Colorado Grayling

Robert from Replicas Inc. had a sweet replica of a grayling in his shop when I picked up my Frying Pan bow replica a while back. Ben and I got to talking to him and he mentioned that there was a good amount of grayling in Joe Wright Reservoir. What?? I had no idea we had grayling in Colorado.

I've always been interested in them and can remember reading articles about grayling fishing in Alaska when I was a kid. Ben was actually stationed up in Alaska for a while and had caught quite a few of them. It sounded like a blast. Ben remembered them being really aggressive little fish that gave you a good run or two and weren't too picky about fly selection. We were both on board to hit the reservoir. I sent an email to myself so I wouldn't forget the name of the reservoir and we left it at that for quite some time.

Ben actually brought it up one weeknight when we were trying to figure out where to go the following weekend. Sweet! I had pretty much forgot about it. Pays to have good fishing buddies. We decided to leave fairly early so we could get up there for some mid morning fishing.

It is a bit of a haul from Colorado Springs and you have to drive past a TON of good looking water on the Cache La Poudre River to get up there but its worth the trip. The mission was for at least one of us to catch a grayling. We had no idea how many grayling were in the reservoir, if we could find them to put flies in front of them, or what flies to even start out with.

My first grayling

Lucky for us the grayling lived up to their reputation. It took about a minute and a half to get a hit on a #18 red Copper John and about 5 more seconds to realize it was a grayling. Mission accomplished! Everything else was icing on the cake.

Grayling are in fact pretty aggressive little fish. Most takes were VERY obvious. We caught grayling on nymphs and dries. It really didn't matter what you used but Copper Johns, Hares Ears, San Juans worked well below the surface and Caddis and Adams worked well on top. Ben even caught a few on his Tenkara rod on Tenkara flies.

The action did taper off the closer we got to noon. The next time we hit this reservoir we want to start fishing right at daylight. I'm guessing you would get at least 4 hours of crazy good dry fly fishing in.

We did hit the Cache La Poudre on the way out but we didn't go downstream far enough. We hit some pretty rough water and were limited to a few good runs. We did manage to pull a few nice browns though.

Next trip up this way is going to be an orvernighter. We are going to camp along the river, fish the reservoir first the in the morning, and then hit the river around the hatchery in the afternoon. Going to be sweet. This state has no shortage of cool places to go fishing. Very cool to add a new species to the list. Still have pike and large mouth bass to knock out! Not to mention some monster carp.

Hayden Ranch on the Arkansas

Lucas with his first fish on a fly!

My buddy Lucas Wilson was in town for a few days for a Soundgarden concert at Red Rocks and I wanted to get a fly fishing trip in while he was here. I had recently been over Tennessee Pass and was impressed with the looks of the Arkansas headwaters. Usually I peel off of 24 before I get up that far on the river. To me it looked like a lot of water and not a lot of people.  I didn't want Lucas to have to use 6x tippet and microscopic flies, and the normal crew was in the mood for new water so we decided to give it a shot.

Lucas, Mike, Ben and I dropped by ArkAnglers in Buena Vista on the way up to
grab some advice and a few flies. We didn't really know where we wanted to start fishing and we were told that the crowd thinned out a bit up in the Hayden Ranch area. We decided to drive out of town for a while and hit whatever looked good on our way up to Hayden Ranch. We saw plenty of good water but it seemed that the further we drove, the busier it got. When we got to the overpass the parking lot was packed! We were pretty bummed out but decided to give it a shot anyway.

Mike with a nice brown

We jumped out and rigged up and headed for the water. As soon as we got over the first hill we found the crowd and they weren't fishing the Ark! There was a pond just over the hill from the parking lot and it was completely surrounded by bubbas. Sweet! Looked like we were going to have some room on the river.

The river looked great. Reminded me a bit of the Tomahawk area of the South Platte. It was COLD too! Lucas made us all aware of just how cold it was. I probably should have let him jump in a pair of waders since he isn't used to cold water but he's a former Marine and I figured he'd get over it.

The fishing got better the further upstream we moved. Not much of a hatch when we first started fishing so I was fishing a two nymph rig. Chartreuse Copper Johns #16 worked best early. Caddis started hatching about an hour after we got there and we switched to a two dry rig consisting of a Yellow Sally and Caddis.  The Caddis worked pretty consistantly but the Yellow Sally brought up the bigger of the fish we caught that day. Didn't just bring them up either, it made them go crazy on the take. REALLY aggressive/splashy takes! Good times :-)

We all caught fish and had a great time. Next time we head up this way we are going to walk in a little further before fishing. I would have liked to have kept fishing upstream another mile or so but the weather didn't allow that. Definitely some water I plan on fishing again.