Headwaters Matter

          What Happened To the Animas, or Why Headwaters Matter

    A few days ago, after a perfect day on a perfect river (the Colorado) I got home to watch a sickening series of images shown on the nine o’clock news. They were aerial images of the Animas River, looking like a bright orange ribbon of toxicity winding through pastures and past golf courses. The Animas is a river I would have considered just as perfect as my own not long ago. It will be beautiful again one day, but it’ll probably remain tainted for the rest of my lifetime. The Animas begins in the highest of Colorado’s high country, the San Juans, birthplace of five of Colorado’s greatest rivers. The Rio Grande, the Dolores, the Uncompadre, the San Miguel, and the Animas all begin here.  There are very few places on earth that are the natal source of so much life, spreading out like spokes in a wheel. The Dolores feeds the Colorado, just before turning its crimson flows towards Moab.  The Rio Grande helps water the lower San Luis Valley and is the lifeline of Taos and much of northern New Mexico all the way to Texas and the Gulf Coast.  The Uncompadre nurtures one of Colorado’s true breadbaskets, bolstered by an amazing irrigation project built a hundred years ago underneath a mountain using waters from the Gunnison.

  And then there’s the Animas.  If you grew up back east the way I did, you probably hadn’t heard of the Animas.   The Animas has a pretty colorful history, in all meanings of the word.  There are plenty of mines above it, and despite the history of men and women doing amazing things at high altitudes in tough conditions, the main legacy of the mining era is its toxic waste.  But the Animas feeds into the San Juan, and the San Juan merges into the Colorado at Lake Powell, and the Colorado below that is the lifeline of Phoenix and Las Vegas and the Imperial Valley. The Animas is fed by a little creek called Cement, probably not so named due its bucolic properties.  Abandoned mines leach into Cement Creek, which has been fishless for as long as miners have been extracting wealth from these hills.  One of these is called Gold King, and it was walked away from by the last men to work it in 1923.  Gold King was one of the many holes in the ground trickling nasty stuff into Cement Creek, which in turn flows the Animas.  EPA crews were poking around that hornet’s nest of toxicity when something breached and the small trickle turned into a small flood. 

  The problem with Cement Creek is that it’s a really stupid creek. The water in it wasn’t content enough to just stay where it was, and enjoy the wonderful views it had of the surrounding countryside.  No, that deranged Cement Creek water wants to run downhill towards Silverton due that pesky unseen force known as “gravity”.  Gravity is something that scientists can explain the effects of and manipulate, but don’t really understand the true cause of.  All we really know is, unless external pressure is exerted upon it water runs downhill, and on the western slope of North America, that means that the true connected end point of Cement Creek is the Pacific Ocean, via the Animas, the San Juan, and the Colorado rivers.

 The EPA was attempting to mitigate what they knew was an impending problem, and in the process triggered the exact outcome they were hoping to avoid.  Whomever was operating that track hoe or bulldozer probably feels badly right now, or if they don’t they should.  But the EPA at least had good intentions, and was trying to do the right thing, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with. 

  The thing that really all brought this to forefront to me was something I heard from a neighbor the day after the news broke.  We were having a nice conversation, and admiring how perfect the Colorado River was looking. Knowing that he is also a lover of rivers, I asked him if he’d seen what had happened on the Animas. Since our properties are more than fourteen miles from a cell phone signal, sometimes it’s easy to get a little behind on world events. Turns out, he had. We exchanged a few comments about it, and then he looked at me with a pointing gesture and said, “Do you know that the EPA did it?”

  Now my neighbor is a wonderful person, and one of the nicest people I know.  But he’s made his career in the uranium mining industry, and I’ve made my livelihood dependent on having a clean river to run.  This is one of those things that happen which some people are just going to look at from different perspectives. In strictly technical terms, he was right.  The EPA “did” it. If they had just left it alone, and just gone and done something else with its increasingly limited resources, then maybe the Animas River would have kept being one of the most beautiful rivers in America for another year or two, or for the rest of my life, or maybe even longer. But maybe not.  The point is, the EPA didn’t create the problem, they were trying to fix someone else’s mess, and that’s not the same thing. 

 Then my neighbor said, “Well they didn’t break any laws, there were no rules back then”, as if to say, “if it wasn’t illegal then they did nothing wrong”.  He was referring to the miners who a hundred years ago had dug the mine, extracted whatever wealth there was to be had from it, and then walked away.  That’s a scenario which was repeated  thousands of times in the west. There are an estimated 18,000 abandoned mines in Colorado, and 250 of them are leaching toxins into our watersheds.  Once again, he was a hundred percent correct.  Back then, doing that broke no laws, or least no meaningful ones.  But bad behavior back then is why we have laws to try and regulate that kind of behavior now. If the unfettered free market could be allowed to do whatever it wanted and not just walk away from the mess it had created, then we wouldn’t need an EPA in the first place.

  The EPA was created in the early seventies, and signed into existence by a radical environmentalist called Richard Nixon. What’s happened on the Animas should be a wake-up call for everyone that protecting watersheds is important, for they make life as we know it possible.  I’ve heard one suggestion that this might be a “Cuyahoga River Moment” for watershed awareness, referring to the Ohio River which caught fire in 1969 and was one impetus for passing the Clean Water Act in 1972.  I hope something good like that can come from the poisoning of a beautiful river like the Animas.  There are those who would defang the EPA in any way possible, up to and including getting rid of it altogether.  They might use this horrible but inevitable accident as a rationale to blame or tear down the EPA, which after all exists to help mitigate problems like these and not manufacture them. 

  Recently, the EPA and the Army Corp of Engineers have moved to restore the protections given to headwaters under the Clean Water Act, (also passed by that Edward Abbey doppelganger Nixon).  These logical rules, which understood that little creeks like Cement Creek are connected to rivers below, and not somehow distinct from them, were relaxed under the Bush administration.  Trout Unlimited has been calling attention to this issue, and urging its members to contact their congressperson and ask them to not stand in the way of restoring the original language and intent of the Clean Water Act.

  The Yakima River TU chapter in Washington State recently printed up a large number of “Headwaters Matter” bumper stickers.  They were created in response to some of the issues faced by the Yakima River, including placer mines.  But though the issues in Colorado or anywhere else might not be the same, the message is.  Headwaters matter. We all live downriver, and downwind, from someone else.  What others do above, has an impact on those below. The higher up a watershed you go, the more lives and ecosystems below are affected by your choices.

