August 2026

 OK - let's face it.  The ongoing drought is completely destroying our fishing possibilities this year.  We never seen streams as low as they now are (it's August 25 as I type.)  We did make a couple of short overnight trips to old hauntings, but spending any time at all on the waters was a real waste of time. 

I did have a tiny bit of success on the White River up by Sleepy cat, but my flies were too large for what I finally saw as trico duns along the banks as I exited the river.  Upstream on the South Fork and the North Fork, I stuck with surface flies in the early afternoon and had little in the way of strikes.  The camping was nice above Lake Avery with no one else around due to the lake finally starting to be refilled after some dam repairs have been completed.

Tomorrow afternoon, I'm driving back again to the above river in the hopes that my changing to flies in the #20 range will be more palatable to the local residents the next morning. By noon I'll be finished and heading back home.  Virtually every river now has been either voluntarily or ordered shut down in the afternoon, and we won't go behind that kind of sign for any reason.

Last Logbook Entry  � for previous day

8/24-25: As probably everyone reading this short report likely knows, Colorado and most of the rest of the west part of our country is suffering a really bad drought situation this year.  Stream flows locally have pretty much shut down fly fishing - although guides are still taking some folks out in the mornings before rising water temperatures force everyone off the rivers around noon every day.

It's the same way above Meeker on what's always been our favorite fly fishing river in the state.  The last few times we've been camping up around Buford have been pretty poor on either of the North or South forks along with the main stem below the confluence of those two tributaries.

But a couple of weeks ago I had a slight bit of success below the Sleepy Cat Ranch on the White.  While I hadn't rigged for a trico emergence early in the morning, I did get a number of strikes and a couple of releases on some overly large yellow sallies.  So with that experience as a learning lesson, this time around I tied on a variety of smaller stuff in the form of #20 and 22 sized RS-2s, baetis comparaduns, and similar types of midges

 Although nothing was coming off the water until about 8:30 AM, when the midges started flitting about I finally started hooking fish.  A little comparadun at the back end with a spent wing generic may fly on the tag worked very well.  A bunch of nice bows and cutbows in the 14 -16 inch range came to hand early on along with a really hefty just shy of two foot long rainbow from a shallow riffle a bit further downstream. 

At the end of the session throwing and bouncing a smallish golden stone nymph along the bottom brought more whitefish to hand than I really needed.  So it was a worthwhile morning and one I hope to repeat at least one more time before we shut down the fly fishing up here for the year.  Here's the video of the trip:

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