"DRIFTING THROUGH THE FLAMING GORGE", published by Trout and Salmon

February 2005



Anglers in the western United States have it pretty good: lots of trout, delicious, gurgling streams running through spectacular scenery, and plenty of different hatches to keep things interesting.
In fact, there’s only one real fly in the ointment: the dreaded “run-off” – just when the world-famous, blue-ribbon streams of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho are starting to twinkle in the late spring sunshine, after the long, bleak months of winter, and the local anglers are dusting off their rods and reels and looking forward to another season in paradise, that same sunshine dumps a huge quantity of murky snowmelt straight off of the high Rockies and into the streams, rendering them unfishable for anything up to a month.

I’d done my homework – I didn’t want to kick my heels for those long weeks, waiting for the rivers to clear, and I had my “get out of jail” card tucked carefully up my sleeve. I’d planned a route that took in some of the most spectacular scenery on earth in the form of the geological freakshow of Arizona & Southern Utah; some eye-popping entertainment for the family in the surreal cauldron of Las Vegas; and some pretty-much weatherproof fishing on the tailwaters directly below the great dams of the Colorado River and its tributaries, where the dams, not the weather, control the river’s flow and clarity.

Having learnt some valuable lessons on New Mexico’s San Juan, I was due to head on to the much-feted waters of the Green River in Northern Utah, but prior to this, I managed to fit in a couple of days on what might just be the most spectacular trout fishery anywhere in the world – Lee’s Ferry on the Colorado River.

I met up with a brilliant and lovely lady angler called Wendy Gunn. When she’s not holding the fort at Lee’s Ferry Anglers, in the arid wilderness of the Arizona desert, Wendy likes to wrestle with marlin, wahoo, sailfish and the like…on the fly, naturally. Wendy fixed me up with Chad, an amiable young guide, and I spent a great day on the Colorado, sight-casting dry flies to mobs of rainbows under the shear 700-foot cliffs of Marble Canyon.
I caught plenty of fish that day, using Chad’s Griffith’s Gnat to imitate midge clusters, but I watched plenty more refuse the fly before continuing to sip the tiny individual emerging insects. I knew what to do: that night, I fished out some CDC, black thread and size 20 hooks, and knocked up some scaled down ‘shuttlecock’ emergers, just like the ones I’ve used so often at Bewl and Rutland back home.
The next days’ sport was sensational – on a river traditionally known as a nymph water, I had fish after fish rise confidently to the tiny emerger and the three-weight was perpetually arced over as yet another lovely rainbow joined battle. I didn’t have any monsters – most fish were nearer one pound than two – but wading in the icy gin of the Colorado, surrounded by the impossible red walls of the canyon that climb straight into the Arizona sky, I had an absolute ball.

Two days later, we were winding up through Utah, leaving the crazed canyonlands behind us: some of the same waters I’d been standing in at Lee’s Ferry start their journey high on the rocky plateau of Wyoming before tumbling through North-eastern Utah’s Flaming Gorge in the form of the aptly-named Green River. This major tributary of the Colorado, an emerald ribbon cutting a swathe through Utah’s craggy red topography is recognised by many as the most exciting trout fishery in the US. Resembling a giant spring creek, the Green is particularly noted for its Cicada hatch. I’d carefully timed my arrival to co-incide with the peak of this explosion of large terrestrials, but just as in New Zealand, earlier in the year, I arrived to find that the hatch just hadn’t materialised. After leaving my family ensconced in the beautiful little town of Park City, I’d taken the three hour drive through the starkly dramatic Uinta Mountains and arrived at Flaming Gorge just as the light started to fade, the night before I was due to fish. I met four anglers coming off of the river: they’d only managed seven small fish between them and were looking more than a little miserable. When I asked about the cicadas, they all shook their heads mournfully: “Just hasn’t happened this year, buddy” confided one in a melancholic, deep-southern drawl.
After walking a short stretch of the river, which seemed strangely quiet and lifeless, I repaired despondently to the Red Canyon Lodge, where, over a frosty bottle of Michelob and a staggeringly large, all-American burger, the sound of more anglers discussing the disappointing sport they’d experienced that day only increased my gloom.