  The bottom line is, one of the most verdant and beautiful spots on the planet has been irrevocably harmed, not by someone living and breathing today, but by someone who has long since passed.  (Unless you believe in reincarnation, in which smashing the next mosquito you see might help balance the karmic scales).The point is, how do we try to make some good out of something that has virtually no upside to it?  Supporting the restoration of headwaters protection by the Clean Water Act is an obvious first step.  Another positive thing that might come from this is for people to acknowledge that all of the waters that flow from the highest peak to the widest ocean estuary are all one thing, not separate and distinct.  Like an aspen glade consisting of what seems to be individual trees that are actually just one big plant, so too is water from mountain streams all the way down to the sea.  Just one thing, and all the same thing. Trying to make one set of rules for the water on your right hand, and another for the water on your left, makes no sense.  It is all one water, indivisible by God or whatever deity you are accountable to.

  As science explores the universe, and searches deep into the cosmos for worlds suitable for human habitation, one thing becomes abundantly clear.  The best possible habitat we’ll ever find in our lifetime or in our grandchildren’s is the humble old rock we’re currently stuck on. Headwaters matter, and so do everything those headwaters are connected to, which is to say, everything else. Headwatters are especially important, because they are upstream of everything we hold dear. If the source becomes fouled, then everything downstream of the source becomes impure, as well.  Its our duty as citizens and temporary guardians of this planet to keep the waters we depend on as clean as we can from as high up as we can all the way down to the ocean’s edge.

  Watching the toxic orange progression make its way from the highest peaks through Durango, and then on to the southwest desert should really make obvious the connectedness of it all to everyone.

                                 Jack Bombardier

 

Guides Need To Fish Sometimes, Too

                              Guides Need To Fish Sometimes, Too

I just got home from a day and a half of fishing, but it felt like a week.  That’s because although I’m a fishing guide, I don’t get to actually fish myself very often, at least not during the summer. What I do quite often is watch other people fish. Oh, I  spent five or ten minutes most evenings just before dark standing out on the end of my dock trying to catch the same small brown trout.  I’ll usually toss flies to them until I fool one, or can’t see the river anymore.  But that’s not really fishing, there’s no skill involved in the doing of it. Its just a bit of methadone, and not a real heroin fix.

  Summers have gotten busier in each of the eleven years I’ve done this. There are a lot of outdoor-minded people coming to Colorado in the summer, partly due to the fact that the Centennial State is a pretty darn great place to be.  Dry weather, full reservoirs, and not many bugs. More people seem to figure out every year that Colorado is where its at in the summertime. (The cliché is that people come to Colorado for the skiing, but stay for the summers).  Most of my July and August days are spent rowing, then recovering from that day’s float trip, and then getting ready for the next. 

  But this weekend, two things happened simultaneously.  First, we had a torrential rainstorm on Thursday night that turned the river bright red on Friday.  Also on Friday, my wife left town to go visit her sister in Arizona for the weekend.  Suddenly I found myself looking at a couple of off-color days in which I couldn’t extract any filthy lucre from the Colorado River.  Just as important, there was no one around to tell me how I should be filling that gap instead.  And so on Saturday morning, I mowed the lawn to fulfill my legal minimum spousal requirements, and then went fishing. 

   Not only did I get to go fishing, but I got to try a couple of new spots I’ve been wanting to try,  plus I can write the whole thing off to research. Another guide I work with has been trying to turn me onto a couple of high-mountain lakes I’d somehow missed, so this would be a chance to check them out first-hand before bringing any clients up there. 

  Since the Colorado River was off-color, and probably would be for another couple of days, going up above the red sediment sounded good.  So I to  an area that shall remain nameless, one I had spent some time in before.  Even though I’d fished it many times for fun, this time I would look it at with the cool eye of a trained professional, tasked with getting someone who had never held a fly rod into fish.  I started at a lake large enough to paddle around in, but not big enough for a motor.  To do the paddling part, I brought a water vessel I’d never used before, a small one man raft called a Tote-N-Float.  Its fits into its own bag with carry straps, and is fairly sturdy.  It’s designed to use oars, but the oarlocks it has are a hard to find design, and so lacking those I brought a kayak paddle. 

  Things with the Tote-N-Float started poorly and didn’t improve much.  I had a difficult time getting the pump hose to seal, and it took about five times more pumping than it should have needed to fill it up.  Once I got it filled, I paddled out in to the lake into a slight headwind, but couldn’t really take efficient strokes with the paddle due to the protruding obsolete oar locks.  The boat was very wide, and had a blunt bow that gave the wind plenty of rubber to push against.  With my paddle blades having to be held way out away from the boat, the little craft had a pronounced yaw first right then left as I made my way across the lake.  I looked over my shoulder and saw that I was leaving a zigzaw pattern of bubbles behind me.  And then there was my cold, wet ass, and other body parts that are neighbors of the same physiological region.  The Tote-N-Float had a rigid seat made of plywood with an attached stadium seat, but it was only about a half-inch out of the water with me sitting on it.  If I could have just sat still there without either me or the water moving, my crotch might have stayed dry.  I realized too late that I should have worn waders, and not simply quick-dry pants.  For those pants to stay dry, certain moisture-free time intervals need to be observed between wettings, and I didn’t get any of those on the Tote-N-Float.

  I got out into the middle of the lake, and sat there resting all of the new muscles in my arms, shoulders, and back that I never knew I had.  The motion I had adopted to propel the boat was one akin to crawling out of quicksand or a grave.  I leaned back to rest a moment, and heard a slight hissing sound.  I’ve had a lot of inflatable devices in my life, and in that rich experience one thing I’ve learned is that hissing sounds are not good to hear around inflatables.  Over my left shoulder I could see a steady stream of bubbles coming from the boat in a spot that I had gotten patched.  The Tote-N-Float only cost me fifty bucks a couple of years ago because it had a small tear.  I spent more than twice that getting a patch put on in Denver, but the boat had sat in its carry bag for two years before I finally got around to trying it.

