Carbondale – Mud coming.
For a little band of anglers fresh from a red-eye ride from Denver, these suddenly had become the two worst words in the English language.
The notion that had driven us on our early morning journey, first through a rainstorm, now in a blaze of sunshine, was that delicious float down the Roaring Fork River from Carbondale to Glenwood Springs.
It reasonably can be argued this is the most compelling boat ride in the state – at least when you factor in access and length of season, not to mention the size and number of fish.
You may find bigger trout in the Gunnison Gorge, but getting to them is the rub. You may catch more on the Rio Grande below South Fork, but the float season ends early.
The Arkansas also is great for numbers, but not much for size.
Then there’s the Colorado below Pumphouse. Excellent access. Plenty of water. But also more traffic than the Panama Canal.
This leaves us with the lower Fork. But there’s just this one nagging problem, something that kicks in every so often when a cloudburst zeroes in on an accursed patch of real estate that funnels into the unstable drainage formed by Coal Creek.
All this gunk flushes into the Crystal River near Redstone, where it flows to the confluence with the Roaring Fork just downstream from Carbondale. You know the rest: Water in every shade of brown featured on the menu at Starbucks. A temporary end to fishing as we know and love it.
Although he didn’t let on, the news must have struck Mike Scialla particularly hard. A Denver native, Scialla has fished every major river in the state, including the Roaring Fork.
But he had never seen it from the business end of a drift boat, one of those delights that can make a man lose sleep just thinking about it.
But all was not lost, Mike Thomas assured us. If we hurried downstream to West Bank, a site halfway to Glenwood, we would launch ahead of the mud. A guide with Taylor Creek Trout Shop in Basalt, Thomas has been rowing the valley for years and knows a trick or two.
The revised plan, he said, was a sort of two- for-one. We would float the Fork to Glenwood, then continue down the Colorado to the takeout at South Canyon.
The distance would be roughly the same, but this way we would get to sample the distinct characteristics of two rivers whose only similarity is the fish they contain: rainbow trout, brown trout and whitefish.
At a point in the season when the major stonefly and caddisfly hatches are done, the big Green Drake mayflies have wandered upstream in the general direction of Aspen and hoppers are just over the horizon, this is time for small nymphs.
Dry-fly devotees or streamer fanatics can pound up a few fish off the banks under a midday so big and bright it might have been cut from cardboard. But if you want to catch lots of fish, get out the indicator, tie on a couple nymphs du jour and wait for that magic tug.
Which, under Thomas’ watchful eye, is precisely what Scialla did. During several notable periods, his indicator disappeared faster than the Rockies’ bullpen. A parade of browns and rainbows made involuntary appearances at the side of the boat, seemingly almost nose to tail.
This sort of action has become typical for the lower Fork, a river that alternately whispers, then sings, then roars – a chorus that calls to fishermen like sirens from a Greek poem.
The song changed abruptly with the left turn onto the Colorado, just as afternoon clouds pulled the shade on all that bright light. It took trout the better part of an hour to make the switch, creeping closer to the bank to hang in the little current breaks behind rocks.
Thomas’ nymph strategy shifted to something bigger and bolder: A peacock body with white wings and a bead head. A double streamer rig of matching black and white Clousers also came in to play.
I call it the “Salt and Pepper,” Thomas said.
Near the end of the float, a brown trout lurking in rock rubble near shore opened a large, toothy mouth and declared a taste for pepper.
This 20-incher provided perfect punctuation to a day that delivered the best of two rivers. Think about it. We wouldn’t have caught it if not for the mud.
Charlie Meyers can be reached at 303-820-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
