HARTSEL — A glance into the limpid waters of Antero Reservoir on the eve of another ice season reveals a classic example of a receptacle either half-empty or half-full.
On the top side, we have this same rich impoundment spewing forth a dietary abundance that last summer made it the talk of trout lovers across the continent. Lurking beneath this buoyancy, we find the dark conditions that during the winter turned it into a deadly time bomb.
No one who thrilled to the tug of giant trout during those glory months, then learned the horrors of winter kill, can help but wonder: Can it happen again?
For the few dozen anglers who gathered this week beneath a brilliant late-September sky, thoughts of misfortune might have seemed very far away. But no one who experienced those most precipitous highs and lows ever can quite push it from the mind.
The very fact that so many people turned out on a Monday after a dry cold front with no real promise of a meaningful bite is proof positive that this large impoundment south of Fairplay still holds some magic, still keeps a grip on the collective psyche.
It is one thing to contemplate the loss of the ordinary, quite another to calculate the loss of something as remarkably wonderful as Antero Reservoir during six magic months of 2007.
Those of us who drift off to dreamland on cold winter nights with visions of large trout can’t resist taking a high dive off a platform of conjecture.
What if winter arrives with a kinder face: thinner ice, fewer snowstorms, none of the lethal melting and sticking that shuts out life-giving light?
What if those hundreds of thousands of trout of various shapes and sizes stocked this year by the Colorado Division of Wildlife keep growing through the fall and winter, repeating that bounty of yesteryear?
But what if the worst of winter comes again, snatching away the biggest and best with poison gasses and oxygen depletion?
What if, indeed?
These are the inevitable thoughts that filter through a fisherman’s brain as he floats lazily between bites that arrive with neither the frequency nor vigor he would prefer.
But there may be official reason for optimism. Flashing the faith that makes up an essential element in a fisheries biologist’s job description, Jeff Spohn already has found hope.
“The aquatic weed cover isn’t nearly as thick as it was a year ago,” observed the man who watches over the lake for the Colorado Division of Wildlife.
This single element may be enough; it is the decomposition of light-deprived vegetable matter that ultimately steals the oxygen and kills the fish. Beyond that, Spohn is at weather’s mercy. Last winter, he tried plowing snow from a limited expanse of ice, only to have it drift in again. Such intervention perhaps isn’t likely again.
What the biologist counts in his favor is a huge stockpile of fish — rainbow, cutthroat, brown, brook, splake and kokanee salmon — of the smaller sizes that tend to survive. When he is done planting 4-5 inch rainbow later this month, Spohn will have contributed a half-million new fish to go with the winter holdovers.
Most of these range from 14-17 inches, silver speedsters that will attract plenty of attention at the start of ice season. But while these hardy souls sit on the ice, the rest of us will rest in our reverie, imaging what they might become next spring.