  Now I was in the middle of the lake with a difficult to row leaking boat, and a cold, wet ass.   I wasn’t worried about running out of air, for I did bring the pump with me along in the Tote-N-Float’s ample storage area behind the stadium seat.   But I questioned whether I could be doing something more fun and productive instead, and which didn’t feel so much like being in a wet diaper.  I crab-rowed my way back to shore, the steady breeze at my back.  When I got back I stuffed the Tote-N-Float back into its handy carry sack, and it may be there for another two years. 

  Now I had to decide how to try and salvage the afternoon.  There was a sweet small river that meanders through a big meadow nearby, one I’ve fished before, so I headed for that.  It’s a short, steep walk down to the river, but worth the hike.  I had fished this river several times before, but usually during the morning or early afternoon when the fish are kind of spooky.  Now it was late afternoon, and I could see small bugs about and some rise forms.

  I cracked open a beer and put it in the river to keep it cold (my favorite temperature for beer is whatever temperature the river is). Then I had to decide which rod to use.  I had with me a ten foot three weight, and a twelve foot Tenkara.  I was going to start with the conventional rig, but then I noticed a hole that presents just the kind of situation that the Tenkara really excels at.  The small river went around a bend, and just beyond the bend there was a small reverse eddy like a bursitis bump in an old man’s elbow. The Tenkara rod was pulled from my bag and extended, and soon I was dropping my two-fly cocktail into the spinning foam.  After several spins around in the foam without interest, I decided to switch back to my conventional rig.  Looking up the river, I knew I’d have to make longer casts and so the Tenkara got closed back up. 

  There were little pale mayflies hatching, and I thought that my standard rig should work.  That consists of a ten foot 5X leader attached to a hi-vis Elk Hair Caddis, trailed by a little mayfly.  There were occasional caddis flies flitting by, so I figured I was covered either way.  But neither fly elicited much interest, but when I noticed that they were rising for something I knew I had to make an adjustment. Then I came to hole that just said Tenkara. The river split into three channels, and there were three little back eddies to fish, all around the outside of a small gooseneck.  One could stand at the center of the gooseneck, and fish all three uisng the Tenkara’s reach without hardly moving one’s feet. Before I cast into the first pool, I replaced the mayfly with another elk hair caddis, this one without the hi-vis orange tuft on top. There had been a couple of hits on my top fly with the ten footer that I’d missed, but none on the mayfly.  I flicked the flies into the first swirly spot, and after a couple attempts at divining the complicated little hydraulic, got a rise to the second caddis fly.  Steering the fish away from the other holes, I tipped the Tenkara rod way back over my head and landed a nice little six inch brookie.  I kept fishing the Tenkara, and in the third hole I caught a small brown, this one about nine inches, (or what known in the Colorado River as preyfish).  Neither fish was big, but they were beautiful and feisty. I worked my way up the little stream, getting more hits but missing them. Then near the top of the meadow I pulled out a really nice cutththroat, fourteen inches of bronze color with black Sharpied spots and a slash so red I thought he was bleeding.   It was the nicest cut I’d caught in some time. 

  After working my way up the river I got to then end of the bigger pools, and in the waning light decided to explore what lay downstream.  I was able in spots to just walk along the river with my arm extended and the fly just floating alongside me like a dog at heel. The fly came to a small riffle, and as I took my eye off it to look at what was below I felt a tug in my hand and realized that I had a trout on. It wasn’t a big trout, and as I gently brought it to the bank, before I could see what kind of trout it was, I had the thought, if it’s a rainbow then you’ve gotten a Grand Slam.

  Now I am not normally the kind of person who cares much about How Many or How Big a day we have trout-wise.  Fly fishing for trout is mostly just an excuse to be in the beautiful places they tend to live in.  But I had never caught all four main species of trout in one day, let alone out of one river. And at this point, I was only lacking a rainbow, and I knew that the state fisheries people loaded the lake below with them.  It was like being a baseball player who had already hit a home run, triple and double, and only needed a single to hit for the cycle.  So as I drew the trout closer with my arm held as high to land the fish, I was disappointed to see that it was another brookie.  Immediately I chastised myself for feeling that way, for brook trout are my favorite trout.  They are the fish I grew up chasing in New England.  To my eyes they are also the prettiest, (though I’ve seen a tiger trout in person), and photography just doesn’t do trout justice.  I released the brookie, fished my way down to the end of meadow ‘til it was almost dark, and gave up on the Grand Slam idea.  I would have just enough time to get back to my truck before dark, and put away the Tenkara so that I could photograph the sunset over the mountains.

   Reaching for my camera, I noticed that I was missing something, mainly my camera.  It was a new waterproof camera I had just gotten less than two weeks earlier, after losing my last one overboard off my boat. Trying to remember where I had used it last, I realized that it been when I took the picture of that gorgeous cutthroat.  Walking briskly upriver, I tried to remember which hole I caught it in, but the little goosenecks looked a lot alike and it was almost dark.  But then I saw it, on the bank right below where I had steered the cut towards to photograph it. 

  I secured the camera in a zippered pocket, and looked up the steep hill towards the 4Runner on the shoulder above.  Starting to head that way, I remembered that I was still one rainbow trout short of a Grand Slam.  Since it wasn’t completely dark yet, there was still time for a couple more casts, so I pulled the Tenkara back out.  I cast towards the spinning foam pockets, and missed one hit on a tiny foam line.  The flies were barely visible in the dark purple light that was left.  I moved down the river a bit to the next hole, tried a couple of casts, and then moved down one more.  I was fishing more by feel than by sight. I put the fly in a likely-looking spot, or at least I think I did, when I felt a little pull on the rod.  Raising it slightly resulted in a splash on the water, and the fight was on.  I decided that no matter what was on the end of the line, and that it was going to be my last cast of the day.  Of course, that promise was made easier to keep when I got the fish in my net and saw that it was a seven inch long rainbow trout.  I had gotten my first Grand Slam of trout in less than two hours, in a very small river using a Tenkara rod! 

  Fishing for trout has never been much of a results-oriented pastime for me, but still it was hard not to feel good about it. It made the steep hike back up to my truck go much easier!

