Fly Fishing High Mountain Lakes, Near Boulder Colorado

 

 

I’ve been super excited to go fishing with an incredible guy from Trout Unlimited that I’ve worked with for a number of years, Tim Romano.  Tim is an entrepreneur that helps Trout Unlimited with marketing.  He is also a very talented professional photographer, and if that wasn’t enough, is an owner of Angler Trade Magazine.  Tim and I have been trying to find some time to fish together for a couple of years now, and this was our day.  The only issue was the fact that all of the streams near Boulder, Colorado blew out the day before we were going to fish.  Tim was watching stream reports, and notified me that we may have an issue.  He searched for options, and ended up calling in a favor to get us access to some private high mountain lakes up the canyon from Boulder.  

 

 

We met up at a killer bakery for breakfast called Shamane’s Bakery.  If you are ever in Boulder, I strongly suggest you check this place out.  I had the best breakfast burrito I’ve had in years.  We headed up the canyon to a neighborhood at the top of the mountain.  When we pulled in, we could see trout eating on the surface.  I don’t know about you, but isn’t it more difficult rigging up your rod while fish are rising all around you?  I rigged up my 5 weight El Jefe combo as well as our 1 Weight El Jefe Wild.  We knew some of these fish were looking pretty large, but we were up to the challenge!  

 

 

At first, I threw on a parachute adams with a zebra midge dropper.  After getting a few strikes and hook ups, I decided to add a more buoyant cubby Chernobyl in olive as my dry, and for some odd reason choose a size 18 blue midge I tied up as my dropper.  I’m glad I went with blue.  The fish were oddly crazy for blue.  At one point, I lost my blue midge to a rude tree behind me, and tried 4-5 different colors with ZERO success.  I went back to blue and hooked up almost immediately.  There were actual hatch’s coming off the water, and the chubby was producing solid strikes about as equal to the blue midge dropper.  

 

 

The fish we were catching were chunky rainbows in the 16-18 inch range, and had some pretty incredible colors.  These fish were hot, fighting incredibly well, and jumping like crazy during the fights.  

 

 

After a couple hours of constant action, we talked to one of the locals that told us there were some huge fish in this lake, in the 24-36 inch range.  When I hear things like this, I immediately start thinking about throwing streamers.  These larger fish in a lake like this will feed primarily on trout.  Unfortunately I didn’t have my main streamer boxes with me, but Tim and I had a few.  I was hooking up with the streamers, but the action slowed.  We didn’t find any of the large fish, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.  

 

 

I’m not sure how many fish we hooked up with, but it had to be 20-30 in a few hours of fishing.  Then it was time for me to find my way to the Denver Airport to fly home.  What an incredible little adventure, it’s always great to have success on new waters.

Until next time my friends, tight lines!

Jeff