Radium – These are days when anxiety reigns, this unsettled time in April and early May when stream fishermen grow addicted to The Weather Channel and everyone becomes a prophet. It’s time for dark disappointment and spoiled dreams. But it also sparkles with opportunity and, above all, hope. In a season ripe with impending runoff, anglers must keep a favorite trout shop on speed dial and hope nothing changes after they hang up the phone.
Take the current situation on the Roaring Fork River. “The lower Fork is day to day from here on out,” Tom Trowbridge reported Friday from his watch station at the Roaring Fork Angler shop in Glenwood Springs. Rain and low-elevation meltout on a tributary of the Crystal River caused the Fork to blow out below Carbondale.
“It’s improving, but there’s a question how good it’s going to get,” said Trowbridge, perhaps with an eye on the horizon for the next storm.
The message: What you saw yesterday isn’t necessarily what you’re going to get today.
As a second case in point, there was the situation Thursday on a float trip on the middle reaches of the Colorado River toward State Bridge, something that seemed a perfectly fine idea when John St. John suggested it just four days earlier.
Blue skies. Moderate, mostly clear flows. Fish snapping like crocodiles at several types of streamers. But when two anglers hopscotched between patches of snow on an early-morning drive from Denver, things changed dramatically. The river that slid past beneath a patchwork sky reflected the dull cast of coffee, with cream.
St. John had trailed south from Steamboat Springs pulling a new-age drift boat manufactured by his company, which he named Hog Island. Prodded why he might give such a splendid boat this inglorious name, St. John was quick to explain.
“It’s a place below Jackson Hole that I came to love when I was a guide on the Snake River,” he said. So there.
A frequent visitor to this stretch of the Colorado, St. John quickly perceived a need to move upstream, hopefully toward a cleaner flow. As the primary culprit, he fingered Sheephorn Creek, which poured liquid mud into the Colorado near the hamlet of Radium.
“We’ll float down from Pumphouse,” he said, as he selected the popular 7-mile drift that launched us above the problem. Or so we thought.
Don Watts earlier had declared an ambition to experience a fishing float in a snowstorm. The fact that he only last year wandered up from the general direction of Florida to launch Denver’s Bass Pro Shops superstore might be cited as excuse for his delusion. Even in jest, be careful what you wish for.
In a way that wind forms clouds from clear mountain skies, a growing gust literally blew the sun out, like a candle. Like some dark curtain of doom, a squall line bore in from the west.
In a twinkling, Watts had his wish, then wished he didn’t.
Ice gathered in the rod guides. The water turned mocha with trickles of silt. Any hope of progressive heat percolation to wake slumbering trout vanished beneath a blanket of white.
Such situations will be common on many untamed rivers with the evolution of Colorado’s notoriously uncertain spring. Others controlled by dams will squirt periodic excess as water managers manipulate reservoir levels to allow for bountiful snowmelt.
Meanwhile, keep your fingers on those phone buttons.
Here’s a rundown on the better rivers that remain in play.
Roaring Fork: The reach above Carbondale is clear and fishing very well with stonefly nymphs, baetis nymphs and midges. Some baetis dry flies, the Blue-winged Olives, have appeared just beyond Basalt. Fryingpan: Flows jumped from 160 to 274 cubic feet per second, but fish are active on midges, mysis and baetis nymphs. Arkansas: Trout on the lower river toward Parkdale are moving actively to baetis nymphs and other insects, keying on an upward motion best imitated by soft-hackle flies. Caddis have sealed their cases on this downstream reach, and Bill Edrington of Royal Gorge Anglers expects the first emergers to appear toward midweek, weather permitting. Meanwhile, Blue-winged Olive dries are starting to appear along the river upstream to Salida. The best such activity can be found between Salida and Howard, where subsurface activity also abounds. At 298 cfs, the Arkansas is at an optimum level for wading.
Charlie Meyers can be reached at 303-820-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