  That night I resupplied in town, and then drove back up to start doing the “research” part of the trip. There were three small lakes that my buddy and partner took paying clients to, and if I got familiar with them then it might give me an alternative way to earn money guiding when the Colorado River was off-color. The first lake was really a small impoundment, located in national forest so I could park the 4Runner for the night wherever I wanted.  I followed my friend’s directions up an increasingly smaller and steeper road to a dead end, where I saw signage for the lake.  It had begun to rain as I went up into the mountains, and it was impossible to see the lake in the dark.  Every now and then a flash of distant lightning would allow me to get a sense of it, but really scoping it out would have to wait until morning.  I got a great night’s sleep that night in the back of the 4Runner, listening to the tap tap tap of the rain on the soft top that I had just reinstalled for summer. An ’88 4Runner might just be one of the best small SUVs ever made.  It the only year they put a V-6 into the first generation body style, which is also the only 4Runner made that allowed for the removal of the fiberglass top an the addition of a soft jeep-style top. It’s a great truck in the winter, and even better in the summer.  With the left rear seat bottom taken out, a six-footer can easily sleep in the back.  I love dirt-bagging it in the 4Runner, and gladly did so that night. 

  In the morning I walked over to the lake to check it out.  The first thing that I had noticed on the Forest Service sign was that the lake had grayling in it, or at least it did when the sign was erected.  That sounded interesting – maybe I could follow up my grand slam with my first grayling?  I made some hot coffee, and went down to the water’s edge where I had yogurt, orange juice, a banana, and apiece of apple pie for breakfast.  Across the lake (which was maybe thirty acres in size) was a bald eagle,. On the surface of the water there was a disturbance, and in the shallows I could see a trout-sized fish finning along.  I wasn’t sure if it was a grayling, and the tail seemed to be breaking the water more than the famous dorsal fin, but I’d never seen a trout so stupid as to be that obvious and exposed to predators.

  The only two other people out there were a pair in a small johnboat tooling around the lake with an electric trolling motor.  They were fishing, but I never did see them hook up. There were some intermittent rise forms, but they tended to be out towards the middle. To get to them I’d have blow up the Tote-N-Float again, and wear waders, and I wasn’t inclined to do either.  After breakfast, I got my nine foot Fenwick five-weight and lofted a pair of dry flies out as far as I could into the lake, but that got boring pretty quickly, and the lake itself wasn’t pretty enough to distract me.  One hillside was blanketed by aspens though, and I bet in another month when the leaves were changing it might be a different story.  I was more interested in the other two lakes, and so catching my first grayling would have to wait. 

  The next lake was bigger, but required either a twenty dollar fee to access by boat or by a hike in from the national forest. Since I don’t mind burning a little shoe leather to get to good fishing, and I’m cheap, it was the low-cost option I took. From the trailhead it was about a mile long walk, and the reservoir once I got down to it was once again uninspiring.  There were many more rise forms though, as well as substantial amounts of algae floating about.  When I got to the lake, I saw a rocky promontory with a heron sitting on the point of it, and that seemed to be as good a spot as any to start fishing.  One of the three small tributaries that filled the lake also ran past that area.

  Walking closer to that point, I realized that it was a small island, not a peninsula.  The water across didn’t look far or deep, but by the time I got halfway to it my arms were upraised and the water halfway up my chest.  Where the line is between “wading” and “swimming” can be blurry.  If I had been wearing waders, it would have overtopped them, so technically this might have qualified as “swimming”.  Once onto the heron’s perch, I could see why it liked this spot so much.  Trout could be seen cruising through the pods of floating green gunk, occasionally popping their noses into the surface to slurp some yet-unidentified bug.  After watching them for awhile, I began casting about ten feet in front of the trout I could see hoping that one would check out my offering.  Two did, but both turned abruptly away as soon as they got a closer look at my flies.  At the far end of the lake it looked as though there might be another inlet, so I walked down there to see.  There was a very small and very cold creek of about five cfs that ran in, so I  walked up that to see if there were any small pools.  The water made my sandal-clad feet numb, and I did find one babbling brook dropoff that was worth photographing but not fishing.  I was OK with that though – once more the fishing rod in my hand was merely the ticket to a secluded, beautiful spot that I would never have found if not for the pursuit of trout.  Fishing might have been the reason I was here, but it wasn’t really the reason. On the way back, I watched an osprey making silent circles above the water, playing avian god.  Which of you fish will soon die in my talons? As I watched the osprey, a sudden shadow passed over me like that of a passing plane, and I looked up to see an immature bald eagle fly twenty feet over my head. I was tempted to fish some more, but not really that much.  I had verified that there were fish in the lake, maybe even a good number, but figuring out what they wouldn’t turn their noses up to wouldn’t be that hard to determine. I had noticed huge tricos the size of damselflies hatching, and am pretty sure that I could have imitated one of those pretty well and tempted a fish with that, or a grasshopper. 

  I hiked out from there and went to lake number three, possibly the most promising of all.  It was also in a national forest area, and the road access pretty good. Though it was well off the beaten path, when the lake came into view I saw that there were some people scattered on the bank either spin or bait fishing.  There were two dories out on the lake, both operated by friends of mine.  It was just past noon, and I was preparing to make a long hike to the lake’s inlet, when I saw both boats heading to the small boat ramp.  Instead of hiking, I drove there instead and got to the ramp just as their clients were climbing out of the boats.  I asked my friend if he wanted to give me tour of the lake, but he’d been guiding for several days in a row and was ready for some home time.  But he offered me his boat, and after the previous days experience in the Tote-N-Float I was more than ready to take him up on that.  After attaching his trailer to my truck, I rowed out into the middle to take it all in.  This was a much prettier lake than the last two, though there were more people here as well.  To the northwest was a bold escarpment that was the edge of the Flat Top Mountains, and on the southern edge a dark forest of big trees were guarded over by a big bald eagle.  To the south and north were dark black clouds, and I could tell that I wouldn’t be able to hang here forever before the weather moved in.  I rowed from one end of the lake to the other to get an idea of its size, and the whole time I did so was surrounded by rising fish, some not merely rising but jumping clear of the water in pursuit of their quarry.  My friend had left me a rigged rod, and said to just use that, they had hooked forty fish in under four hours using it.  It was six weight Orvis, rigged with a large foam hopper and a neon green egg pattern suspended beneath.  Out in the middle of the lake I chucked that thing out there, watched in land with a Plop!, and waited.  I made a few more casts towards the heavier concentrations of rings, but no one was interested.  It was everything I hate about still fishing, and why I do so little of it. Fishing moving water has a pull on me that all but the most beautiful of lakes lack.  There is really very little skill involved in still water, just cast it out there, watch closely, and when a hungry fish happens to cruise by be ready to set the hook.  Whoop de doo.  

