more than sporadic posts, but those creative impulses are starting to fire again, fishing this spring has been stellar (if a little premature), and it’s time we started telling a story or two – with some good pictures to boot.  To that end… the Bighorn.

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The Last (Cheap) Best Place

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Clear Creek canyon is my getaway for when I have a few hours. It’s not spectacular – so far the fishing has been ho-hum, and it’s right along one of the busiest state highways around, always crammed full of blackhawk weekend casino traffic when I fish it.

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Letting it Come to You

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We were up in Steamboat this past Labor Day weekend, and I fished the Yampa 3 days in a row.  And sometimes, things just line up right, y’know?  And after a year of things not quite lining up right in other elements of my life – a near-miss here, a dropped ball there, an egregious field goal attempt that soars wide left - I’ll take the little victories where I can get them.

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Carpe Diem

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We pursue that which eludes us.

That’s not waxing rhapsodic, nor is it a profound statement.  It’s just simple fact: if it didn’t elude us, there would be no need to pursue it.

And that pursuit is responsible for so much of what we find compelling in this life, isn’t it?  We pursue goals, championships, promotions, happiness, pleasure… love.

And fishermen, of course, pursue fish.

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Stunning water on the Crystal

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We fished the Crystal on the Saturday morning of our Frying Pan trip.  Our campsite was right on the river, so it just made sense to roll out and start fishing without too much of a drive.

My goodness is this river stunning.

To my eyes, two things in particular make it so: Gin clear water that also manages to have a light blue, glacial kind of tint, and a substrate made up of big boulders that are many different colors (no doubt due to the varied geology in this valley – sandstone, granite, and marble).

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Here and Somewhere Else

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It’s interesting, our desire to be two places at once.

After a quick morning meeting on Friday, I had the rest of the day off, and since I had dropped the little guy off at his daycare, I had until about 5pm all to myself.  So I went fishing.

But here’s the funny thing: half of me wanted to be fishing, and the other half wanted to be spending time with my son.  And so, two halves of me were at odds.  On one hand, I know that, as a parent, it’s reenergizing and important to take time to ourselves.  On the other hand, I really love spending time with my guy, and I felt bad about not sharing my day off with him.  I still went fishing, but it bothered me all day, and having something gnaw at you is darn counterproductive to the calm you’re supposed to experience on the water.

Which is why it was karmic, I suppose, that I broke my rod at the end of the day.  I put that negative energy out into the universe for the better part of the morning and afternoon, and it was returned to me in a moment of graphite snapping certainty.  I smiled a resigned kind of smile, reeled in, and went to my stash spot to change back into my hiking shoes.

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Lightning Round on the Frying Pan

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There’s an easy kind of grace that a group eventually achieves on a fishing trip. It’s usually something you just kind of slide into without realizing it; suddenly the hemming and hawing about when to fish and where, and who’s gonna do what, just kind of fade into the background. The cooler gets packed by one guy, another guy gets all the rods strung up and put in the carrier, another makes sure the boots and waders are loaded, and, upon reflection, you realize none of it was even discussed.

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Buzz Lightyear Goes Fishing

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I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that, from the moment he came into this world, I looked forward to the day that my son and I would fish together. And snowboard. And ski. And hike. And play music.

That first fishing outing finally arrived this weekend. My wife was in Iowa for her 20 year high school reunion – which she generously excused me from – so Bennett and I went to Steamboat for a boys weekend. We watched too much TV, ate junk food, played with toys well past his bed time all 3 nights, and went fishing on Saturday for all of 45 minutes. He seemed to enjoy it, though, and that’s all I could’ve hoped for.

(A disclaimer: ultimately, if Bennett never loves any of the things that I love, that’s okay. If he turns out to be a passionate math geek, I’ll brush up on my differential equations and we’ll get down to business.)

We went to a little stocked pond in Steamboat called Fetcher Pond. The Fetchers have been in the Yampa valley for a long time, and they’ve been honored numerous times over with place names. The Fetcher Ranch is still a legitimate working ranch, from what I understand, though I think you can book it for weddings, too. But I digress.

The little stocked rainbows were hitting emergers all over the place, doing that thing where their dorsal, not their mouth, breaks the surface, and if you didn’t look closely you’d think they were rising to dries on the surface. So I tied on a pheasant tail, put some shot above it and an indicator, and cast it out as far as his 2 foot long spider-man zebco would allow. Which wasn’t all that far.

We caught nothing. And he didn’t seem to mind one bit. He was just happy cranking the reel handle and picking flowers for his mom.

Though he’s probably too young to remember it, I will never forget Saturday. And for sentimental reasons, I am so glad our first outing was in Steamboat, his birthplace.

However, next time we’re using powerbait.