Dentry: Brook trout help color arrival of fall

Published September 15, 2006 at midnight

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They are delightful jewels, those miniature char. Who doesn't love a brook trout for its harlequin color, its wildness and enthusiasm for a well-cast fly?

As mountain autumn sets in again, brookies have been shifting into spawning mode, which renders them all the more colorful. The bellies of olive males have turned crimson. Their red spots seem brighter inside baby-blue coronas. The yellow spots match changing aspen leaves.

For many anglers who value solitude and scenery, now is a perfect time to steal up a creek, kneel on beaver cuttings or haul a cast across an alpine lake. With luck, the elk will bugle.

Did just that the other day. And I'm going to do it again before snow claims high brook-trout haunts. There are no more impressive cathedrals.

Visiting brook trout long has been a ritual for me. Any time will do, but fall is best. I discovered them in a tiny eastern rivulet called Panther Branch and was bewitched.

During a lifetime, I have called on Salvelinus fontinalis in rivers, brooks, estuaries, cirque lakes and even the sea. One of the more amazing sights was a river in New Brunswick a quarter-mile wide, dimpled bank-to-bank with thousands of rising brook trout.

Before that, the brook-trout bug led me on a pilgrimage to the Nipigon River in northwestern Ontario, where the world-record brook trout, 14 1/2 pounds, was caught in 1916. The brookies I caught there were small, but bright, and a black bear came to share the meal.

In Newfoundland, 2-pound brookies, silver from touring inshore Atlantic waters, were migrating up the Pinware River. We steaked some and poached them in river water. Their flesh was red and sweet after a summer dining on shrimp.

Brookies are native to all those eastern waters. Not so here in Colorado, but they have fared quite well anyway, since their introduction in the late 1870s.

Some would say they have fared too well, at the expense of native cutthroat trout. In Rocky Mountain National Park, brook trout are considered something of a pest. Attempts to remove brookies and replace them with cutthroats have succeeded in some of Colorado's high-country drainages.

In recent years, wild brown trout also have been competing with brookies and have driven them from some streams and lakes.

But no one doubts the prolific little char are a permanent fixture in the high country, and their devotees couldn't be more delighted.

Among the brookie's more endearing attributes is its readiness to fling itself at the nearest fly, lure or bait - providing an incautious angler hasn't spooked the skittish fish under the nearest tree root.

Brookies are said to be so accommodating because most waters they live in furnish only scarce food and a brief growing season. They must seize every opportunity.

But despite their spartan existence, they are incredibly good at reproducing, a fact that incites people to eat them.

Colorado's generous bonus brook-trout limit encourages anglers to thin brookie populations so remaining fish will grow larger. In addition to a regular limit of four trout, anglers may take 10 brookies a day if they are 8 inches or shorter.

All that aside, the brook trout cavorting the other day at a timberline lake in the White River National Forest weren't so easy to dupe.

Fish kept busy cruising, rising and sipping almost microscopic midges. They ignored almost every fake fly cast at them. Only a few allowed themselves to be caught with tiny midge flies pulled just under the surface.

The remedy waited in the little stream below, among those miniature habitats where brook trout are at their best.

I'd tell more, but I have to get back up there. Suffice to say, the time has come to cast aside civilized, lowland trout fishing games and hike to where the real trout live.

dentrye@RockyMountainNews.com

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