Anyone looking for a lament to the South Platte River should consider giving Pat Dorsey’s new book a miss.
Instead of grief over the impact of fire, this best-ever work about Colorado’s favorite trout stream offers a celebration of revival and every angler’s potential to share in it.
Four years in the making, “A Fly Fisher’s Guide to the South Platte River” will debut at fly shops and book stores Sept. 21. The book is like nothing ever published about the river Front Range urbanites love to death.
On one hand, it’s an intense tutorial with all the key directional arrows for improved success on a stream that may be the most daunting in the country.
On the other, it’s a handsome hardback in large format that demands display space on an appropriate piece of fine furniture.
Thus we have the ultimate contradiction: a slick coffee table beauty that soon will sprout tabs of sticky notes and, ultimately, the dog-eared look of a handy reference.
Dorsey, a 42-year-old Denver native, began fishing the Platte with his father as a young boy. Now, as head guide at Blue Quill Angler in Evergreen, he has during the past 10 years perhaps spent more days on the water than any other person.
The result is an abiding romance that permeates the pages of a book whose lessons are enhanced with 160 color photographs, illustrations by noted angler Dan Wright and various hatch charts.
“I love this river because it’s so technical,” Dorsey said. “I like catching big fish on small flies. This river can humble you at any time. It’s a great classroom.”
This sets the stage to examine the book as a teaching tool for a river that, for its tiny insects, erratic flow and, above all, intense angler pressure, ranks as a constant challenge.
With delightfully fluid style for his first book, Dorsey directs a tour, both concise and lilting, through each section of the river, telling its secrets at every turn.
While targeting the specific nuances of the South Platte, Dorsey expands the format to include his immense knowledge of fly-fishing in general; the basic teachings of this book echo to every river of our lives.
The message is plain: If you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere.
It’s no surprise that Dorsey places supreme emphasis on those diminutive food forms that form the crux of the South Platte test. His examples are pointed specifically toward the Platte, but you can take wing with these same insects to many other rivers around the globe.
Dorsey devotes a particularly agreeable chapter to specific fly patterns for the Platte, providing not only photos and recipes, but an informative chronicle of how each was developed.
What you won’t find on these glossy pages tracing the river from its wellspring above timberline in the Mosquito Range to immersion in Chatfield Reservoir at the southwest Denver suburbs is the slightest trace of gloom.
Even as the river in the Deckers area struggles to recover from the devastating effects of wildfire, Dorsey directs his emphasis toward that not-too-distant point when nature’s cleansing flow flushes away everything but the memory.
“The river is coming back. It’s only a matter of time before it heals itself,” Dorsey said between puffs while hiking deep into Cheesman Canyon last week.
He put it more succinctly in the book’s chapter devoted to the aftermath of the Hayman and Schoonover fires that bracketed the river in 2002.
“The South Platte River has faced distress before, and it always seems to prevail somehow,” he said.
Both from an esthetic and emotional perspective, Dorsey’s book – $49.95 from Boulder-based Pruett Publishing Company – stands as an important element in that revitalization.
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.
