Trout Unlimited - Colorado Cheyenne Mountain Chapter

News

Parent Youth Day

2008 Parent Youth Day will take place July 19th and 20th at Puma Hills Ranch. CMCTU has expanded our Parent/Youth Day to two days, a full weekend, because demand from families last year was more than we could accommodate in just one day.
Read more...

| Print |

E-mail

Five Seasons in Eleven Mile

by Dan Snow

The Eleven Mile Canyon stretch of the South Platte is the tailwater between the Spinney and Cheesman tailwaters, if you didn’t know. And it’s likely some of you don’t. You won’t find an entry for this fishery in the weekly fishing report in the newspapers, nor does Eleven Mile pop up in conversation nearly as often as its two “big sisters”. But in a state blessed with beautiful canyons, Eleven Mile can more than hold its own – the lush vegetation, steep rock walls (many of them famous climbing routes) and the easy access of the road running beside the river bring many visitors just for the view.

11 mile

But for many of us, it’s the river that draws us to the canyon. The fishery, due to the recent introduction of special regulations, is finally starting to realize its potential. It’s a fishery with its own quirks and moods, in some ways similar to the other South Platte tailwaters and yet also very different. As with any stretch of water, you can’t really understand or appreciate it with just a single visit. It takes time for someone to start to get a handle on some of the puzzles – maybe not fully understand them, but at least feel comfortable with them.

I’d like to take you through a year in Eleven Mile Canyon. I certainly don’t claim to understand everything about the fishery, but I do appreciate it. You may wonder why someone who says they appreciate a fishery would “kiss and tell”. I can only say that Eleven Mile Canyon is a fishery in need of friends, and TUers as a group consist of the best friends a fishery can have – not just anglers (who could gut a river as easily as preserve one) but educated, caring, conservation oriented anglers.

The First Season – Winter

Winter was the season of my introduction to this place. Standing on the bank freezing as I drifted a worm through a pool made me happy that the car and my thermos were only ten feet away. What I remember most from those early trips was how tranquil and peaceful the canyon was. This is the time of year when you are more likely to see bald eagles than fellow anglers – especially on some of the marginally dangerous days we have here.

This is also when the difference between Eleven Mile and the other tailwaters is most apparent. Eleven Mile Dam is a top-draw dam, sending the coldest water into the fishery at this time of year. Cheesman and Spinney are bottom-draw dams, sending the warmest waters from their respective reservoirs into their tailwaters. So when you drive into Eleven Mile Canyon from Lake George you are surprised to see how much of the canyon is frozen shut – especially in late January and early February. This also means that winter (which I’m defining as solely midge season – no Blue Wing Olives) comes earlier and lasts longer than it does in Cheesman. Typically Eleven Mile will see its last Blue Wing Olives of the year in early November and must wait until almost April for them to reappear.

As with all tailwaters at this time of year, this is a season of small flies (RS-2s, Miracle Nymphs, Griffiths Gnats, etc.) – notwithstanding the fish that are genetically predispositioned to eat any San Juan Worm they see. And this is not the time to be expecting twenty fish days, although it can happen on a very rare basis. But what you can expect, with some effort, is to find rising fish. The key is following the shadows. The fish in winter tend to rise in the pools that are in shadow – direct sun will keep them from rising. So as the day goes on, you simply move from pool to pool, sometimes hiking and sometimes driving, as the pools come into shadow. Obviously, the better you know the canyon, the better your odds of finding risers. Some people I’ve talked to have actually spent a day going up and down the canyon just watching instead of fishing. It’s an investment that pays dividends not just during winter, but year ‘round.

The Second Season – Spring

The season of Spring is defined by the flow of the river, at least in my definition. Running from late March to Memorial Day weekend, the flows are usually very low. This means that the fish can’t help but notice the Blue Wing Olives that are coming off – sometimes in trickles, sometimes droves. A cloudy day can mean fishing dries to fish rising to midges, then Olives, then back to midges by dusk. Days like that can leave your arm sore for awhile from all the casting and you might notice that your feet have went numb from the cold water. But of course we usually have this damnably nice Colorado weather – clear skies with some wind – which makes for tough fishing. But that’s the best way to learn something. While you don’t need to carry every BWO pattern that exists, you should have a few emerger and dun imitations that you have confidence in.

