Fire In The Sky

                                                     Fire In The Sky

2023 has been a great summer to be living and recreating on the "Lower Upper" Colorado River.  Thanks to a thick healthy snowpack, we had our first real runoff since 2019.  In the wake of the receding water, sandbars have emerged which showed the river shifting and changing in new ways.  We even ended up with beautiful new sand where my yard meets the river. Big water in the spring helps create healthy riparian ecosystems, and its how rivers are supposed to work.

 Spring was wet, but then the early summer was dry, and as a result the Colorado River has been exceptionally clear, with only one fishing day lost to off-color water. But things changed, and the summer weather patterns known as the monsoons were beginning to develop.  Last Sunday night, storms moved in along with some very loud and very close lightning and thunder.  Around six pm, there was a loud crack of thunder which was almost instantaneous with the flash of the lightning it was created by.  When that happens, you know that it was very close.  It was as loud as anything I'd ever heard.  

 Eventually the storm passed, and I didn't think much about it, but the next morning we awoke to the sound of a helicopter hovering nearby.  Seeing and hearing helicopters around here isn't unusual, since at the Eagle Airport there's an Army training site where pilots learn to fly them in the mountains.  I drove over to my shop, and from there I could see a thin column of smoke coming from the top of the hill above my house, with the chopper hovering near it.  That atomic boom from the previous evening had apparently left its mark with more than just sound, started a small fire.  We had shuttles to run upriver, but when we got back the helicopter was still hanging around the fire, keeping an eye on it.  The smoke was coming from atop the rocky cliffs above my house,  which was thankfully downwind.  On our last pass the helicopter was gone, but at the Colorado River Ranch we saw it on the ground, surrounded by a couple of hot shot crews and a support vehicle with a fuel truck. Behind the truck as a large cargo trailer with gear spread out all over.  A couple of men were leaning over what looked like a large red inflatable swimming pools.

 

"I think that's one of those buckets they use to haul water", I said to my shuttle driver and neighbor Donna, whose house was even closer to the fire than mine.  When I picked her up earlier, she was on her front step watching the fire and the helicopter, both uncomfortably close to her new log dream home.

  Upon our return from running shuttles, the helicopter was no longer at the River Ranch, so we figured it was up in the air delivering water to the fire.  As we drove up the road we looked for it, and then as we rounded a corner Donna cried out, "There it is!" Sure enough, the helicopter shot up into view tugging a bright red bucket below it, racing to the top of the hill towards the smoke.  I dropped her off at home, then went to mine to enjoy the show.  My wife said the helicopter had been pulling water from the river from our backyard, but by then the helicopter had started scooping it from just below Donna's house.  I drove down to a spot closer so that so I could watch it, and found a great spot to see the helicopter and its very skilled pilot do their thing.  Each lap between the river and fire took less than five minutes.  The chopper would hover above the river, lower itself just enough to sink the bucket, and then race up to the fire. He would find just the right spot to unload its contents, then zip back down to the river to repeat the process.  It was very entertaining to watch, and it was also reassuring to know that a potential danger not far from my home was being dealt with so quickly and effectively.  After an hour of those loops, the column of smoke was gone and the fire was out. Those who like to complain that the government can't do anything right haven't seen wildland fire crews in action.

That night the summer monsoon rains finally came, and the next day the river turned bright red and muddy and unfishable. On the evening before the rains moved in, I went to my backyard and stood on the end of my dock.  I rarely ever skip a quick trip to the river whenever I get home after a long day. Its only twenty strides from my driveway to my dock above the river, and the psychic pull of the river is usually more than I can resist. Even just standing there for five minutes soothes my soul and calms my spirit like nothing else. The air was very still, and the river as clear as vodka, but overhead a huge malevolent black cloud was moving in. But far south and below the cloud was a short strip of clear yellow sky, beyond the black cloud's backside, and that yellow hue gave the river's surface an eerie glow.  To the north, there were other dark clouds emitting elaborate bursts of chain lighting.  In the gap between the bottoms of those clouds and the top of the Flat Top Mountains, the sky was orange and purple and the frequent lightning bolts made for quite the show, with the distant cracks of thunder breaking the otherwise still evening air.  It made me think of the John Denver lyrics, "I've seen it raining fire in the sky" (of course, he was describing meteor showers, not lightning). I grew up back east, and hearing "Rocky Mountain High", and as a twelve year old was the first time I'd ever heard of Colorado. Fifty years later, its still left an indelible imprint on my consciousness.

