With Rod and Line in Colorado Waters

Awakened the next day by that invaluable servant to us all shining in my face, I reminded the Doctor of his promise concerning the trout pools. So we were up betimes, had breakfast, the horses saddled, and with creels capable of fourteen pounds each, and a stock of tackle sufficient to start a store, we were off across the Grand, and over the hills for the anticipated pleasure down stream, to a place where the Doctor was sure no one had been. The horses of tourists and amateur fishermen usually buck and raise the devil when starting out on such a jaunt, and I was disappointed that the Doctor’s animal did not bow his back, go up, and come down stiff-legged. I like to see a horse buck when somebody else is on him, and I like to hear the man pray, if he is able, when he feels the ground and glances round to see who is laughing at him. An even-tempered gentleman like the Doctor would have afforded an enviable example of Christian fortitude under such circumstances – his horse did not buck, but led the way over the hills as quietly as a cow going out to pasture.

We kept away from the river, traveled over high ground, and through an upland of black sage brush that would rival the mesa between Pueblo and Cañon. We followed an Indian trail, and followed it so long that I began to inquire when we were to reach my much coveted destination. The Doctor called my attention to a belt of timber some distance ahead, and said we were “going up there.” I asked him if he expected that trout roosted like sage hens, and informed him that if such had been his experience, it had not been mine, and that I was going to find water. He told me to do as I pleased, so I struck off toward the Grand – I like to be independent sometimes. My horse went scrambling through the thick sage brush, catching his toes in the roots and threatening to throw me over his head every few minutes, until finally he stopped at the bank of the river. It was fifty feet, at least, down to the water. I looked up stream half a mile, then down to the belt of timber, and that same bank presented itself at an aggravating angle of about ninety degrees. I don’t like Indians, nor any of their belongings, as a general rule, but I went cheerfully back to that trail, and quietly followed in the Doctor’s wake. When I caught up, the Doctor said in a mild sort of way that it was generally safe to keep on the trail. We walked our horses to the timber and into it, the Doctor in the lead. We got about half way round the mountain with a thousand or fifteen hundred feet of earth, rocks and trees below us, and as many above, when the Doctor discovered a “cut-off.” He led the way for a few rods, when a tree about three feet in diameter barred further progress in that direction. We could not turn round, nor could we go on, so we got off, and persuaded the horses to climb perpendicularly fifty feet up to the trail. I was satisfied in my mind that the Doctor was more than ever convinced of the safety of keeping on the trail, but he did not say so to me.

We kept on to Williams’ Fork, and picketed our horses about half a mile from the month. The Doctor then proposed that we “hoof it” over more hills. I began to be disgusted, but was away from home and at the mercy of this new-fangled fisherman. I didn’t know an Indian trail from a cow path, and was as likely to get into one as the other. A trail, like the road of a civilized brother, leads to some place, but a cow path, – . I puffed on behind, up a high ridge of rocks, and as soon as I could get the breath, told the Doctor I was obliged to him. We stood upon a Grand Cañon in miniature. I want to describe it, but I can’t. After dreaming over it awhile, the Doctor told me an incident in his experience concerning the ledge where we had precarious foothold, looking down into the seething waters several hundred feet below. The Doctor, Wm. H. Beard, the artist, Bayard Taylor and a prospector and mining man came over the trail a few years before on horseback, the Doctor in the lead, then the prospector, and, finally, the artist and the great traveler bringing up the rear. When the prospector passed the narrow ledge, barely sufficient in width to allow a horseman to squeeze along, where one has to hang, as it were, like a fly on a wall, he became conscious that his saddle girths needed tightening. With the recklessness peculiar to his craft, he slipped off his mule, and was engaged in the necessary adjustment of his belly-band when Beard reached the narrow ledge and had to stop. The first intimation the Doctor had of anything wrong came in the way of an emphatic adjuration, that might have been heard half a mile, for the blessed prospector to get out of that. The Doctor said he was glad the artist was not given to profanity, though he said a great deal to the miner that the Doctor could not understand; it did not sound like English nor Dutch, nor any language the Doctor had ever heard, but hurled at the head of the miner from a two-foot trail hanging over five or six hundred feet of perpendicular granite, it seemed to have an accelerating effect. The miner led his mule to more convenient quarters without finishing his task, and the artist followed, not in silence, however: he did not seem to be able to get through his business with that miner for an hour.

Looking down into the chasm, I suggested that it did not seem particularly “pokerish.” The Doctor said it was well enough to say so when one was afoot, “but just try it horseback,” in that ambiguous sort of way that always rouses one’s determination to undertake it. I did a few days after, but in returning I led my horse.