  The weather seemed to be getting closer, and so was the lightning, and I began to wonder how safe a large aluminum dory would be in the middle of the lake.  I rowed back to what I thought would be striking distance to the ramp, and took out the Fenwick still loaded with a couple of dry flies.  Since fish were still rising aggressively in the face of the oncoming storm, why fish something below the surface? I wanted to see the fish before he hit my fly, and not watch some chunk of foam disappear in the water.  In short order, I caught several fish, mostly small stocker rainbows and one nice brown.  Then the wind kicked up, and the   I knew it was time to make my break for the ramp, and was just finishing strapping the boat down when the hail began to fall.  By the time I got halfway to town, the roads were covered in a layer of white ice that looked like snowfall.

sky was not only black but had turned tornadic green, with the clouds hanging low like the Hulk’s testicles.

  After dropping the boat off with my friend, I made a leisurely drive home.  When I got back home to the Colorado River I was glad to see that it was clear enough to fish.  Visibility was a foot and a half looking down off the Catamount bridge, and presumably clearing. A fishable river meant that it was time to go back to work, and my mid-summer two day holiday was over.  It was time to watch other people fish again, and help them catch some.  

                                          Jack Bombardier

 

Flashflood

                                            

  Flashflood

  Its tempting to look at a landscape like the Rocky Mountains, and to think of them as being a finished product.  But of course we know that everything is in transition, and that nothing is ever “finished”, and that the only thing that stays the same is change.  If you’ve seen John Fielder’s coffee table book where he duplicates photos from a hundred years ago taken from the same spot today, that change is evident.  New buildings and vegetation aren’t the only things that have evolved in that time span, subtle differences in hills and ridgelines can also be seen. Canyons like the Grand of the Colorado River get carved grain by grain over the eons, a little bit at a time.  But then things happen now and then on a much quicker timescale, and big water can accomplish in hours what might take normal flows millennia to sculpt.

  Such an event happened very close to where I live yesterday.  Two small creeks and a dry wash got very wet and deep very quickly, as an otherwise insignificant thunderstorm turned into a major flash flood. It was very entertaining and awe-inspiring to watch Mother Nature's creative juices flow.  Apparently, those creative juices are red, for red is the color of our immediate environs now.  Red mud covers the road, and sagebrush up to a few feet high, and guardrails and the mailboxes that didn't get dragged under by the force of it. 

 There were three main blowouts. One is right across from my in-laws ranch, the second at Alamo Creek near all of our neighbor's houses a half-mile away, and the third under the train tracks at the mouth of Posey Creek. Alamo Creek does have a very small perennial flow, but Posey is usually just a trickle, and I've never seen a drop of water in the wash above my in-laws.

  Yesterday I had a last-minute float trip, and spent the morning getting ready for it.  As I loaded drinks and got other gear together, I watched the skies with a little wariness.  There were clouds building in the distance, but that's usually no big concern.  They do that frequently, but it doesn't actually rain or snow much down here at 6200 feet. In fact, we have some of the best weather in Colorado right here along the Lower Upper. 

  The customers were due at my shop at 1 pm, and by noon I noticed that it raining on Sugarloaf.  "Mount" Sugarloaf is not really a distinct mountain at all, but merely a bump on the eastern flank of the Flat Top Mountains.  It only looks big, because seen from the prospective of the valley floor, it does seem to dominate the mountains right behind it, even though it’s much lower. Rain on Sugarloaf means that there’s a good chance it will rain along the river too.  By 12:20 it did start to rain, and I called my customer’s cell phone in hopes of saving him a trip up the river in case he wanted to cancel.  I got his answering message, which meant that he was probably already on the River Road and outside of cell phone service. 

  My customers showed up at 12:45, just as the heavens really began to pour their guts out.  While it did we huddled in my shop, trying to decide whether to go or not.  In the end we decided to pull the plug on our adventure, but I showed them on a map how they could take the back way along the river to Arrowhead.  At least then they could see the canyon by rental car that they weren’t going to see from my boat. 

  They left, and I began to unload all of the gear in my boat that I had just packed up.  I was unloading one of the hatches and I began to notice a strange shhhhhh… sound coming from a distance, and getting louder.  It sounded like the river had suddenly gotten much closer, or higher.  But the river has been dropping quite a bit over the last couple of weeks, post-runoff.  Then I looked up the hill towards the River Road, and saw a sight that my eyes couldn’t quite believe.  Up where our driveway meets the road, red mud was pouring over the guardrails and flowing down the steep hillside like cross between Niagara Falls and the elevator in The Shining.  I’m sure I did a double and maybe even a triple take.  I started to head up the road towards it to get a better look, and then noticed that the river of blood was coming down the driveway that I was walking up.  I looked back at my Landcruiser and raft sitting there in what might be its eventual path, so I turned and ran back to the Cruiser, jumped in, and moved it to higher ground.  In my shop I called my father-in-law to let him know what was happening, and put on some waders and boots. 

  By the time I got back around to the driveway, it was red with mud although most of the flow had turned off of it.  I went up through the slippery slime to the top of the driveway, and was absolutely astounded at what I saw.  The little wash across from our driveway had what looked to be about 300 cfs of liquid red mud crashing through it, enough to float my big raft. It was coming out of a narrow gap in the hill, past my in-laws mailboxes, and across the road.  Some of it went down the driveway, but most of it turned right and downhill.  As my father-in-law Jerry and I watched, the red river went more and more down the road as large rocks and tree limbs plugged the gap under the guardrails, forming an elongated dam.  Soon a couple of neighbors stopped by on their way home, and all we could do was stand there shaking our heads at the sight.  Jerry went back to call the sheriff to let them know what was happening, and I roamed around with my camera trying to document it all. 

  Very soon the flow began to drop, and within a half hour had mostly stopped.  But what changes it had wrought in that half-hour!  The entire hillside from the driveway down was covered in a layer of mud. Some very large rocks which had supported the River Road had been excavated away, and rolled down the hill.  The road itself was undamaged, but its underpinnings are possibly compromised. Two of the signs advertising my fishing business were gone, though I found them later snagged in some sagebrush with one broken in half.

