I'm lucky enough that my wife had a week-long conference to attend in Aspen the third week in August, and Mike Fitzgerald, Jr. at Frontiers was kind enough to recommend that I contact Taylor Creek Fly Shop in Basalt for a fishing guide. He said they fished the Roaring Fork, the Frying Pan, and the Colorado. Knowing that Colorado rivers face a lot of fishing pressure, I had low expectations for the fishing part of this trip and agreed to go mostly for other reasons. This was reinforced when I made guide reservations about six weeks ahead of time and found some days already booked. Clearly there was fishing pressure, but boy was I wrong about its effects!
We stopped at Taylor Creek Fly Shop in Basalt on Hwy 82 on the way up to Aspen from Hwy 70 out of Denver. The joke is that Basalt is where all of the millionaires now live after being driven out of Aspen by the billionaires. Actually, the part I saw was just a nice little town but I guess it's growing pretty fast.
The owner, Bill, was running the shop that evening working several customers and a phone that wouldn't stop ringing. He finally got a break and after introductions he verified my bookings for Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and told me to be back the next morning between 8 and 8:30 AM
I had told Bill on the phone that I only wanted to fish dry flies, so maybe that influenced his assignment of guides, but that first day I drew a fellow named Dan Quinto who seemed helpful and easy to like right from the start. He bundled me and my gear into his truck and drove me a few miles up the frying pan river were we geared up and climbed down the short steep bank to the river.
It's
nice scenery around the Frying Pan: mostly green mountains with interesting
stratified rock outcroppings. There is a road all along the river from
Basalt up to the dam, but the traffic along the road seems to be mainly
fisherman and guides mixed with a few power company trucks.
I'd guess the river is something like 50 feet wide with a typical depth of 2 to 3 feet with some deeper holes and some shallow riffles to keep the rafts and tubers away. It's a tailwater, but doesn't have the deep, slow, and sluggish feel of others I've fished. The roadside and banks are very clean, partly because I noticed Dan picking up as we went along. I guess at least some of the guides and fisherman do the same. There are enough trees to provide shade for parking and lunch spots and to produce some interesting shade patterns along the river edge. And not one mosquito.
The rocks are nice and flat making for relatively easy wading except that the current is pretty strong in places. The water is a not-quite-clear yellow-green making the river look considerably deeper than it is. There a long runs of riffles and sections where the river tumbles over fairly large rocks making for lots of deep pocket water with 3 to 5 foot bubbling pools. Mostly the river is open, but there is some overhanging brush and trees and a few places where the bank away from the road is a steep rock.
Dan took charge of me more than I normally allow a guide to do, tied one of his favorite flies onto my Loomis IMX 4 wt, and had me make some very short dangling casts into several small deep pools. I don't remember the details of that first morning too clearly, but over the course of a few hours we caught some nice fish (browns, rainbows, and one small cutthroat), and Dan and I learned something about each other. By lunch he had learned that I can cast a fair distance, mend, do a reach and a couple of other casts when necessary (some of the time while hitting the right spot), and understood the importance of a good drift. I had learned that he loved this river, his guiding job, had worked a number of years as a chef and head-chef at various hotels and resorts, and now owns and manages a string of cabins next to the river in addition to guiding over 200 days each year.
Two
of the days, lunch was a freshly grilled chicken sandwich, pasta, and a
salad prepared on the back of his truck in a shady parking area next to
the river. On the middle day we had a Caesar salad, a cold rice mixture,
and toasted muffins. It was all great. Dan doesn't bring any beer, but
that was perfect with me as I don't drink anyway. His cooler was full of
ice so the soft drinks and water were really cold, a nice change from most
of the guide coolers I've sampled.
Each day Dan jumped around to various places on the river looking for fish and avoiding as much as possible other fisherman. Parts of the river were fairly slow, but other parts were extremely productive with fish rising to every second or third cast with a good drift. There were pale mayflies, caddis, and occasionally a green drake on the water each day and it quickly became clear that big trout would come out of deep pools for a well presented drake imitation.
But not any imitation! The most reliable fly over the three days was the green drake compara dun in various sizes (mostly a 12 I think). Variations with white wings and a cripple imitation produced nothing. Parachute adams, humpys, and Royal Wulffs got a few strikes but generally from smaller fish.
I landed one large memorable brown of about 18" that first day and several slightly smaller browns and rainbows. Most of the fish I caught were browns and almost all of the fish were 14" or better. I don't bother to count above two or three fish, but we must have landed at least thirty each day. We were using 6x tippet, and I broke off several large fish on the first day, usually on the strike, and by the end of that day we had resolved to check the leader for nicks after every fish. I was also arguing that the tippet should be tied to the leader with a double surgeon's knot rather than the guide preferred' blood knot. In my experience, I have never had the double surgeon's knot break, whereas I've noted twice this summer that blood knots have broken.
Back at the shop I raved about my guide and the river to the shop owner, Bill, and requested that Dan be assigned to me for the later days. With a little juggling of the books this was quickly arranged.
Wednesday was even better than Monday since Dan and I had adapted to each other. we were catching fish left and right and trying to remember to keep checking the tippet. With all of the action it was hard to do and I still managed to break off several of the biggest fish. After one break at the blood knot, Dan agreed to try the surgeon's...and we never broke at that point again.
On this second day, I particularly remember a couple of occasions were we took several fish in close succession while standing only a short distance from other fishermen who were nymphing unsuccessfully in more attractive water. Dan told me that he really prefers dry fly fishing and usually even starts out his beginners on dries on this river. But as usual, most of the other guides and fishermen seemed to be sticking to nymphs. It was kind of fun when a couple of them gave up and moved on not fifty yards from where we were taking hard hitting fish on the surface, whooping it up, and having a grand time.