Towards the end of Spring you will find some yellow craneflies which can provide some surface action. Most people miss this, partly because craneflies are not one of the “Big Four” insect groups that flyfishers watch for and partly because few people carry (or even tie) adult cranefly patterns. But craneflies are clumsy fliers and a Grouse and Yellow or Brown Partridge and Yellow tied on a dry fly hook will float just in or below the film – just like an adult that has made a mistake.

But Spring is really the season of the little Olives. The craneflies are, as much as anything, a sign that change is about to happen.

The Third Season – Summer

Since Spring was the season of low flows, you can probably guess what signals the start of Summer. One day you can wade across the river almost anywhere you please and the next you’re afraid you would be swept away if you set foot in it.

Welcome to Summer.

The increased size of the river seems to correspond to an increased size in the bugs the fish respond to. Almost everyone knows that once the flows bump up a bouillabaisse of San Juan Worms, caddis and cranefly larva gets knocked loose. But there’s also a mating flight of carpenter ants (#14) in late June and Golden Stones and Rusty Spinners that show up in July. There’s even a large yellow mayfly (mentioned in Roger Hill’s excellent book “Fly Fishing the South Platte River”) that shows up off and on throughout the summer – making a #12 Light Cahill a valuable addition to the vest.

You can run into these or any of a multitude of other bugs during this season of abundance, but none more abundant than the caddis. Just as the Blue Wing Olives dominate the spring, caddis are the one constant throughout the summer. They don’t show up in the swarming blitzkriegs seen during the more famous caddis hatches – they’re just always around. They make wet wading while casting an Elk Hair Caddis or swinging a wet fly through a riffle a pleasant and productive way to spend a summer day.

You can wet wade because the dam at Eleven Mile is a top draw dam. The warm water means you will be sharing the river with people in inner tubes and kayaks or who are just plain swimmin’. Instead of getting mad when you have to stop fishing as they go by, take that time to look around – something we do far too rarely while we’re streamside. As I said, this is the season of abundance in the canyon, and it’s not simply an abundance of fishable bugs. The sights, the sounds, the smells – relax and enjoy them all.

The Fourth Season – Fall

It’s difficult to pin down exactly when Fall starts in the canyon. One day I’ll drive up the road along the river and notice that the green of summer has started to disappear. That’s usually when I first realize that Fall has arrived in Eleven Mile. To me, Fall is the season when things slowly disappear.

If you had to pin the start of Fall to a date, then the first days following Labor Day are the best candidates. The high flows and high numbers of people start to diminish. The caddis and stoneflies follow suit. The angler’s attention, however, usually isn’t on what’s disappearing but on what’s taking its place. The Tricos, which have been around all summer, start to get more attention from the fish due to the lower flows. And Blue Wing Olives start to reappear with the decreased flows, leading to those few rare times when you can fish to a succession of female Trico duns, then Trico spinners, Blue Wing Olives and finally male Trico Duns – typically with enough of a break between each stage to attend to necessities. I usually hit one day like this every two years, but it can happen. If it happens to you, just remind yourself that you don’t have to hammer every fish in the river to prove your point -–whatever it may be.

As Fall progresses the Tricos also disappear to be replaced by the midges. But the prime player is the Blue Wing Olive, who we put all our hopes on for a long Fall. A long, cloudy, dreary, miserable Fall. One where you can take a few days of sick leave from work and everyone decides that you must have been sick. It was too crappy to take a day off for fun. The fact that you didn’t answer your phone was proof of just how bad you felt.

This strategy actually works if you don’t try it too often.