 

  Recently the property below the mailboxes had been purchased, and the new owners had just carved out a small clearing for their RV the previous week. The short-lived river had followed the path he had made with the tractor, and carved out a temporary conduit for the flow.  I carefully followed the slippery trail down to the river, and saw that one of my favorite fishing holes was now doubled in size, caused by the temporary stream carving out a huge chunk of river bank.  I call this spot Last Chance Hole, because its your last chance to hook a fish just before my take out.  Last week, in three of the four trips I did we caught fish in that perfectly formed spinning eddy.  Now it had a ragged figure eight shape, and was filled with brown and red scum. 

  Eventually, the county emergency crews showed up along with the highway crew. They’ve been out there for the last day and a half cleaning up the mess on the River Road.  This afternoon, I went out to check on the other two points where it flooded, Alamo Creek and Posey Creek.  Posey is a little trickle of a creek that I’ve seen turn the whole river red after a good hard rain, the very definition of a gullywasher. There are a couple of guys who live there, and to get to their place you have to drive under the Union Pacific bridge that also spans the river.  Right now it’s a soupy mess, and it will be some time before its cleaned out.  Posey is still putting out a some red color into the river. 

 The other blowout hits a little closer to home.  Alamo Creek is where my father-in-law used to get his irrigation water before a similar storm in July of 2008.  That one blocked his headgate too, and we spent two days digging it out by hand.  Once we did, the water flowed towards his ranch once more for about three minutes, when the flow suddenly stopped.  His underground pipe was blocked somewhere in along its five hundred foot length, and no water has flowed through it since. This spring and summer he bought some replacement pipe and was getting ready to try and fix it, and now the headgate that we had cleaned out seven years ago is under is buried beneath a few feet of mud, rocks and trees.  And, the creek channel has veered away from the headgate and now runs towards our neighbors.  Its quite a mess, and there’s no easy way to visualize putting it back the way it was.  Making matters even more complicated, the headgate lies within BLM wilderness, and they’re not too amenable to going in there and fixing it with heavy equipment, which is why we had to dig it out by hand the last time. 

  So that’s the news from the Lower Upper Colorado, where even a minor rainstorm can turn into something memorable!  Luckily the river is still in fine shape, and its level dropping.  It fished very well last week, with the most rainbows that I’ve seen in the river since the late Eighties.  Hopefully this flood is a one time event this summer, but just plan on catching your last fish of the day somewhere above Last Chance Hole!

                                        Jack Bombardier

 

The Time To Get Up Here Is Now!

                                   The Time To Get Up Here Is Now!              July 15^th 2015

 Here on the Upper Colorado River, what turned out to be the Great Spring Runoff Of 2015 has finally past its crest, and begun its long, slow decent.  The other night I went home the back way, taking the river road via McCoy and Burns, and the river looked as perfect and sensuous as I've ever seen it in the 28 years that I've intimately known it.  As I drove along it’s northern flank, the river looked like Natasha Kinski suggestively wrapped around a writhing serpent.  The valley colors were made of deep warm browns and reds and olive.  It made me want to pull over and jump into the river to feel its cool embrace.

 The “Lower Upper” Colorado River peaked at about 8000 cfs this spring, but now I can see the wood of my riverside dock for the first time in a month. The rocks which helped hold it down against the river's relentless flow are all poking out above the waterline again.  As I've noted in previous emails, when the river rises, it goes off-color. When flows stabilize, it clears.  When flows drop, it clears faster.  After three weeks of high water, the river had already shed itself of turbid sediment.  Now that it’s dropping, it looks clear and perfect. 

 
  Float fishing the river at levels between 8000 and 2500 cfs might sound like a scary number to those accustomed to floating the Lower Upper at its 1000 cfs summertime norm.  Such high flows do reduce the fishable areas of the river, but if you know this water then that's a good thing, not a negative.  In 2011, we had some of the best fishing here ever from 10,000 cfs on down to where it is now, since it was clear and the fish long overdue for a good meal. I never thought I'd see those high, wonderful flows again, but here we are! While most of the west suffers from dry conditions and low water, and the east has its usual crappy weather, Colorado is probably the best place to be in the United States, if not beyond.  If you look at the national Snotel map, the Centennial State is a huge moist blue blob surrounded by a sea of blank nothingness or pale green. The wildfire season has begun in other places, which is making for some nice sunsets here downwind. If you live in Colorado, thank your lucky stars!

  Two days ago, I took one of my wife's new employees for a quick float.  For me a "quick float" means putting in at Pinball, and taking out at my shop five miles below.  Though its not many river miles, this float encompasses running Pinball Rapid (going right of the bridge abutment, into a meaty wave train), checking out the rock with dinosaur tracks, doing multiple laps around Whirlpool Canyon, running the exciting center line of the Twin Bridges, and cantering through the continuous waves below that for a half-mile all the way past Rancho Starvo. In short, this is the most fun time to be on the water! Its mild whitewater, plus all the fish are stacked up in the eddies where they're easy to find and they’re hungry.

  My wife's employees name is Ashley, and she grew up on the Chesapeake Bay, and she’s only had the most fleeting brush with the Great American West.  Thus far being here has been everything she had hoped for when she came from back east. Being from Massachusetts originally myself, I can relate to what its like to be someone from the east coast turned loose onto the spectacular visceral experience that is western Colorado.  I last took Ashley on the river a month ago, just before the river rose from the 5000 cfs range to 8000 where it peaked. On our first trip, I didn't bother bringing any fishing rods and regretted it, for there was a nice caddis hatch that night and we saw trout noses in every eddy.  The other night I almost made the same mistake again, and only at the last minute did I remember to bring my ten foot Loomis three weight.  The Loomis was already rigged with two caddis patterns, a Hi-Vis Elkhair all ginked up, and a tiny, natural-looking caddis pattern left trailing behind it undressed so that it would sink just a bit subsurface.  

 
  Ashley and I stopped next to the Dinosaur Rock, and then sneaked past the right side of the Pinball Bridge. We flew on to Whirlpool Canyon, where I tossed my cataraft around in the waves multiple times.  Then it was through more fast water all the way to Jack Flats, where it suddenly occurred to me that we had a fly rod with us.  I eddied left and as the boat was being carried back upriver I showed her where the fish should be, though I didn't see any riseforms.  Caddis flies were dashing about in their erratic flight paths, and I knew that at least some of them were being consumed.  Remembering the rod, I took it out of its holder, showed Ashley the flies that were attached to it, stripped out some line, and made a cast upstream ahead of the boat.  I needed a couple more feet than I had, and pointed out the wakes the flies were making to demonstrate what a non drag-free drift looked like.  I pulled a couple more feet of line out, made a bit of a reach cast to get a better drift, and after only a couple feet of floating the Hi-Vis Elk Hair suddenly had a little tug.  I set the hook and felt a stronger tug in my hand.  A trout had taken the second fly which was just below the surface, and the battle was on.