I needn’t have worried – the next morning, I drove down to the little town of Dutch John, where Denny Breer runs his tackle shop, Green River Outfitters. Denny is a big, warm-hearted bear of a man who seems genuinely liked and respected by everybody in the little town. He’s also the man who literally and metaphorically ‘wrote the book’ on the Green River’s unique fishery.
Over a coffee, we chatted about Denny’s great affection for the river, and when I asked about the cicada hatch, Denny was philosophical: “Doesn’t always happen” he shrugged, “there are different cicada hatches and they’re all cyclical, over periods of anything up to thirteen years – we expected a big hatch of the large Okanagana genus this year – big two and a half inch brutes that bring every fish in the river up, but it just hasn’t occurred – cold spring maybe? Who knows?” “So the fishing hasn’t been great?” I asked tentatively. ”Hey, I didn’t say that” beamed Denny “The fishing’s always great – come and meet Gene.”

Gene Gautieri is one of Denny’s top guides – a hugely knowledgeable and passionately keen fisherman who splits his time between guiding on the Green in the summer and teaching advanced skiing techniques on the slopes around Utah’s Park City in the winter. We drove down to the boat-ramp directly below the Dam, at the top of the famous “Red Canyon” or “A section” of the river and I put my rods together while Gene untethered the drift boat from its trailer. Around us, a Dunkirk-style flotilla of guided parties and pontoon boats were all busy scrambling to be the first ones off down the river. ”Let ‘em go” grinned Gene, carefully and methodically laying out the kit and seemingly in no hurry. “These folk ‘ll all rush down the canyon and by the time the fish start feeding in earnest, we’ll have the place to ourselves.”

Gene was spot on – when we finally drifted down from the ramp, the “rush-hour” was over. Fishing from the drifting boat, we immediately started to pick up some solid fish to the ingenious nymphing rig that Gene was determined to show me. This set-up, which features a short length of fluorescent red ‘amnesia’ below the indicator so that takes are spotted that precious split second before the indicator moves, was reminiscent of the grayling rigs employed on the Teviot and Tweed and was highly effective. Gene showed me some nifty tricks to ‘skim’ the flies over the shallows and to then slow them gently into the deeper, fish holding pots. This was all very interesting, but as the sun came out, I began to spot fish – lots of fish – hanging just under the surface, in the slicks and back-eddies. “Do you think they’d look at a dry?” I asked Gene politely, and he was picking out a small foam ant pattern in the blink of an eye. Three casts and three sleek, hard-fighting brown trout later and my question had been emphatically answered. I was instantly besotted with the place. Drift-boat fishing is not something I’d done before: while I waited for us to push off from the ramp, I’d watched legions of loud-mouthed, babbling clowns in ten-gallon hats, plonking huge cork indicators a few feet in front of their boat and then plodding down behind them, and in truth, it didn’t look particularly stimulating. Casting dries inches from the bank and watching big, pepper-spotted browns tip up to snaffle them was a different deal entirely. This kind of fishing takes real discipline : you see the lie coming but get just one cast, from a fairly fast-moving platform, in which to get things right, before you’ve passed it by. At a spot Gene calls “Shark Alley”, I put the fly right into a keyhole in an obvious-looking lie tight to the canyon wall. A huge brown came prowling out of his lair, looked long and hard at the foam ant, drifted tantalisingly downstream with it, and then slowly ambled off into the shadows of the bank-side timber. As I spat curses, Gene reminded me that the great thing about the Green is that there’s almost always another good fish lying just a few yards down. Maybe five minutes later we were drawing a brown trout of close on three pounds into the net.

Sometimes, we’d hitch up in one of the wide, clear slicks and toss dries at the numerous trout nosing around for the various terrestrials plopping off of the sheer banks adjacent. Occasionally, we’d drop a tiny midge or parachute Adams off of the foam ant and pick off the sniffy ones. In short, we caught lots and lots of big, handsome fish. After lunch, Gene suggested some streamer fishing. I wasn’t overly excited about the prospect – we’d been watching big, slurping takes all morning and I was keen for more, but then Gene opened my eyes. Using simple, lead-headed, marabou-tailed lures in a variety of colours, we sight-fished the big back-eddies and watched the big, buttery browns turn and follow the fly, sometimes accelerating to wolf it, and sometimes following to the boat before veering away. A quick switch from olive to white, black, tan or yellow might or might not invoke a response, but it was the opportunity to watch the response of the quarry that was the most addictive element of the whole thing. While Gene and I were plundering the edges of the stream, the armada of nymph anglers relentlessly drifting straight down the middle of the river weren’t having much luck – the obvious assumption was that they were showing the same fish the same sort of flies time and again, and consequently not catching. It was hard not to feel smug as another lovely fish, this time a flamboyantly-coloured ‘cutbow’ - a cutthroat/rainbow hybrid – came kicking into Gene’s landing net, and we shared a conspiratorial grin as we heard again the plaintive cry of “Watcha gettin’ em on, fellas?” from one of the forlorn cork-bobbing nymphers out in the river.

