DENTRY: High country is calling for fishers

Published July 27, 2007 at midnight

Text size

More Outdoors Columns & Blogs

The time is prime, and the season is short. So if you're up to it (fit and ambitious), grab the pack rod and get gone to a high place.

Of more than 2,000 fishable lakes in Colorado's high country, a few are accessible by driving in on forest roads. Some aren't far from highways or county roads.

Getting to the finest lakes, however, takes sweat and boot leather, a well-provisioned backpack and good lungs and legs. At journey's end, you will understand why high-country fishers tend to keep secrets. And why waterfalls and other landmarks are more important than which fly pattern is fashionable today.

"I'll tell you how to get to a great lake if you promise not to write about it," a man said recently.

Deal. My high-lakes-and- streams file folder grew a little fatter thanks to that generous moment. I probably could make a small fortune auctioning off that folder. But that would be like selling the children.

Which is to say, don't expect any GPS coordinates here. I give away only the names of easy lakes everyone knows about, not the one where rose-colored brook trout jump like salmon.

This is the season when many readers with high aspirations cast e-mail requests for fishable mountain waters. Here's what I've been telling them:

Buy a copy of Kip Carey's Official Colorado Fishing Guide. You'll find them in some bookstores or outdoor stores and at FishingColoWyo.com.

Your first source should be a USDA Forest Service map covering the national forest where you want to fish. The maps show named lakes and numbered trails. Pick a few and look them up in Kip Carey's guidebook.

Polish your preparations with a USGS 7-minute quadrangle topo map. Then plan your backpacker for early in the morning, in time to find safe haven from afternoon lightning storms.

The joy is in the discovery. Some people fish for fish, others for places where mountaintops snake away to the horizon, plumes of stars march out at night and dinner is freeze-dried.

While anglers at more civilized destinations dawdle over their fly boxes, oblivious to traffic, the high-lakes trekker gets to gape at volcanic cirques, romping elk calves and beautiful trout.

Thanks to stocking-policy changes that started a decade ago, most of those trout would be cutthroats, restored to their native drainages: Rio Grande cutts, Colorado River cutts and, on the Front Range, greenback cutthroats, the state fish.

Skilled pilots stock fingerling cutthroat trout from airplanes, dropping them from a few feet above each lake's surface. The stockings are needed because, while trout reproduce in some streams and lakes from 9,000 to 12,000 feet, success is minimal.

"For the most part, we have converted the high lakes to native cutthroat species," said Greg Gerlich, the Colorado Division of Wildlife's chief aquatic biologist. "We stock most lakes every other year. But there are a number of lakes the biologists want stocked each year, so they've taken it upon themselves to do that, sometimes with horse packing trips."

More successful high-country spawners are brook trout, descendants of the eastern char that William Byers, founder of the Rocky Mountain News, introduced in the 1880s into the Colorado River drainage. Brookies are hardy and abundant, except at lower elevations, where, in recent years, some populations have succumbed to whirling disease and others have been shoved aside by brown trout.

Cutthroats generally are admired, photographed and released. But the high-country rule calls for a ceremonial dinner of brookies, sometimes roasted on a stick over a campfire.

It doesn't get any better than up there, at Whatchamacallit Lake.

dentrye@RockyMountainNews.com

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News