  Ashley was looking on wide-eyed and smiling.  "Do you want to land it?" I asked, and she sprang forward to grab the rod before even answering.  I told her to keep the rod tip high, and not to give the fish any slack but also not pull too hard.  With the net at the ready, Ashley steered the trout to the boat and soon we had a handsome fifteen inch brown trout on board.  It was the first trout she had ever caught, and was utterly delighted to see it up close and personal.  My small cataraft has an open floor, and we were able to hold the net in the water and let the trout swim around at our feet like it was in a live well.  I had hooked not only a fish, but a new fisherperson as well!

  I let Ashley know that a ratio of one fish caught per two casts made is not to be expected, but when you know where the trout are, and they're feeding, then fishing can be pretty easy sometimes!  And that's how it is on the Lower Upper right now.  There is still little holding water along the banks, so the trout are stacked up in the Colorado's multiple big eddies.  It’s been a little tough for them to get a meal over the last few weeks, but now that the water is clearer, and the bugs are moving again, the warming water temps (64 degrees) have their metabolism going.  It’s all come together in a perfect storm of trout (and trout fisherman) nirvana.  So you've been waiting for the water to come down before doing a float, don't, come now before the river drops the rest of the way, and the fattened trout scatter!

Jack Bombardier  -  13403 Colorado River Road Eagle County CO 81637                            970-524-1440 (home)  -  jackbombardier/blogspot.com – jack@confluencecasting.com

Fishing The Peak

                                                                 

                                                                Fishing The Peak
Its June 7th 2015, and river flows (and the snowpack that create them) are looking good on the Upper Colorado
River Basin.  The river is at or near its peak right now, flowing at about 7,500 cfs past (and into) my backyard right now. The flows this spring are much higher than I would have expected only a few weeks ago, but that's what five weeks of almost daily moisture will do for a watershed.  In my last email, I promised to let everyone know when I thought we were at peak, and when that peak might start to drop.  I think that moment is nigh at hand.  The fishing still isn't great, but the river looks good and it should be fishing great very soon. 

   One thing that's different with this email than past ones I've sent is that I'm going start putting in links to stories that might be of interest.  There's a blog I read by a sportswriter who does a lot of that, and I've noticed that I really like to take those internet side trips sometimes.  For example, the day I ran across a story about Arctic Char being stocked in Dillon Reservoir, and instead of just telling you about it I can just do this....http://www.summitdaily.com/news/16658384-113/free-fishing-weekend-comes-to-rivers-and-lakes .  How fun is that?

  More good news is that the clarity of the river is better than you expect for this time of year and for this high a flow, its much clearer.  Although the visibility is still under a foot, it looks like water and not coffee.  The main reason for this is that upstream reservoir operators are coordinating dam releases to provide flushing flows for endangered fish near Grand Junction.  These impoundments include Green Mountain, Williams Fork, Lake Granby and Wolford Mountain.  (To learn more about that, check this link at " http://www.vaildaily.com/news/16665578-113/colorado-reservoirs-coordinate-to-provide-peak-flows-for  ). Since the water that's flowing my way is coming out of the bottom of these reservoirs and not from surface runoff, its colder and clearer that we typically see in June.  These releases are supposed to end during the middle of the next week, which means that the river should drop quite a bit, clear, and warm up.  This is turn should also increase bug hatches, and the metabolism of the trout.  By next weekend, the fishing here on the Lower Upper should be ON.

  I've done three floats this week, two of them just to enjoy the whitewater with friends and one to fish.  The fishing trip was one we scheduled over a month ago, when the timing of the runoff was more uncertain.  As our date drew nearer, I let my client know via email that it was looking like the river would still be high, and the fishing poor.  But then on my second whitewater float we saw rising fish and decent caddis hatches, and I realized that it might be possible to catch a trout in this big water after all. My customer still wanted to come despite sub-par conditions, for he had heard about my stretch of river from a good friend and wanted to experience it himself, good fishing or bad. I priced the float as if we were doing a scenic float instead of a fishing one, and in our email exchanges I kept downplaying the likelihood of catching anything.  Even worse, in the three days between my second whitewater float and the day of the fishing trip on Friday, the river kept on inching up even more.  On my last email to him, I wrote him that I couldn't promise him great fishing on Friday, but that I could promise him a great time.

  My customer showed up on Friday morning eager to go, and after a quick primer on fly casting we set off up the river.  Along the way, I showed him some of the big wave holes you can see from the road.  We stopped at Pinball Rapid so I could show him the line we'd be taking, which would be to the right of the bridge pylon.  In normal flows, going left of the bridge is the only feasible option in a raft, but above 3,500 cfs or so the right side is in play.  The slot is fairly narrow going right, but the reward is a nice set of big waves to run through that can make a raft feel like a cantering horse.  When we got up to Derby Junction, I took him to the top of the mesa to check out the overlook on top.  Its only a mile from the road and river below, but you gain almost a thousand feet in elevation and its one of my favorite views in Colorado.  From that vantage point, you can see downriver for five miles, or the entire first half of the float we do. 

  When we got back to the river, instead of going to my put in which is just across the River Road at the mouth of Derby Creek, I drove him up to Rodeo Rapid, aka Burns Hole.  Rodeo was formed by a rock slide almost thirty years ago that created a Class III  feature in the river.  At most fishing levels, its a nasty piece of work, for at the bottom of the rapid is a shark tooth-like snag that the fast current tries to push anything in the water up into. The first time I ran it twelve years ago, I got stuck on that rock for over an hour, until some campers downriver saw me and walked up to see if they could be of assistance.  I ended up throwing them my bow line, and the four of them pulled and pulled until my big cataraft finally came free. Over the next few years, I got the rapid pretty dialed in to where I could get through it without any other issues, but I never enjoyed it. I've witnessed several boats flip in it, including one rowed by a guide working for me who put two eighty year-olds into the river.  Now my river access is below Rodeo and I don't miss having to deal with it, but when the river rises it gets easier to run, since the rocks that might otherwise cause difficulties are well under water.  At the 7,300 cfs level or so it was running Friday, it becomes almost easy, and so I showed my customer what it looked like to give him the option of whether he wanted to run it or not.  Being a former Marine, he was not only up to the challenge but looking forward to it. 