Again we tried several places along the river, spending a short, unproductive time in the big fish (and heavily fished) water just below the dam. Most of the fisherman were clustered in this water or a few miles downstream where the drakes were said to be hatching most heavily. Generally Dan avoided these popular regions and we fished mainly the more difficult pockets with shorter casts and harder to manage drifts a little lower down the river.
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It became clear to me that the browns were sitting mainly in the tails of the deep pockets, just above a big rock, but that they were apparently deep enough that it took a good drift of at least five or six feet before they would come up. But when that all worked, they came up more often than not. Rainbows were watching mainly the seams so one could pretty well choose what kind of trout to catch. We took a couple of fish and had lots of misses on my ties of paradrakes, but the compara dun still proved to be the best choice.The strikes on the green drake imitations were often viscous and sudden, sometimes with the fish coming clear out the water on the strike. I remember particularly one large rainbow slashing out of the water with the fly in its mouth not twenty feet in front of me only to shake off the fly before reentering the water. Just when you steeled yourself to these sudden eruptions, the next fish would sip the fly down with hardly a ripple, adding considerably to the challenge.
I got a several particularly nice rainbows this day on a long casts to pools well upstream. Typically they were something around 16" and very healthy and chunky. A couple of the larger ones had curious stub noses...reminded me of a bulldog.
Back at the shop that evening, I asked if we could do the next day as afternoon and evening. I had seen fish rising in the river that flows through Aspen the evening before and was eager to try the evening rise. Again the books were juggled to free Dan for the evening and all was arranged for me to sleep late on Thursday.
I met Dan at the shop at 1 PM on Friday and told him that I had enjoyed napping and recovering that morning as he had about worn me out the previous day. He admitted that he had gone to bed at 9:30 the previous night telling his wife that he had been run into the ground by a sixty-one year old man. I told him it wasn't so bad as I was only sixty, and he felt a little better.
He had hoped to take me to one of their other rivers in the afternoon, but after checking around he couldn't find a river where fish were rising to dries, so we went back to the Frying Pan. And what a good choice that was!
Even though I had had great fishing and seen most of what the river had to offer, the first couple of hours on the river this afternoon was to be the best yet. We put into the river at a place where there was about 150 yards of rapidly falling water over medium fast rocks...sort of a deep and fast riffle above a pool. There was a guy nymphing in the pool, so we moved up the riffle about 50 yards before moving away from the edge and beginning to cast. No sign of rising fish and no action on the nymphing below us.
But this was one of those times and places where fish came up from every pool, just where you expected them to be. It took us over two hours to work up that 100 yards, hitting every pocket and taking fish of 14" or better one after the other. I remember the guy down below left for awhile then reappeared. Dan suggested that he had gone into town for some dry flies. Strangely all the time we were moving up the riffle he kept fishing the same spot and we never saw him catch anything.
Near the top of the riffle, I noticed there was a power company truck parked along the side of the road with a couple of guys watching us. After taking three good fish from three casts into three pockets, I glanced up to see them pull away with a thumbs up sign out the window. Dan got a real workout with many of these very active fish as he repeatedly raced downstream to net them. There were several that I would never have landed by myself wading in the middle of this broken water. Mostly they were large enough that several runs were required before they could be guided anywhere near the net.
We finally worked ourselves up to a place where there was a vertical rock wall on the far bank, deep slow water near the wall and a run of fast water between us and it. Clearly there had to be a big brown who had staked out the inviting but difficult to reach water next to that bank. This time my reach cast worked just right the first time and I got a perfect drift along the entire edge. Right near the end of the drift, a big brown drifted up out of the dark water right on schedule, opened wide so I was looking right down its throat, and slowly engulfed the fly. He turned and I tightened slowly...just like I'd been taught in New Zealand...and we were away. Dan was up and down the river and back and forth across it, as I tried to play the fish into his net. Finally, thanks to a freshly tied fly and the surgeons knot, we had him in the net despite the rocks and 6x tippet. He covered the length of Dan's forearm, from fingertips to the bend of his elbow, a distance later measured to be 18". It looked and seemed bigger at the time, but maybe it was just because everything had clicked and this was a particularly heavy and lively fish.
During
the course of that 100 yards, I also managed a grand slam of four fish
varieties: browns, rainbows, a small brook trout, and what Dan called a
Colorado mountain cutthroat. The latter was unlike any cutthroat I have
seen. It was about 12" long, nice and fat with and a light green back and
an almost pink underbelly. A very pretty and unusual trout. How it got
into this tailwater I have no idea.
The rest of the day was anticlimactic. We took fish at about the rate of the first two days for the rest of the afternoon and a few smaller fish from a nice shallow run in the evening. The evening rise occurred on schedule as we reached the head of the run, but I found it difficult to catch fish as the light was fading and the fish were sipping everywhere. Too much to eat and the fly I could see wasn't quite what they wanted. Still, it was interesting.
All in all, this was the best week's fishing I have had in the US and it occurred in three days. With a hard working and enthusiastic guide and a fairly well presented dry fly, this river yielded many, many fish in a very exciting range of sizes. After the first day, Dan and I worked as a very effective team, and he seemed to be having as much fun as I was. Fishing with a guide is expensive, but I'm sure I caught many more fish than I would have by myself, and we returned them to the river in better condition than if I had had to bring them to a net in my own hand. We also waded in more difficult water than I would attempt by myself, but thanks to his firm grip I didn't fall in once. As with any heavily fished river, the fish are not in the easy places, but with the right guide and some of the basic skills it's a great river. Needless to say, I'll be going back, but I'll have to do without Dan: he's bought a restaurant and has gone back to being a chef.
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© 1996-1999 L.R. Fortney