Early each trip to Colorado, I try and get reacquainted with old friends.
One such friend is a creek on the other side of the divide in Alfred Packer country. This creek is popular with the Lake City crowd and it has drive in access. For that reason you never know if you’ll have the creek to yourself or if you are going to have to share.
This time I had to share. When I arrived in the morning there were already cars at each of the three parking areas along 3 miles of the creek that I like to fish. I was only trying to get reacquainted so I wasn’t concerned and pulled in behind a couple from Wisconsin. They were fishing upstream and were about an hour ahead of me. Plenty of time I thought to rest the creek and catch a few.
After fishing the first couple of runs I began to have my doubts. I had only one dink that rose to the fly so I decided to sit a while and take a picture or two…..
Oops where’s the camera? Did it fall in the creek? I searched up and down the creek—no go. Went back to the truck—again no camera. My good mood was vanishing. I went back down to the creek one more time. Still no camera. By now I was pretty discouraged and feeling sorry for myself decided to check it in. Too many folks fishing and lost camera to boot.
Once I was back in the truck getting ready to head back to the cabin, I finally found the camera, hiding under my jacket from earlier in the morning. Things began looking brighter. In the meantime the folks from Wisconsin were back so I now knew about how far upstream they had fished. (Note: don’t try to fish behind folks from Wisconsin with boo—they vacuum the stream.) With a fresh new outlook, I drove on upstream a mile and went back to fishing. Finally, fish rose to my caddis fly where they should have been.
I tangled my caddis in bushes where I normally do. I bumbled over the rocks in the riffles splashing water up to my sunglasses, again like normal.
And finally, I stumbled over the same old beaver dams gouging my leg like I usually do. It was good to get reacquainted.
Later.