By this time, the river’s flow has slowed and it seems the fishing has slowed down as well. But really it’s the pace of the fishing that has slowed. Because of this, you (or at least I) become more reflective on the fishing, the fish, the river and the past year. Thoughts like these lead us to the fifth season.

The Fifth Season – Conservation

I’ve tried to give a start and an end to all the other seasons discussed, but the Season of Conservation rightfully eludes such characterization. It’s a season that begins at a different time and place for each individual, but once it begins it usually never ends. Much of what I will talk about has to do with problems specific to Eleven Mile Canyon, but some of this may apply to your home waters as well. And just thinking about your home waters and how to improve them never hurts.

11 mile

You may have noticed that I never mentioned when the spawning season is in Eleven Mile. Some people like to fish for spawners when they are on their redds, but I ask that you not do that here. Eleven Mile Canyon is one of the few stretches on the South Platte that is only lightly effected by Whirling Disease, and nobody’s really sure why. This water hasn’t lost a year class of rainbows yet, while we all know what has happened in Cheesman Canyon – but these two stretches are very similar. Are the differences in survival rates between the two waters due to differing flow profiles from the two dams? Differing temperature profiles in the dam releases? Top versus bottom draw dams? Or could the hen rainbow that you’re about to cast to have the genetic key to solving the Whirling Disease puzzle and making Cheesman and other fisheries healthy again? We’ll never know if you pull her off the redd and screw up her attempt to spawn.

My second suggestion in the “Be Nice to Fish” category is to not go overboard on the good days. If the catching is so easy that the fish become, as John Gierach once said, “part of a process instead of an individual triumph” then you have to start thinking about hooking mortality. Hooking mortality essentially is the fact that if you catch enough fish a few of them will die – due to rough handling or exhaustion or whatever. Statistically speaking, when fishing with flies we probably accidentally kill somewhere between one out of every 20 to 30 fish you catch. So after an orgy where we may have caught 50 fish but don’t really remember 40 of them, we need to ask ourselves if it was really worth it or if we would have been better off being a little less frantic, ending up a little more relaxed and with a few more fish left in the river.

Now let me say right here that I’m no saint in this area. I’ve more than once been caught up in the moment and rationalized what I was doing with “I haven’t been out in a while” or “It’s gonna be a long winter.” But the question of how many fish do you need to catch to have a good day is one that each angler needs to ask him or herself at some point in their career. You’ll probably find that there are other things that play into having a good day.

Like crowding. Many of the regulars speak in fear of “the Deckerization” of Eleven Mile Canyon. This is a fear not so much of the river becoming crowded but of people fishing like it was crowded – cutting in front of others or jumping in on the hole someone is already fishing even though there may not be another person for the next 100 yards upstream. The lack of respect for other people’s space on the water is something that we read about (and witness) more and more these days. By writing this, I’ve probably passed my first test in the process of becoming an Old Fart, but this is something I believe in. Think about it – if you only know how to fish four spots on the entire river and you’re willing to risk a confrontation just to get one of them, how good of a fisherman are you? Once again, I’m not perfect when it comes to this, but I am trying.

Speaking of confrontations, if you fish Eleven Mile enough you will run into someone fishing bait in the special regulations section. Assume they made an honest mistake and tell them about the regulations. If you tie, give them a few San Juan Worms and show them how to fish them. In many cases, it was an honest mistake and in five years they might become the best member of your TU chapter – if they aren’t pissed off by the first flyfisher they encounter.

But the most important thing you can do for all the waters in the state is to get involved with your TU chapter and their efforts to work with the Division of Wildlife. This means both the instream work and, particularly now, in the regulations process. The evening you spend at a regulations meeting can help your fishing more in the upcoming years than an evening spent in a rod building or fly tying class for the simple reason that this is where you work for places that are worth fishing and fish worth fishing for.

Gee, that sounds like the whole point of TU.

I hope this year we’ve spent together begins a friendship with my homewater and maybe furthers your friendship with yours. I look forward to learning more with you during any of the five seasons in Eleven Mile Canyon.

[ Back ]

CMCTU Equipment Raffle