Buena Vista – In moments of grand inspiration, Stuart Andrews moves a brush across canvas and records in oil lovely landscapes from the high country near his home.
To find these scenes, he takes long hikes into wild places where water trickles down from crags whose pinnacles seem to pierce the sky. No matter how pressing his assignment, one thing never changes. Andrews always travels with a fly rod, an extension of his other occupation as a fishing guide and a compulsion that runs to the depths of his soul.
Paint brush. Long rod. It’s all art to him.
Andrews lives for the high country and those magic waters at the end of the trail, places where the season comes and goes in an instant and the trout dazzle like floating flowers.
It is a passion he shares with a large and inexclusive cadre of adventurers, including this writer, who began exploring these lofty places 40 years ago. Many of these places have surrendered most of their trout and older legs have lost their spring. But the spirit never waned.
Earlier, driving west and south, I had watched the sun rise against Mount Elbert, Colorado’s tallest, saw the color turn from gray to gold and back to gray again, the shrinking snowfields etched like stretch marks on its long flanks.
For all of those years, I have loved that group of tall mountains called the Sawatch Range, climbed them, watched each changing mood, reveled in the lovely lakes cradled in their bosom.
Over time, I found that climbing made the most sense when there was a tangible goal at the end, like a fish on the line or at least the chance for it.
Now, at Andrews’ invitation, this was the first foray into the southern end of the same range, that part framed by the lovely and lofty Collegiate Peaks.
Andrews had mentioned a destination called Lost Lake, which gave little clue to location. A quick check of Kip Carey’s Official Colorado Fishing Guide revealed 21 such places scattered from one end of the state to the other, causing wonder at how so many lakes could have been misplaced and who found them in the first place.
Upon further review, this one appeared on the map just south of Cottonwood Pass where a thin ribbon of blue squiggled down from the Continental Divide. It is an intimate little lake with a granite island in the middle, a perfect place for emptying the ashtrays of the mind. When the surface is calm, it glistens like an eye into the earth.
This is a lake that Andrews knows well, even to the point of counting its trout, much like a farmer might number cows in a pasture.
“The Division of Wildlife stocked a bunch of small greenback cutthroat trout here last year. Before that, there were less than 20 fish, but all were four or five pounds.”
For that reason, and until the little trout grow up, Lost Lake can be a challenge. Unless there is an insect hatch, these larger cutts generally remain in dark depths, occasionally darting up for a bug or perhaps just to shock unwitting anglers by their sudden presence.
My own jolt came while aiming a cast toward a submerged shelf where a long finger talus spilled down from the divide and into the lake. The sighting came first as a sidelong movement, then a shape that morphed into a fish. Or it might have been a wayward submarine as far as the comprehension of an angler accustomed to inches rather than pounds.
The great trout left as quickly as it came, leaving Andrews and his visitor to beat a retreat back down the trail to a smaller, shallow pond that warrants no mention on the map. In a rush of humor, Andrews named this lake “Found.”
What these cutts lack in size they compensate in reliability; they rose until the wind from a growing storm sent them to the depths and anglers scurrying back to the car.
A licensed guide, Andrews escorts anglers to a variety of high lakes in the Collegiate Peaks region. He can be reached at 719- 221-0042.
