HARTSEL — It might have been, Paul Geer surmised, the last, best day of the season in this quadrant of South Park, which draws serious trout fishermen like moths to a flame that in short weeks will flicker and die.
While Colorado’s Front Range shivered beneath brooding clouds and drizzle, this high valley on Monday basked in warm sunshine, a juxtaposition that happens about as often as pigs sprout wings.
The only amenity generally missing was the trout, a commodity that in the main has confounded members of the fraternity who choose to fish with flies. Blame it on a cool spring or a rush of cold-water runoff or a bad moon rising.
Whatever the reason, bugs generally failed to appear on schedule, trout often avoided their usual haunts in the shallows and anglers who hung their hopes on wispy creatures such as midges, damsel-flies and mayflies went home disappointed.
When anglers drifted off to sleep last winter, they dreamed of large trout rising to callibaetis mayflies at Spinney Mountain Reservoir or even bigger bruisers slamming nearly anything that hit the water at Antero, a few miles upstream.
As spring awakening came, harsh reality replaced the reverie. Most Antero lunkers succumbed to winterkill, leaving anglers with fish only a fraction the size. Many didn’t bother with a second visit.
Spinney made a good start with midges, but the other bugs never kept their part of the bargain.
“The reservoir filled pretty quickly, even spilled over for a short time. When it did come down, that happened more quickly than anticipated,” Division of Wildlife biologist Jeff Spohn said of a condition that stymied weed growth and stifled insect production in the shallows.
The result was a bonanza for fishermen with a determination to fish deep.
“Lure fishermen had a good year at Spinney, and the trend continued at Antero,” Spohn observed. “There was a long time when you couldn’t buy a fish on a fly at Antero while people caught fish on big spinners.”
Which is where Geer re-enters the picture. The Denver-area native is one of those addicts whose dreams are punctuated by rise rings, coming awake with leaping rainbows tugging at his arm. Essentially self-taught, he also may be the finest fly tyer whose name you don’t know well.
Geer’s boxes look like a jeweler’s display case; his precise patterns might cause angels to weep. He visits Spinney a dozen or more times each year, typically with glowing results. Now, casting into water shrinking several feet back from shoreline and seemingly too warm for trout, he felt pangs of utter rejection.
“I haven’t had a gangbuster day all year,” he said with resignation. “I did OK with midges, but after that, not much.”
Allowing for the nuance of weather and water, Geer and his fellow Spinney zealots can look forward to brighter days — in large part to an ambitious new DOW stocking program.
In an attempt to break a glass ceiling of trout size, Spohn next month will stock 45,000 rainbows of the Hofer-Harrison Lake strain, a blend that in a hatchery environment showed a propensity for greater growth than the generic product Spinney typically receives.
This new plant offers two other advantages. It promises a propensity to run up the river, along with a resistance to whirling disease that actually might yield surviving natural reproduction.
“We’ll know in a couple years if it works or not,” Spohn said.
So there’s the potential: larger rainbows, big fish in the river, a return to the good old days of fish rising in the shallows.
It’s something to dream about.
Charlie Meyers: 303-954-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com