Getting through with his anecdote, the Doctor pointed to another pile of rocks half a mile further up the stream, and called my especial attention to a pool beneath, which, even at that distance, placed me under conviction that I could see trout therein, two feet long at least. I started to get some of them. Arrived there, we shipped our tackle, and I selected a spot under a pine-tree on one side of this pregnant pool, while the Doctor took the other. I made a cast with an anxiety indescribable; I knew I would have the first strike, and I did; the fly caught in the luxuriant foliage overhead. I tried to coax the blasted thing loose, but the more I prayed and persuaded the more obstinately the line interlaced itself. If there is anything more exasperating than to get a line fastened in a pine-tree, I want to know what it is; a “picked-up dinner” on wash-day is bliss in comparison. Not being able to untangle the line, I tried to pull down the tree; then I took a seat on the bank and patiently renewed my leader. Meanwhile the Doctor was threshing the peaceful waters industriously. I asked him if he had caught anything; he said he was going to very soon, and threshed away. When I got my line fixed I murmured, “but deliver us from evil,” and got out of the reach of that pine, when I labored faithfully for full fifteen minutes, till finally we scared up a trout about six inches long. He came browsing around with his head half out of water and an inquiring expression plainly visible in his bright eyes, then he disappeared wiggling his tail in derision. We worked away in hope of bringing the scaly monster once more to the surface. A second sight of him would have been comforting; but his curiosity was evidently satisfied. I asked the Doctor if this was one of the trout pools he had been bragging about, and he said it was; he had always caught trout out of that hole, and the stories he told me of the numbers he had lifted out of that place “in the short space of an hour,” were marvelous. While listening and trying to believe him I felt a sudden jerk at my rod. Up to that moment I had entertained no special antipathy to stop-reels. But with one leader unattainable in the profuse growth overhead, and another serving as a sort of submarine union-jack to an unknown denizen of the pool, with no prospect of satisfaction, I felt – not like Patience. The trout must have been a monster, of course, or he never would have snapped that gut with so little ceremony. I shall not soon forget the sensation; it was a single and sudden blow without pause for a second pull, as though his troutship in passing that way had snapped up that fly and gone on about his business or pleasure, without realizing in the remotest degree that he had done anything more than take a midge floating on the surface of his habitation. To avoid a repetition of the calamity, I cheerfully tied the check to a crossbar of the reel, looped on another leader, and resumed, with an angler’s vow registered in heaven, which I have religiously kept.

With that commendable resignation born of experience, I worked that pool for half an hour, gave up in disgust and started down stream – the Doctor followed in humiliation. We whipped every foot of the way down through the cañon to our horses, but not a fin rewarded our efforts. The forenoon was gone; I felt sorry for the Doctor; my sympathies went out to him as they always do for the under dog in the fight. I had no heart to express anything but unbounded satisfaction for the morning’s enjoyment. But I believe he thinks to this day I was lying.

AGAPAE

Did you never go fishing when a boy, and come home at the close of a Saturday without so much as a single chub dangling on a string to console you for the anticipated dressing because of your interdicted absence? I have. But the chagrin of the ten-year-old is nothing in comparison to the mortification of the middle-aged boy under similar circumstances. However, there were no inquisitive bores in our camp. The Doctor was determined to again try his luck in Williams’ Fork; nothing but the remembrance of my early experience could have induced me to join him.

The day after our successful failure, equipped as before, we took our way over the hills and through the sage brush, reaching our destination about nine o’clock. The tackle was quickly adjusted, and keeping out of the way of that infernal pine, I dropped a brown-bodied gray hackle gently upon the placid water. The fly had hardly touched the surface, when suddenly from out the depths there flashed an open-mouthed beauty, and that hackle disappeared as, turning head down and revealing his glittering side, its captor plunged again into the till then silent pool. It made my pulse throb a little quicker, but I was not paying as much attention to that as to the trout. He made a dart up stream with the hook firmly fixed; I brought him gradually round and coaxed him to the surface to ascertain what sort of a leviathan I had encountered; then I got excited and felt that if I did not get him ashore very soon he was not my trout. Just below the pool, ten yards or so, was a shelving beach a few feet in length, and I gradually worked my way to it, keeping a taut line on my bonanza. While I was doing this I remembered having read a whole column of imagination, written by somebody named Murray, wherein he described his “happiness” under like circumstances; cracking bamboo and spinning silk, with a half dozen Johns with landing nets, were the burden of his effusion, and he wound the matter up after a three hours’ fight, with a trout seventeen inches long, when I expected to learn at least of a ten-pound salmon lifted out by one of the Johns above mentioned. I wanted to hit the fellow with a club for making an ass of himself. I was hungry for trout, and inside five minutes I had drawn my prize up to and on that gravelly beach, had him by the gills, and he was seventeen inches flush, big as Mr. Murray’s and no fuss about it. Just as I got my fish secured I heard the Doctor threshing round in the willows, about two rods away, and in a moment after he held up to my envious gaze more than a match for my capture. Our exchange of congratulations was hurried; the Doctor cast in his hopper; I stuck to the gray hackle, and inside half an hour I had landed a dozen good-sized trout, and the Doctor had “yanked out” as many more. The pool and the Doctor were redeemed; we had not quite “fished it out,” had only taken those with sharp appetites. But that kind of success demoralizes one for the time being, so we moved off down the creek, trying the eddies and below the riffles; now and again dropping the fly under the lee of the larger boulders in mid stream, with varying success, until we reached our horses. Our creels were full enough to carry with comfort and we started for camp, discussing the causes of the failure of the day before, but arriving at no satisfactory solution.

