The instant the trout ate I felt my courtesy rewarded.
A few minutes earlier, Erik Johnsen and I had slipped down the dusty riverbank trail to a sweet-looking run on Colorado’s Eagle River, not too far from Vail.
Johnsen wanted me to have the first shot, but I wasn’t having it. “It’s all you,” I said.
A 16-inch rainbow promptly smashed his caddis imitation.
My turn. Three casts to the head of the pool later a hefty trout rose and gobbled my fly. The fish, 18 or so inches of silver and rose fury, took off on a blitzing run. “Gotta love fly fishing in the West,” I thought to myself, even after quickly losing that fish.
We have lots of trout water in the East and some nice fish. When my friends from the left side of the country talk about their trout, I eagerly defend fishing out here. “We’ve got it really good!” I’ll say.
The voice in the back of my mind can sometimes be a little more tempered in its enthusiasm. “It’s not bad, but is it really as good as the West?”
These two trout — both bigger than anything I’d encountered all season back in Virginia, hitting dry flies in the middle of a hot afternoon in our first five minutes of fishing — got that voice talking.
As did the next three days.
The thing was, during those days, I kept hearing things like, “It’s been really slow,” “We’re going to have to work for them,” “Maybe this change in weather will help things pick up” and the old standby, “You should have been here last week.” Yet it was still really, really good.
I was in Colorado as a guest of the folks at TroutRoutes and OnX, popular apps that we used over those few days to navigate our way around trout waters in the Edwards and Leadville areas. TroutRoute’s Johnsen and OnX’s Jack Flatley were the hosts. The other guest was Jay Nichols, who works in book publishing and is a frequent contributor to Fly Fisherman magazine.
In addition to the Eagle, we floated a 10-mile stretch of the Colorado River, drove deep into the backcountry to explore small streams and hit the upper Arkansas.
This was my first trout-fishing trip to Colorado. I’ve been fortunate to fish a bit out West, mostly in Oregon, where I grew up and still have family I visit regularly. I’ve had enough incredible days out there to know that our Colorado action wasn’t as good as it could have been. But, relatively speaking, tough fishing in the West can still be darn good.
Consider that Colorado River float. We were casting hopper dropper rigs and the fish weren’t overly interested in either the hoppers nor the droppers. “Had to work for them,” was absolutely a fair description. Yet at the end of the day, we’d boated a couple dozen browns in the 14- to 18-inch range among us. That kind of action on one of my go-to Eastern tailwaters would constitute a banner day.
The next morning, we spent a couple hours on the Eagle, where chunky wild rainbows slashed at skated caddis with reckless abandon. Then we headed high into the backcountry for the closest thing to Eastern fishing we experienced. The water was small, as were the browns and brookies. The setting? Spectacular.
On the upper Arkansas on our final day, we cast caddis to rising fish between squalls, before heading back to our home base and wrapping things up that evening with incredible caddis action on the Eagle.
So, is there anything not to love about fishing in the West?
Well, for one thing, it’s not like it’s undiscovered.
At Vail Valley Anglers the morning of our Colorado River float, the parking lot was jammed with at least 15 trucks with drift boats and rafts as guides connected with their clients before heading out. The fishing spot on the Eagle where we ended up that second morning wasn’t the spot where we wanted to start; it was the only spot we could find near Edwards that had not already been taken.
That said, there’s so much water you absolutely can get away from crowds with a little effort (and the help of an app like TroutRoutes or OnWater Fish).
All things considered, I’m still not willing to say trout fishing out West is definitively “better” or “easier” than in the East. No, we don’t have as much trout water, but we’ve got plenty. Our average fish probably isn’t as big. But it’s not bad. Our hatches might not be as epic, but we have some good ones.
Whether here or there, each day on the water brings its unique challenges and its rewards. It’s a cliché, but there really aren’t many bad fishing days. If anything, traveling can help us appreciate our home waters even more.
