The month was late August. The year, 1969.
A freshly minted Denver outdoor writer had joined a band of fellow anglers for his first real adventure outside the country.
The plan was ambitious to say the least: gather via commercial jet in Quebec City, then drive hours northwest by rough road to a mining outpost. From there, squeeze an overload of gear into a Twin Otter float plane, pushing farther north to an Indian village.
There we piled the paraphernalia into two freight canoes manned by a Cree father and son, along with a string of Grumman aluminums.
The place was where the sprawling Rupert River refined its course for a rush toward Hudson Bay. The inspiration was to become the first non-natives to navigate that stretch of the Rupert, a story line that intrigued some fancy writer from one of the New York dailies, I forget which.
My aim was far more uncomplicated — to catch a brook trout worthy of the wall. Recently arrived in Colorado from a place flat and warm, I’d never caught a brookie of any size. Given two weeks to probe some of the continent’s best waters seemed a godsend.
I returned, wide-eyed, with a photo of a 5-pounder that I regrettably never had made into a molded mount. But the image of that multihued trout formulated a love affair that will endure the rest of my days.
Even though they must be classed as an exotic import to the Rockies from points of origin in the eastern U.S. and Canada, there is something about these dazzling trout, whatever the size, that make them a hallmark of our region.
In fact, it is entirely likely that more brook trout swim in the mountain regions of the West than prowl their ancestral haunts back east. The larger reason can be traced to widespread habitat destruction — dam building, logging and all the rest. At the same time, these lovely little jewels have taken so well to the cold, clear waters of high-elevation western streams.
This incursion has come at a price. Where brook trout have prospered, native cutthroat have suffered in turn. This happens in part because brookies may become sexually mature as young as two years in dense, high-elevation populations, giving them a distinct reproductive advantage. Brookies also feed more aggressively on other fish, nibbling their way through cutthroat populations in places where the two species interact.
Now there has been a turnabout of sorts. In much the same manner that brookies acted as predators on cutthroat, brown trout now have turned the tables for much the same reason.
Highly piscivorous, sharp-tooth browns have taken a heavy toll on brook trout, eliminating them completely in streams where they once thrived.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Clear Creek where it flows down from the Continental Divide past the town of Idaho Springs. Brook trout once flourished in both numbers and size, sometimes growing from 15 to 18 inches. Now they seldom are found except for an occasional small fish on the West Fork toward Berthoud Pass.
In his splendid book “About Trout,” noted biologist Robert J. Behnke describes a “generalist” form of brook trout that seldom lives longer than three years or grows longer than 12 inches, both elements governed by water temperature and food supply.
Now the season for brook trout has come again, those magic days of late September and October when they gather to spawn in the riffles of lovely streams. For sheer beauty, there is no fish more wonderful than a male brook trout in autumn — vivid vermiculations piled upon yellow and orange dots circled in a patina of teal, all punctuated by a belly of brightest crimson.
Blend all this with the changing of leaves and there is no better time to be than among brook trout, wherever we might find them.
Charlie Meyers: 303-954-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com
