A Tale of Two Streams

The day started off at a fairly urban section of stream. We soon found a classic deep hole and started dredging the bottom with our nymph rigs. There was a large overhanging tree we had to cast up under and despite a few tangles we managed to save our rigs for the most part. We had no hits and we decided we could better hit the hole from the far bank. We waded across above the hole and started pounding it hard. We changed weight, leader length, and flies until we finally figured out what they wanted to eat...a wine colored san juan worm and a black zebra midge dropper. We started to get hits but we missed several potential hookups. Finally I stuck a football shaped brown that ran close to 16 inches. It felt very good to get this one since we were determined to figure the fish out in this hole.



Then David had at it and soon he stuck a piggy brown that must be sneaking caddis from the feeding lane at night...

It was incredible how well fed these two fish were. They had massive bodies in comparison to their heads which is a good sign that the stream's kitchen cabinet has been full as of late. We missed several hits and soon things started to slow down so we took off to a different smaller stream in the high country. It was a winter wonderland up higher with a good dose of snow covering the landscape. At the first decent run we came across I managed to hook into a small feisty brown on a rainbow warrior.


We came across a great looking hole and David waxed artistic with his camera and got some awesome landscape shots.



At the head of the hole I tied into something large but it pulled off. I don't know if it was a big whitefish or a large brown but it got my blood rushing for a few seconds. After this encounter we tried a few more holes then decided to call it. This second stream would have been good to fish if we had a little more time since we had to search out the good holes which were spaced apart quite a bit. The ambiance between the two streams was completely opposite however the fishing proved to be somewhat slow on both. It was a great trip with some good memories made.