The mountains were to my right, but as I watched the electric display I heard the unmistakable sound of a trout breaking the surface of the water.  I looked to my left and saw what remained of the riseform spreading out into the river, then disappearing.  It had just sipped a fly only fifteen feet out, just downstream of my dock. I hadn't been fishing in my yard lately, but knowing that there was a trout feeding so close by made me want to grab my rod. What fisherman doesn't feel their pulse quicken by the sound of a feeding fish?

In another part of my yard stands a retired chairlift from A Basin, supported by a wooden frame of 6' X 6' timber. The chair itself hangs on a pipe, so that it can swing naturally the way the chair used to do back when it was carrying skiers up to their destination at 12,450' and the top of the mountain.  When I sit on my chairlift, I can close my eyes and imagine myself with skis atached to my feet, making that trip up the hill on the way to my next run.  When I'm at A Basin, I can close my eyes and pretend that I'm back in my yard beside the relentless flow of the river.  On the back of the chairlift frame hangs a seven foot three weight rod, handmade for me by one of my best and oldest friends.  There it sits at the ready, so I went over and got it, then went back to the dock to see if I could fool the feeding trout. 

It was almost dark, but the river still had just enough dwindling light left to see my line, if not my fly.  From the south the big black cloud drew closer, and it was obvious that the still night wasn't going to stay quiet for long.  To the north, the distant lightning show continued, and I knew that I could watch the fly or the lightning, but not both.  I stripped out some line, made a cast, and realized that I had no hope of actually watching my fly drift, i for it was way too dark.  Much of the fun fishing dry flies is the pleasure of watching them ride the river like little sailboats, while mending the line to keep them moving along that way, and then (hopefully) seeing a trout's head emerge from it's liquid world to sip that little sailboat made of feathers and fur. There would be none of that this evening,  since I couldn't see my fly and was more interested in watch the lightning show anyway.  So I stripped out more line, flipped it out towards the center of the river, and kept looking right while my fly floated away off to the left. 

I occasionally looked downriver, and the line began to straighten as all of the slack ran out, so I began to fish it like a wet fly, making short strips. Now that the fly was underwater, there was no need to watch it anymore, so I turned back to celestial display over the Flat Tops while twitching the line downriver.  The big cloud was overhead now, which made me wonder how conductive a graphite fly rod was.  Standing out on the edge of the dock holding a rod aloft with lightning nearby might be a great way to win a Darwin award.

Then there was another crazy double chain lightning that went off over the mountains, followed by a tug on my seven weight. I looked left, raised the rod tip, and was rewarded by the sight of a foot long trout skipping across the surface of the river, doing its best impression of a tarpon.  The river had been getting warm over the past week, so I didn't want to play him for long, and I tried to bring him in quickly.  The single fly he had in his mouth was old and coming apart, and usually when I hook a fish off my dock I just drop the rod tip to let them shake it out of their mouth. But that was more than the old 7X tippet could take, and he broke my ancient Adams off before I could give him slack.   But it was fun to have the little trout on for even a moment.  The tug, as they say, is the drug.

The rain drops began to splat loudly on the river's surface, then on the dock, and then on me. By the time I returned the rod to it's chairlift frame, the rain began in earnest and I had to sprint to my house to avoid getting soaked. But I had my few minutes by the river, and had hooked a trout, and had seen fire in the sky.  John Denver was probably holding a joint in his hand when he had his inspiration, but I got to hold a fly rod in mine.

Jack Bombardier