Estes Park – You’ll seldom catch a fish worth bragging about in Rocky Mountain National Park – unless your notion of ostentation runs more toward beauty than size.
After all, visual splendor is the primary reason 3 million visitors come to Colorado’s largest park each year: towering peaks, deeply sculpted valleys, majestic waterfalls, the grandest collection of wildlife this side of Yellowstone.
In any description of this dramatic landscape, the words pour out in multiple syllables, often in a long line. But when it comes to fishing, the language is spoken in inches rather than pounds, with lots of little numbers.
Why, then, are accomplished anglers eager to walk miles dead uphill for what might seem a dubious privilege of catching an 8-inch trout?
The answer lies in that peculiar psychology by which we measure success relative to possibility. To wit: If we’re fishing in a lake where swim lots of double-figure fish and we only get 5-pounders, then we might go home with a nagging feeling of failure. But if the biggest fish in a stream is only a foot long and we catch it, we count this as some grand achievement. Go figure.
So it is that anglers who make the trek into the lofty environs of Rocky Mountain National Park and similarly barren habitats in Colorado’s high country are perfectly happy to try for trout that might elicit laughter somewhere else.
The park is laced with a spider’s web of such places – remote headwater streams where only a few anglers take the trouble to go. While milling crowds choke the highways and campgrounds a couple of thousand feet below, these hardy souls willingly swap size for solitude.
Part of the lure rests with the happy fact that this fishery has been shaped naturally to protect two trout species in short supply in other locations across the state. That part east of the Continental Divide has become a sanctuary for cutthroat trout, the native greenback that once was presumed extinct.
Certain streams and lakes in the park have been selected as repositories for pure-strain greenbacks, important links in a continuing recovery effort along the Front Range.
In the west, this same endeavor holds for the Colorado River cutthroat, a native trout west of the Divide.
But Rocky Mountain National Park may shine brightest for brook trout, a species that steadily has lost ground many other places across the state. Protected by waterfalls and steep escarpments that block an incursion from brown or rainbow trout, these populations continue to thrive in Lilliputian environments where survival is gauged on a different cycle and scale.
On just such a creek, three visitors from the city found little brookies packed into every bend. An 8-incher ranked as a prize, a 10-incher a triumph and a 12-incher – had anyone actually caught one – would have been cause for shouting and celebration.
Overpopulation, the traditional bugaboo for high-country brookies, might be blamed for the stunting. Or perhaps it was a setting where winter lasts eight months and food perpetually is in short supply.
The benefit to the angler in such a hard place is that nearly every fly that hits the water is greeted as if it were the last good meal on earth.
The should not suggest that aquatic insects don’t occur in these lofty environments. At various times, the creek came alive with two different mayflies and even an occasional Yellow Sally stonefly. But hatches always are fleeting, and trout are conditioned to take what they can get. Any reasonable dry-fly pattern presented well usually gets eaten.
At high elevation, brook trout already have begun to flash their autumn colors – all orange and green with those wonderful red spots with the blue halos – that make you wonder if these are not the most beautiful fish on earth.
No visit to Rocky Mountain National Park is complete without a riot of wildlife sightings. In a brief rainstorm, a cow moose gave a warning shake of the head toward two hikers, before leading her twin calves across a grassy meadow into dark timber.
Near the headwaters of the Colorado River, nine majestic bull elk, antlers in velvet, lounged 30 yards from the highway, oblivious to the intrusion of flatland photographers. Farther along, a foolish coyote attempted a bare-ground stalk of a mating pair of sandhill cranes.
Then there was the belligerent badger that for a time seemed willing to challenge a sport utility vehicle for right-of-way.
All these park creatures keep visitors coming back time and again, none more so than brightly colored little fish with an appetite for dry flies.
Charlie Meyers can be reached at 303-820-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
