Collbran – Bill Enstrom allowed his thoughts to wander back four decades to a place where a 9-year-old boy joined his grandparents to forge his earliest, and perhaps fondest, fishing remembrance.
The cabin on Sunset Lake where Chet Enstrom, founder of the candy company that bears the family name, took his youngest grandson is gone now. But all those same delicious natural lakes and reservoirs, 300 or more, still dot the big flat-top mountain called Grand Mesa.
Sprawling across 35,000 acres with an entire national forest to its name, this volcanic formation has long served as the primary outdoor playground for Grand Junction and dozens of other Western Slope communities, large and small.
But for Bill Enstrom it represents a precious link to his youth, a place where every visit brings back a flood of recollections that cause his spirits to soar.
On a day last week when thunderstorms circled the escarpment like dark-winged birds, memory lane became the winding road that leads from Collbran up the east side of the Mesa. In those glorious days of youth, the road served as a madcap sledding hill in winter, a path to equally outrageous fishing adventures during those months when trout-dimpled lakes were framed by wildflowers and it seemed as if the fun never would end.
Grand Mesa hasn’t changed much in all those years, nor has the way people try for its wide variety of trout. For Enstrom, an electric trolling motor has replaced the oars of his youth. But the 12-foot john boat, “a Grand Mesa yacht,” that he snugs into the back of his pickup is much the same and so, too, are his fishing methods.
This place of small lakes – most less than 20 acres – is, as someone described it, “hand-loader’s heaven.” Drive directly to the water, haul out a rowboat or a kickboat and you’ll have a trout on the line in a matter of minutes.
Don’t own a watercraft? No problem. Families camped beside these lakes tempt trout from shore with a variety of bait. Anyone with a strong arm and a fly and bubble can throw halfway across; a flycaster can reach almost any fish he wants simply by wading out past the shallows.
A reasonably competent angler who can battle a standoff with The Mesa’s infamous mosquitoes might expect to catch more trout here than almost any place in the state – not necessarily large trout, but lots of them.
For this, one mostly can give thanks to the Colorado Division of Wildlife, whose stocking trucks spout catchable rainbows far and wide. One also can expect a fair number of holdover rainbows that grow to 14 or 15 inches, along with an assortment of cutthroats and brook trout in select lakes that have been spared the rainbow immersion.
With a good forest map and Kip Carey’s Colorado Fishing Guide, you can spend an entire summer tripping from one lake to another, choosing your species as you go and never the same day in the same place.
“You’ll find a lake down every one of these roads,” Enstrom gestured to a spider’s web of tracks leading off the main forest roads. “But there are still some secrets up here. Often there are no signs pointing to some of these smaller lakes. People don’t know about them.”
Enstrom remembers them all, driving up regularly with his wife, Cheryl, from their home in Rifle to explore all the old haunts.
One of the confidences he keeps is that the old ways, the same methods his grandfather taught, remain the best way to catch fish: Trolling a wet fly with a medium sink fly line and keeping to the same retro flies that worked almost a half-century ago.
“I don’t know of a faster way to catch fish than trolling flies,” Enstrom said, pulling a long length of line off his reel.
Then there’s the considerable matter of fly selection. His favorite is a pattern most people never knew, or at least forgot, Black Carson or Brown Carson, presumably inspired by the lake of the same name on the west side of Grand Mesa.
“The guy who tied them was Dow Jones. Honest, that was his real name. He taught me most of what I know about fishing.”
The pattern features palmered hackle and distinctive wraps of brightly colored, coarse thread at the head and tail. It succeeds in part because it holds its profile when pulled briskly through the water. Two more throwback patterns, the Muskrat and Halfback, round out Enstrom’s go-to collection.
On this day, Enstrom began his exploration at Cottonwood Reservoir No. 4, where he caught a single rainbow trout. Next came Silver Lake, an 11-acre jewel set beneath a cat’s claw of rock slides that sparkled like its name. Noted for its Colorado River cutthroat, Silver didn’t disappoint.
Not every place name can be taken at face value. Forty Acre Lake, located at the end of a difficult road, actually measures only 11. But it contains a fine population of brook trout, an experience missed because of a thunderstorm.
Neversweat, 17 acres at 10,500 feet elevation, lived up to its billing with a spectacular number of rainbows, mostly small. Big Meadow, a mile away, delivered the only brook trout of the day.
“Four lakes in one day,” Enstrom grinned. “We could have squeezed in a couple others, but it wouldn’t have changed anything.”
On a return to yesteryear at Grand Mesa, more of the same is all anyone could want.
Charlie Meyers can be reached at 303-820-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
