Tuesday, August 09, 2011

RMNP August 7, 2011

On Sunday, Steffan, my neighbor Tom and myself headed up to the Roaring River drainage in RMNP to do some fishing. I was at Steffan's house at 5:30am and we were in the parking lot of Lawn Lake Trailhead at 6:30 - lots of other cars in the lot - we assumed these were from overnight campers.

The hike in was pretty uneventful, it took a good 30 minutes, but wasn't too bad. I took a video of the entire hike up, but not a single picture the whole day. The water was rolling down the hill, fastest I have seen it in my few trips up there. We tied up and jumped in the water, leapfrogging each other. The soft/slow areas that are normally everywhere in this river were hard to find. We'd see fish, but where we had seen 5 or 6 of them in the past in the slow water, we could only see 1 now tucked up to the bank. We didn't catch fish for a while - it was tough going, so we kept moving up river - there is a flatter section further up where we started getting into fish - but not many. I think we got 9 fish total and by 12 noon we decided to head down the hill and head for the Fall River.

The Fall River right there by Lawn Lake Trailhead looks like a beautiful river, but it still had quite a bit of water in it. It was clear and we could see the fish, but they weren't any easier to catch. There are some great bend pools in this river - at lower levels I bet the fish just stack up in them. Steffan headed off with a dry fly and Tom and I stuck to nymphing. I managed a couple brown dinks and Steffan hooked a bunch on dries. We hiked up to the confluence of the Roaring and Fall to check it out and then headed for the truck. We left around 3pm and were home by 5:30.

Not much else to report. Beautiful day, not so great fishing.

1 comment:

HighPlainsFlyFisher said...

That's some beautiful country up there and a quality day doesn't always have to include fish when you're surrounded by that kind of scenery.
Jeff