Mogote
Don’t bother buying one of those fancy bug books to determine what the trout are eating on the Conejos River during the dry fly orgy that is late June and early July. Just check the surface of your auto’s windshield, peek behind the wiper blade or peel a few specimens from the grill.
You’ll find four different kinds of stoneflies, a similar number of caddis and plenty of mayflies of that large and highly prized variety – the green drake. So much for the airborne inventory. To find out what’s actually being eaten on the southernmost major stream in Colorado, you’ll have ask the trout, which, naturally, is the idea of it all.
On a recent day when blue sky and green ridges formed a postcard-perfect geometry along the ridge lines and mayflies poured off the water like wood smoke, the answer came as quite a surprise – particularly to an angler accustomed to the anarchy of picky trout and tiny insects.
With the assurance of someone who has called this river home for 14 years, Jon Harp looked right through what most would take for the main event and tied on a yellow Stimulator pattern, a match for a fluttering golden stonefly. His immediate reward was an 18-inch brown trout, a thick-bodied beauty that munched his surface fly with a slurp audible across the river.
The next payoff was even better, another brown pushing 20 inches, a fish that seemed to prove his earlier point about a river whose location keeps it a secret of sorts from most anglers along the Front Range.
“I don’t think the numbers of fish in this river are exceptional, but the size certainly is,” said Harp, who owns the Conejos River Fly Shop (719-376-5660) in Mogote, where Route 17 parts company with Highway 285 on a rambling path toward northwest New Mexico.
This is particularly true in the so-called fly water and in the meadows below Platoro Reservoir, where regulations help keep most fish in the water.
The remainder of the equation comes with the location. As the southernmost major trout stream in the state, the Conejos attracts minimal attention from the populous upper Front Range. The Lone Star plates of Texas decorate at least half the vehicles, a minor annoyance when one considers that the percentage of serious anglers is low.
On balance, this makes the Conejos a hideaway compared to the intense pressure one finds on similar spots along the I-70 corridor and in South Park.
The attraction grows with some 30 miles of public access, about half on either size of a dramatic canyon called The Pinnacles, which divides the upper and lower river. Somewhat difficult to access and manageable only with lower flows, this canyon offers some of the largest trout in the river as a reward for extra effort.
Perhaps the most intriguing segment is the extended public access point called The Meadows, specifically a place where the Colorado Division of Wildlife conspired with Trout Unlimited on a 2002 stream improvement project. Here, some of the best trout in the river profit from a regulation that allows two fish over 16 inches.
“That becomes something of a default regulation because not many fish larger than that are caught,” said John Alves, DOW biologist.
Thing is, these trout – 90 percent browns – seem to be growing larger since the project.
Another aspect of a general Conejos revival is Alves’ decision to no longer plant catchable rainbows, going with fingerlings instead. The biologist hopes to use the new whirling disease-resistant strain of rainbows to re-establish the species in a stream where insect populations might favor them over browns. Which brings us back to Harp who, with his wife, Kari, had taken a busman’s holiday to sample a river running bank-full with clear water.
“The first three weeks of July are best,” Harp advised. “The water will be down and the drake hatch will last all month.”
If you don’t believe him, just check your windshield.
Charlie Meyers can be reached at 303-954-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