In truth, it was Gene’s expertise that were mainly responsible for our success – time and again, he’d hold the boat in exactly the right spot, at a consistent distance from the target, while I was able to execute the cast. Gene knew each bend in the river intimately, and he’d have me all set and ready for the cast as each lie came into view. When we anchored up in the slicks and back-eddies, I urged Gene to fish. Gene chose the streamer every time, and was ruthlessly efficient in eliciting strikes from even the wariest–looking followers, by deftly employing sudden changes of pace or direction to his fly. We traded banter, drank a few deliciously cold beers, and caught fish, all through that golden afternoon. Late on, we watched as a couple of otters ambled out of the pinion pines and lazily sparred by the riverbank. Gene pointed to a tiny dot way down the canyon that resolved itself into an osprey, hovering on the thermal currents above the river, no doubt eyeing one of the plump browns as a potential supper.

By the time we reached the take-out point, at Little Hole, just over seven miles down the river from the Dam, I was sated. Ever since I was a kid, winkling out perch and gudgeon from the Grand Union canal, I’ve always been hard to drag away from the water, but for once, I spared Gene my customary “One more cast” pleading. I’d caught a shed-load of big, hard-fighting fish, and we had another great day to look forward to. As we admired the view downstream, Gene told me that we weren’t the only ones who have caused a little mayhem in the Green River Valley – just a few miles downstream, on the “Brown’s Park” Section, is the site of a hideout favoured by Butch Cassidy and the notorious Wild Bunch.

We drove back to the tackle shop and met up with Denny. He didn’t need to ask how we’d done – he knows the river too well, and besides, I was grinning like a Cheshire cat. “See any cicadas?” he beamed. “Not one” I replied, and we burst out laughing.

That night, I enjoyed a great evening drinking beer with Gene, talking all sorts of increasingly extravagant nonsense about bonefish, peacock bass and so on, and generally putting the piscatorial world to rights. I headed back to Red Canyon Lodge and as I strolled back to my cabin, the huge silver-dollar moon and a million stars winking on the glassy surface of the lake, I was already planning the next day’s campaign, and the imminent downfall of that big speckled brown lurking in the timber at “Shark Alley”.



Contact:

Green River: Denny Breer may have better guides than Gene Gautieri, but I very much doubt it. Phone Denny on 001 435 885 3355, or e-mail dbreer@union-tel.com, and ask for Gene by name. Denny Breer’s book, “Utah’s Green River” is the perfect introduction to the Flaming Gorge Fishery.

Colorado River: Contact Wendy Gunn at Lee’s Ferry on 001-928-355-2261 or e-mail anglers@leesferry.com. Guides Chad & Russell were both excellent.


Accommodation:

Green River:
Stay at Red Canyon Lodge, which has great timber cabins, horse-riding trips and its own trout pond – see www.redcanyonlodge.com or phone 001-435-889-3759.
If the family fancy less remote surroundings, Park City, three hours away, has great amenities, excellent shopping and lots to do.

Colorado River:
Wendy & Terry Gunn offer excellent accommodation at:
Lees Ferry Anglers
HC-67 Box 30
Marble Canyon,
AZ 86036

001-928-355-2261 or e-mail anglers@leesferry.com


Tackle:

Flies:

Green River: Foam ants were murderously effective on fish sitting tight to the canyon walls, waiting for terrestrials to fall from above. Having said that, there are so many different hatches on the Green that I would advise stocking up at Denny’s excellent shop, Green River Outfitters, upon arrival.

Colorado River: Tiny size 20 CDC shuttlecock emergers in black, with a stretched pearly rib caught fish all day long on this midge-dominated river.




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