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DENTRY: Madness of brook trout not easy to shake

Published August 3, 2007 at midnight

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It is creepy business, this brook trout curse. The afflicted lurk in shadows and peer from bushes. Sometimes they slither like salamanders and roll cast with half a fly rod.

You know the profile: loner. Necromancer interpreting dark secrets writ in burbling brooks. Definitely delusional, obsessed with bejeweled fish, some no bigger than cheroots.

With apologies to a good friend whom I promised an outing for brook trout, I haven't forgotten. I went ahead to scout for your perfect brook. It isn't true that I've run amok or gone native. Mosquito bites and deer flies caused this glazed stare.

I have ranked the best streams for our outing, so I've shaved the list down to about 70, with a dozen at the top. Every one is somewhere between Dove Creek and Hog Park.

The best part about brook trout creeping has been the departure from commerce. There are no guides working the high-and-brushy, no fly shops. There are no fishing tournaments, no book signings or seminars, no angling celebrities with funny hats and sponsor patches quoting into video cams.

In a summer of creeping around, I've seen only one other fisherman, but it was an expert. It was a mink.

What there is - just downstream under that alder - is an undercut eddy. Something flashed there in the water. It was a monster brookie the size of your bug spray can.

The only way to catch it is to break down your 6-foot fly rod and fish with the 3-foot tip. Lie on your belly and tease the fish with an old-fashioned wet fly.

Nobody has counted the thousands of miles of brook trout streams in Colorado's high country. But I ran across a figure about the density of brookies in some of those streams. A few years ago, biologists figured out some populations had grown to 3,500 fish per acre.

Of course, it takes several miles of streams no wider than shower stalls to make an acre. But you get the picture.

Brook trout are prolific. States farther east, where brook trout are native, wish they could grow them the way the Rocky Mountains do.

Biologists converting Colorado's high country to native cutthroat trout have their work cut out for them. In a few suitable creeks, fish barriers have been erected to separate the brookies from natives.

In others, the char and the trout coexist. Since brookies are fall spawners and cutthroats spawn in spring, there is no chance of cross-breeding.

There also is no chance the non-native brookies ever will go away. While brown trout have displaced brookies in some waters, tons of watersheds at higher elevations in national forests remain naturally reproducing brookie haunts.

The way to find a few is to hang a forest map on the wall and throw darts.

The ideal brookie stream has numerous groundwater sources, cool springs seeping from underground. Aquatic scientists call such courses "summercool" streams because they keep water temperatures cool in summer while preventing freeze-ups in winter.

If you aren't threading through deadfalls and creeping under bog birches, you aren't brookie fishing. And if you aren't stealthy at it, forget anything you thought you knew about presentation.

A wild brook trout will spook at the drop of a spruce needle. Up in the high-and-wild, presentation isn't something you do with a fly, but with your whole, besotted being.