  We launched from Burns, rowed through the flat water above the Rapid, and then ran it just left of center without incident.  The waves were huge and rolling but my big cataraft just bombed right on through.  As we made our way past Derby Junction, we began to focus on fishing, and how to "read" water to determine where the fish were.  My client had done mostly still water fishing on lakes and oceans, where fish are on the prowl looking for food. I explained that in a river, the fish like to hold in feeding lies and let the food come to them, a very different scenario.  These feeding lies can often be located by determining where the seams between the moving and still water are, and those are usually delineated by bubble lines. During this whole description to him of what we were looking for, I kept interjecting that given our current high water conditions, it might be difficult to actually catch anything, but in theory at least this was where we would try to locate feeding trout.  I was trying to keep his expectations low, but in our first big eddy, Echo Hole, he caught a fine fifteen inch rainbow right out of a spot I told him to cast into!  Over the next hour, he caught two more rainbows as well, and it looked as though we would have to start raising our expectations a little!

  Unfortunately, those three fish would be the only ones we'd catch all day.  After those three he did fish less, and we just enjoyed the brisk float.  The nice part about fishing high water is that you don't have to fish every foot of the river the whole way down.  That's because there's not much holding water along the banks, and so the fish tend to stack up in the big eddies to wait out the high water.  This causes the fish populations to be concentrated into very small areas, making finding them easier to find.  So a trip this time of year tends to be short sections of very fun whitewater, interspersed by pulling out of the current to fish the eddies along the way.  The only caveat is that with the water clarity under a foot, you need to get your fly or lure within a small visual window close to a trout's eyeballs.  The upside to that poor clarity is that the fish aren't too spooky, and you can get the boat pretty close to them. 

  As we made our way down the river that day, the clarity seemed to worsen.  We also saw plenty of floating wood in the water, another sure sign that the water level is increasing. So whether it was due to that, or from our halfhearted attempts to catch more, we got skunked the rest of the day.  But my client didn't seem to mind, for the fun waves and the always-spectacular setting more than made up for it.  We did get several bumps and chasers, some right up to the boat, but didn't land any more of them.

  So the snowpack is looking good, and the Front Range is even wetter so their reservoirs are even fuller than ours.  If you were on top of A Basin right now, you might think that it was the middle of February.  The Snotel number for the Upper Colorado River basin is at 95% as of this morning, (http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/reports/UpdateReport.html?report=Colorado .  This means that all that beautiful water is coming west, where it belongs.  There is one place I like to look to get a feel for what the snowpack is doing melt-wise, and that's the gauge on the Piney.  The Piney River is a great window into what the snowpack is doing. (This gauge can be found at http://waterdata.usgs.gov/co/nwis/uv?site_no=09058500 ).  The Piney begins above Vail at Piney Lake, nestled up in the Gore Range.  It has a short steep run flowing northwest to its confluence with the Colorado River at State Bridge.   Denver Water owns most of it's water rights, and if the proposed Wolcott Reservoir ever gets built, water would be pumped uphill south over the divide into the Eagle River watershed.  That water would then be stored in a reservoir for late summer releases into the Eagle, which would satisfy downstream water commitments. In low water years this would be bad news for the Colorado River, since water that currently flows past this stretch in the summer could be substituted by that Eagle water, which might mean less here and more of it going east through the Roberts Tunnel.  The only irrigation taken out of it now is at Magnus Lindholm's ranch down near the bottom, but its not that significant of a diversion.  The resulting flow number at the Piney gauge is a good real-time look at what the snowpack is doing from day to day, without the variabilities that reservoir storage or ranch diversions add to the picture. The Piney peaked on Tuesday and has begun to drop a little since, so I feel pretty confident that once the dams start releasing less water come the middle of this week, we'll see the levels begin to drop.  As you might remember from previous emails, or from personal experience, the period immediately after the peak flow when the river begins to clear can have some great fishing, and right now that looks like next weekend.  Of course weather and other variables can have a big impact on that, but for now somewhere around June 12th should be the time to get your fishing rods back out. 

  Of course, the neat thing about getting out this time of year is that river is so much damn fun at this level, and really at anything above 3,000 cfs.  The waves trains just seem to roll on and on, caused by the sheer volume of water being squeezed between canyon walls.  Whirlpool Canyon has some really big waves, whereas normally there are none at all.  Rodeo Rapid goes from being a dangerous rapid to avoid, to being a fun play spot to seek out.  The Twin Bridges can be safely run by going right down the middle, and there's a good half mile of fun, fast water below. One difficulty we did have on Friday was finding a place to stop for lunch.  All of the usual sand bars and eddies we usually stop at were under deep moving water.  We ended up at the Pinball boat ramp, which was perfect.  It's mostly under water right now, and so you can float right up to the spot you are usually maneuvering your truck, and hang out there out of the wind and current. 

  If you live on the Front Range, you've had such a wet and cold past few weeks that its probably hard to even think about doing any wet outdoor recreation.  You've probably had enough of that just walking to and from your front door each day. But out here, its a different story.  I lived in or around Denver for seventeen years, and never appreciated how much nicer and dryer it is over here on the western slope. We get way less rain and snow here at 6,200 feet of elevation on the river, as opposed to what we see often see on the Denver TV newscasts.  So the water is just where we like it - watering pastures, flowing past our wader-clad ankles, or in a frozen state crunching under our skis.  (Yes, A Basin is still open and will be until at least the 14th, maybe longer. Find out more at http://arapahoebasin.com/ABasin/snow-conditions/summer-season/default.aspx ).

  So if you want to experience Colorado at its best, and ski / whitewater float / fish / golf all in the same weekend, this is the time to come up and do it!  (I can help you out with two out of the three).

                                                              Jack

Jack Bombardier

www.confluencecasting.com13403 Colorado River Road
Eagle County, CO 81637
970-524-2775 - shop
303-378-2149 - cell
http://jackbombardier.blogspot.com/