Walden – The candy store closed early, or at least so nearly so that only a tiny sliver of light shone through a crack.
Less than a week after that last, thin sheet of ice peeled away from those deliciously rich reservoirs of North Park, the window for which anglers had waited all winter had swung shut.
No more big rainbow trout prowling the shore at North Delaney Butte Lake. The big spawners had come and gone, leaving behind only anglers’ wild tales of lunkers caught or lost.
A few scattered bank hangers remained at nearby South Delaney to tease a puzzled cadre of latecomers from various points along the Front Range. But the water was partly clouded from a recent influx of water and finding them proved less than easy.
A group of veterans from Fort Collins found a looseknit pod in the usual spot near the boat ramp, where Phil Small teased up a 7-pounder. But the best of it was gone in a heartbeat. Blink and you missed it.
This leaves flat-water enthusiasts with the usual task of dredging them up from somewhere out there beneath the waves, which, after all, is the true delight of it all. You can count on a single finger – that one for Spinney Mountain Reservoir – the Colorado reservoirs that grow bigger, better and more catchable trout than the ones in North Park. We’re not exactly talking punishment here.
Egg term may have ended early, but midge season already has begun. At both the East and South Delaneys, trout were rising to a dark midge that boiled up off the lake at the urging of warm sunshine. Small, who beats a regular trail to these lakes, used a tiny black emerger to take trout in the surface film, then a Griffith’s Gnat to tempt them when they looked on top.
“The trick was finding the flat slicks where the wind was not blowing,” Small said of a strategy that consistently moved fish at both lakes between noon and 4 p.m.
As the season progresses, midges will morph to damsel flies, then to callibaetis. In the middle of all this swims a thick bouillabaisse of scuds, leeches and snails. Little wonder that trout grow an inch a month through the summer.
No real need to fret over arcane entomological puzzles. Tie on a No. 16 olive scud or a Size 8 olive or black Wooly Bugger and hang on to your rod handle.
Put a lid over the three Delaney Butte lakes, Lake John and Cowdrey Lake, mix vigorously and you’ve got a fine kettle of fish. Ken Kehmeier, a biologist who has spent a long career stirring this pot, takes pains to provide something for every angling taste.
At the top of the list, there’s the trophy brown trout fishery at North Delaney, among the few Colorado still waters with Gold Medal designation. To maintain a seasonal balance and a hedge against an occasional siege of lockjaw by the browns, Kehmeier began mixing in a pinch of rainbows at the north lake. Some have taken trophy shape.
What once was a dominance of large rainbows at South Delaney has faded to an up-and-coming crop of Snake River cutthroat that top out at 18 inches or so. East Delaney, smallest of the trio, offers lots of rainbows but few of serious size. The Delaneys are managed jointly under an artificials-only, two-fish regulation.
Lake John, largest in the park, adds bait fishing to the scramble for rainbows and cutts. But the sleeper here is Cowdrey, a shallow lake that suffers a yo-yo cycle of winter kill but now has prospered for six years. Kehmeier said he believes Cowdrey, also open to all methods, may hold the biggest fish of all. His postulation received a ringing endorsement by a grizzled local who, through a car window partially raised against the wind, told of a fish that dragged a full spool of 8-pound test out to some distant part of the lake before swimming away with the hook.
There is much to love during springtime in the park: a bald eagle flapping past on loosely hinged wings, yellow-headed blackbirds crooning in the willows, coots chasing and cackling through bankside vegetation now flooded with fresh water.
This latter development may be best of all. Every lake is brimming water; never has there been a more ample supply. More water means bigger fish, less chance for mortality in the winter and an even grander bounty when the ice recedes again.
When the candy store opens next time, I intend to be waiting at the door, first in line.
Listen to Charlie Meyers at 9 a.m. each Saturday on “The Fan Outdoors,” KKFN 950 AM. He can be reached at 303-820-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
