We wrapped up our tour through the Southern Rockies on another beautiful stretch of water. No natives were targeted here, but I had heard word from a friend that we should fish here if we had the chance, and given how it looked on aerial photography, I couldn’t disagree with that statement. It looked fishy as hell.
I started off the day with a rough looking rainbow and Blake got himself a couple of browns early on. About an hour in I started to get dialed in, and caught a lot of browns when that happened. They were small to start the day, but seemed to pick up size as the day progressed.
At some point during our day we were the subject of many a passing tourist’s camera as a train rolled on by. I was able to catch another ugly rainbow and even a brook trout shortly after – that’s a slam back East, lol!
Blake motored through some tough fishing and ended the day with a solid brown. It’s rare when it happens, but I think I topped him in size and numbers that day. We made the long walk back to the car, cleaned up as best we could, and then made the drive back towards Colorado Springs – passing through a rogue hail storm along the way.
As is customary on all of these trips we found a couple breweries to try out before calling it a night. For those interested, I thought the Bristol set up in the old school with the other vendors was pretty interesting, as was their crowd – very eclectic – Urban Animal had the better beer though – either are worth the stop.
As the title suggests we needed one more trout species to finish the New Mexico Trout Challenge – so that was the plan for the day – catch a rainbow trout in New Mexico. It sounds simple enough, but you never know how the day can go. I know more about native trout species than I do transplants, so the first thing to figure out was where the best place to do that would be – especially somewhat close to where we were in southern Colorado. We figured that may be in the Rio Chama so we drove to Chama and stopped in for breakfast before we started fishing.
We tried to head to some easy public access close to town and got confused when the road leading us there had a gate on it – which turned what I thought was easy, drive-up access into hike-in access. I wasn’t sure this was a good stretch of river and I’d hate to waste time hiking in to crap water, so we opted to head elsewhere. Not finding much in terms of easy public access in town, we decided to stop at a local business which had river frontage and asked them if we could access the water from their property – thankfully they agreed and we were able to start our rainbow quest.
Blake was able to get the monkey off his back early with his first fish being a rainbow. My first fish was a brown, so I had to sweat it out a bit. We were maybe an hour into fishing, but I was able to catch a rainbow as well. He actually took a big Chubby Chernobyl – trout on top are always my favorite kind of trout.
We kept fishing for a bit, wading up from our access. Although the river was surrounded by private land, most of the river frontage was not developed, so you really didn’t get that sense you were in town. It was nice stretch of water so we didn’t feel the need to rush out of there.
We caught a few more browns alongside our lone rainbows. Content with completing the NM trout challenge and the few browns we caught, we opted to head back into southern Colorado and set up camp for the night, closer to where we planned to fish the next morning. After setting up camp we were able to hit another stretch of water near the camp site. It was a recreation area where a stream flowed through a meadow into a lake, a beautiful setting, we figured there’d be trout there too.
Not long into the fishing I stuck a really nice brown. Outside of that brown the fishing was not great. I caught a stocker rainbow towards the lake, but the in the stream itself the fishing was tough. The brown trout certainly made the short evening session worth it, but so did the scenery.
A cold beer, a hot meal, and a campfire sounded like the perfect way to end day 4 so we headed back to camp. The next day would be our last day of fishing. As you’ve probably figured out, I’m a very goals-minded fishermen. I like to have some sort of checklist of things to punch off throughout a day or throughout a trip. With all of those goals I had in mind for this trip accomplished we now had one more day of fun fishing. Of course, it’s all fun fishing, but there was no pressure to catch anything specific heading into tomorrow. I had a river picked out that I had gotten one good report on, but I wasn’t able to get a lot of info on it otherwise. It looked pretty awesome on aerial photography, so it’d be another fun day of exploring on day 5.
Man, it doesn’t seem very fair to write a blog post, end it with “to be continued”, and not actually continue the story, lol. Especially when the tale takes place on one of the best cutthroat streams I’ve ever fished. My apologies on the three year absence; the adventures never stopped, but the passion to document them sure has – hopefully y’all have found me on Instagram by now@mountainstomarsh
This place was special. A Colorado stronghold for Rio Grande cutthroat. I knew we needed to fish it on our trip based on research ahead of time, but also on the recommendations of people I trust. A lot of times places like that have a hard time living up to their billing – your expectations going in can be too great. This place didn’t have that problem. Cutthroat were tucked in seemingly every undercut bank ready to come out and eat a well placed dry fly. The fish made us look like pros that day.
I was originally worried about other anglers – whether they were there that day or just from the pressure they had put on the stream in the days prior, but that was really all for naught. When the fishing is that good time just kind of goes away, hunger never sets in, you forget about everything else going on, and are consumed by what you are doing – catching fish, lol. It’s an amazing feeling.
We fished our way up the stream, catching our way through beaver ponds, until eventually we ended up at a lake. What a dynamic fishery – a forested section to a meadow section to a section with beaver ponds and eventually a lake – I told y’all this was a special place.
Some time has passed by now and my recollection of the day is probably hazier than it would have been had I written this shortly after the trip, but from what I can recall we didn’t catch fish right away on the lake. There were fish holding too deep to sight fish, but there were also sporadic cruisers which you could try and cast to. As we made our way around we were able to catch some fish, but the fishing there wasn’t lights out – it was a fun challenge though and some of the fish we did catch were really colored up – some of the most vibrant reds were on trout from the lake.
What I do remember very well was that this was the toughest hike out I can remember ever doing, lol. After fishing as far as we did and for as long as we did my legs were shot. There were numerous times I had to stop and take extended breaks on the walk back. Time and neglect are not ideal ways to stay in shape and they definitely caught up with me on that day.
We managed to make it out before the sun set though and I will tell you that I would do this trip all over again just to fish this stream. Definitely a top 3 cutthroat destination that I’ve been to – right up there with Shangri-La – a stream we hit during our Wyoming Cutt Slam trip.
Mountains to Marsh 