Tag Archives: trout

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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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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The Yampa Revisted (Timmy puts it all together)

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It was one of those days where, in the end, not a whole lot really needs to be said about it; especially when the accompanying pictures (see slideshow below) so adequately showcase the beauty of our surroundings and the fact that, this time, there was a lot more catching going on.

Nonetheless, here are a few details…

We asked Tim and his family to come spend the weekend with us in Steamboat. The wives had Saturday to themselves as Tim and I watched the toddler (ours) and the infant (theirs). The ladies hiked Mad Creek (not a bad little brookie stream itself, if you’re wondering), and soaked in Strawberry Park Hot Springs afterward – a quintessential Steamboat summer day.

Tim and I had Sunday morning for fishing and we started early, on the water before 7:30.

The low morning sun was honey colored and perfect, and hit the water in that angled way that a lot of us don’t often get to see (usually because we’re not out fishing early enough). We started at a bend west of town, a good 300 yard stretch that is away from the road, has no buildings on it, and gives the illusion of being a lot more isolated than it is.

You’ll want to finish this one. Some GREAT pictures ahead…

You can go home again…

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It’s just that sometimes it looks a lot different.

I fished the Yampa tailwater below Stagecoach reservoir this weekend without Tim, just south of Steamboat Springs, and it was the biggest I’ve ever seen it. The water below the dam averages 80-100 cfs most of the year except for a brief period every spring where they let it loose so that the reservoir doesn’t overflow. In the above picture, not only is the bottom release CRANKING out water at a scary rate, that’s also more water coming over the spillway than I’ve ever seen. I’d guess the flows were at least 600 cfs, but there’s no way to know for sure since the measuring station has been down for weeks.

This year is the biggest runoff year in the ten years I’ve lived in Colorado. Rivers are still hundreds to thousands of cubic feet per second above averages, and while they remain playgrounds for rafters and kayakers, fishermen stare wistfully from their cars and continue to tell themselves things like “Well, at least it’s good for the health of the river.” Throw in a wet start to the summer, with torrential afternoon rains at least once or twice a week, and rivers likely won’t be down to average flows until August.

But, I digress, as that’s not really what this post is about. This post is about home waters.

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“Well I’m Timmy P, I hook Fishes Galore!” – Cheesman Canyon on the South Platte River

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The day started fuzzy, thanks to two too many drinks the night before and the umpteenth viewing of “The Movie” that lasted well past midnight.  To be honest, I hadn’t watched it in years, not since I really started to fish obsessively, and I found myself surprised at how poorly Craig Sheffer and Tom Skerritt actually cast a fly rod.  Brad Pitt seemed to know what he was doing, but it was still obvious when they were using footage of Brad versus when they were using cleverly disguised footage of his stand-in.

Anyway, I had spent the night at Tim & Stacy’s because Tim and I both had Friday off and we wanted to get an early start.  My wife, Jenn, and I are juggling careers while raising our two and a half year old son, so a night spent at a friend’s house, with a day of fishing starting the next morning, feels damn near like a vacation.  (The challenge, of course, is making sure these getaways even out over time for both husbands and wives.)

After loading our gear and a quick stop for a drive-thru breakfast that probably met our recommended sodium intake for the whole day, we were on the road by 7:15.  I was about to remark that in our younger days we could’ve made an even earlier start, but, actually, that’s probably not true at all.  With jobs that wake us up early, aches and pains that do the same, and toddlers and infants that don’t let us sleep past 7:30 even if we could, I think most of us in our late thirties probably, on average, get up a hell of a lot earlier than we did in our twenties.

Our destination was the Cheesman Canyon section of the South Platte River.

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