Heeney – Blame it on a steep descent to the water where the only things missing are crampons and a herd of mountain goats.
Or a painfully low flow that didn’t present the river in its finest form.
Or maybe even the fact that the preholiday crowd had its sights elevated to a more distant horizon.
How else does one explain that, with runoff raging all about, one of the region’s most appealing tailwaters remained virtually deserted?
Such often is the case with the Blue River in the shadow of Green Mountain Dam, a hideaway that relatively few people know.
Consider this: The three companions who skidded down the steep trail from the parking area below the dam counted a collective 100 years of Colorado residency, time often spent in loud lament over crowded conditions. Yet none ever had set foot on this stretch of the Blue that winds through 2 miles of public access, enough room to escape ’round the bend even if several other anglers actually showed up.
Like sections of other rivers distinguished by canyons and dams, here the present aspect is formed jointly by millions of years of erosion and six decades of water regulation.
A jumble of boulders cleaved from steep walls make this canyon one of the most scenic places relatively few people ever have seen, a trip back in time, touching creation. Cliffs with stone towers rise sharply out of the depths, home for a large, dark bird that spins circles across a sky colored electric blue.
Where a rock the size of a small house pushes into the water, ouzels have made a nest beneath a sharp overhang, pouring a stream of musical sounds. Farther down, where fangs of rock split the current, a pair of geese set up housekeeping against a water timetable that soon might wash the enterprise away.
Since its completion in 1943 as part of the Colorado-Big
Thompson Project, Green Mountain Reservoir has served as a great repository to deliver approximately 52,000 acre feet of water annually to western Colorado in compensation for a similar diversion to the northern Front Range.
Much of this comes in a great gush beginning in late summer. In its present storage mode to capture upstream runoff, the dam release is a paltry 60 cubic feet per second, a trickle compared with native flows or with the volume that will multiply 10 times in a few weeks. This classic tailwater condition creates a fishery characterized by a rich inventory of insects – midges, mayflies, caddis and craneflies – that reside beneath a carpet of vegetation promoted by the nitrogen mixing from the dam.
When the water is low, fishing success diminishes except during periods when insect hatches put trout on the move. When the gates open, trout are pushed to the sides by the volume, whereupon a different angling pattern emerges.
That’s when a hardy breed of river runners improbably shinny rafts down the precipice for a wild ride down to the confluence with the Colorado near Kremmling, a trip often spiced by large trout.
For now, anglers content themselves with generally smaller trout that congregate in the deeper runs interspersed between elongated riffles. This should not suggest that big fish don’t exist. One of the handful of anglers who visited the river just over a week ago told a wide-eyed tale of a torpedo trout that raced off downstream with the broken tippet. It did not return the fly.
Because of security concerns in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the area below the dam has an established timetable of operation: 6:30 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 8 a.m.-7 p.m. Friday through Sunday, including holiday Mondays. Further information is available by phoning 970-962-4326.
Listen to Charlie Meyers at 9 a.m. each Saturday on “The Fan Outdoors,” radio KKFN 950 AM. He can be reached at 303-820-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
