You can contact Dennis at: DSmith7136@msn.com

 

 

    It’s a little early yet, I suppose, to be thinking about ice-off and spring fly fishing on the big sagebrush lakes up there near the Colorado Wyoming border, but I can’t help myself. I’ve got a bad case of the shack nasties, I’m itching to stick a big fish and I know that’s a lot more likely to happen in a high prairie lake (for me, anyway) than on one of our pretty little freestone mountain streams. True, there are some big trout in our rivers, but there’s a hell of a lot more of them in the big lakes. The odds are better, and when it comes to catching big trout I need all the help I can get.

     The ice rarely comes off these lakes much before the end of March, and late April is even more likely. As Bill Willcox at the Lake John Resort is fond of saying, “Spring comes slowly to North Park.” It’s an annoyingly long wait.

     I haven’t ever actually fished (or even witnessed) that magical period immediately following the break up of ice on Lake John, the Delaney’s or any of Colorado’s other big trout lakes, but the stories are always reliably maddening: rainbows, cuttbows and browns - six, seven and eight- pounders cruise the shore line hungrily gobbling damn near anything you throw at them. A friend of mine swears he and his buddies saw a ten-pound brown trout wallowing in the shallows on North Delaney Buttes Lake last spring and were so dumbstruck at the sight of it none of them thought to cast a fly to it. I know, I know: 10 pounds fer Gawd’s Sake!! And nobody so much as  lifted a rod. I’m not sure you could fault them. A fish like that is enough to destroy anybody’s composure.

     I did manage to get up there last year with Steve Armstrong about a week to ten days after the ice had completely gone off the Delaney’s. It was May 1^st to be exact and we arrived just after sunup to a dead calm lake pocked with the bulges of rising trout. It was obvious they were midging, and we stumbled around like a pair of Friday-night drunks in the frantic hurry to pull our waders on and get into the water.

     We began catching fish almost immediately, and they were nice fish, in the 14 to 17-inch class, but certainly not the mythical monsters of ice-out legend. The midge hatch lasted for an hour or two during which time we had plenty of action, but then the infamous North Park winds came up and shut the lakes off for most of the day. Later in the afternoon, things calmed down and we returned to the water throwing big ugly minnow and crawdad patterns.

     I finally hooked what felt like a good fish and thought for a while there that maybe I’d finally latched on to one of those legendary spring hogs, but it turned out to be a fat and extremely energetic brown trout of about eighteen inches. Steve wandered over and simply said, “If we’d been here two weeks ago, that’d be a ten pounder.”

                                                                       - Dennis

Dennis Smith is an Outdoor Writer and Photographer. His articles and photos have appeared in numerous outdoor publications, catalogs and newspapers. Dennis can be reached at (970) 669-6074. Want to know more about Dennis?

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