September 10-12 South Platte/Arkansas Trip

With Sue's having an extra day off from her Forest Service duties, we loaded up the Vanagon on Friday morning & headed over the hill to Frisco, on through Breckenridge, over Hoosier Pass, and on down to the South Park town of Hartsel.  Unhappily there already were fishermen occupying one of my favorite stretches of the South Fork of the South Platte, so we spent a half hour searching some unmarked roads and eventually found a new entry point to the Middle Fork of the same stream.

All these tributaries of the Platte share the common characteristics of classic meadow type flows with undercut banks with shallow riffles between each pool.  Frankly it took a while to figure out what the resident browns were interested in eating.   Caddis or mayfly patterns proved nearly worthless as did various nymphs.  But this year's standby - the hybrid yellow stone again proved to be the ticket on this stretch, and we released a couple dozen fish before heading out to try another piece of water.

We drove past Hartsel down to a public access point on the South Fork of the same river & set up camp for night.  The lousy weather that basically continued through the weekend prevented us from doing any late evening casting for the browns, but earlier we did land a handful of fish - again on the yellow stone fly.  The following morning we tried different tactics on the stretch where we'd camped and further down towards Spinney Reservoir, but kept coming back to the same old fly.

Shortly thereafter we drove to the tailwater section between Spinney & Elevenmile hoping for better action on the browns that might be heading up to spawn, but that didn't pan out either.  An interesting trico hatch occurred in mid day, and we really had nothing to match it.  It was not a spinner fall.  Eventually we picked up a few smallish rainbows on the tiniest PMD comparadun I had in the box.  Worn out from constant casting we drove down #285 over a pass and into Buena Vista, then turned South on the highway and ended up in Salida.  Had a nice dinner, some good wine, and made a few unproductive casts near our camp site.

The following morning after breakfast we drove to a favorite spot along the Arkansas just outside Salida and had decent success on browns to 14 inches again using the yellowish stone fly.  The river was slightly too high to wade across, so the best water went untouched.  Drove back up 285 towards Buena Vista stopping, but not fishing until we got to River Park in that town.  There we had the best success of the whole trip.  The Arkansas ran gin clear and held beautiful riffles and deep green holes right in the middle of town.  It's obviously heavily fished, but again the stone proved extremely popular with the local browns - and one lone rainbow that Sue brought to hand.  The fly was so successful that we could see fish coming up from very deep in holes to take it.  It absolutely has to be a relatively close imitation of grasshoppers as well as the various stones, since no hatch of any sort was going on while we were on the river.  All in all, this was a great ending to an otherwise uninspiring three days of fishing.