The rapidity with which news of success in trouting will travel through the various camps in one’s vicinity is somewhat singular, and is only equaled by the celerity with which the reports of the quantity captured is multiplied. Having more than we could consume, we gave some to our nearest neighbor, who came over to see our catch. We learned the next day that we had caught anywhere from twenty-five pounds to a hundred, and I am unable to say how many went exploring for trout on the day following. That some were unsuccessful I know, because several swore to me that there was not even a minnow in Williams’ Fork. There was one young gentleman in particular who appealed to me in a tone of remonstrance after a day spent in unsuccessful labor down the Grand. He was dressed in light drab pants, cheviot shirt, and a broad-brimmed felt hat, the band of which was stuck full of flies of all sizes and a multitude of colors. He had a fifty-dollar rod and a fifteen-dollar reel of wonderful combination; his eyes, emphatic with disgust, glaring through his glasses, he avowed there were no fish in the Park. He held up a crimson fly that would have driven crazy any fish except a sucker, and would have scared a sucker if sunk to his level, and wanted to know of me if I didn’t think it a fine fly. I told him I did. He said he had whipped five miles of water with that fly and could not get a rise. I told him that the trout was a queer fish, and that perhaps he had better try a blue flannel rag, and offered to give him a piece of my shirt, but he got mad, tore around, and threatened, in popular parlance, to take off the top of my head. Believing this to be a more painful operation than scalping, I apologized, and the difficulty was promptly adjusted. Then I gave him a gray hackle and told him that that was to the trout what bread was to civilized man, a staple article of which he seldom grew tired, or if he did, to try the brown hackle, which, still like the bread, was a wholesome change; that if he could get neither the gray nor the brown, then to take a grasshopper, pull off his legs and wings, and string it upon a number six Kirby; that such a hook would take a three ounce or a three pound trout with equal facility.

The next evening I saw my new acquaintance; his drab pants were ruined, his rod had been shivered into kindling wood, his reel lay in a pool of the Grand twenty feet deep. He had cast that gray hackle with a brown body into that pool; it had been seized upon by a trout something “near a yard long;” the angler had succeeded in landing its head upon the rocks, then his rod gave way and he fell on the fish, rolled into the river, lost the remains of his tackle and his hat with the flies, and some other tenderfoot who happened providentially that way, had pulled him out by the collar. He was happy, and said he would write to his mother, for which I commended him. This morning I saw him following a trail down the Grand; he had provided himself with some hackles and had a pole cut from a plum bush. I predicted for him success or a watery grave.

In tender consideration of the tyro in these waters, I may be permitted to make a few suggestions as to tackle, based upon my own experience. In the matter of lures the taste of the trout must be considered; as to all else you may consult your own. It is well to have in your fly-books a little of everything, but of gray and brown hackles, as already intimated, coachmen and professors, an abundance. The best reel is one that combines lightness and durability, and is incapable of fouling your line, no matter how negligent you may be; a click reel of hard rubber and metal, with a revolving disk, the handle fixed upon the outer edge, and weighing, with thirty yards of line, about five ounces, will answer well. For lines there is, to my mind, nothing equal to the braided and tapered water-proof silk (size F); being the best, they are the cheapest, easily managed, and less liable to snarl or call for a tax upon your patience. For a rod always select one of three joints; they hang more evenly and have a “better feel.” Ash butt and second joint, with lancewood tip; Greenheart or Bethabara; try any and all; break them on the least provocation, which means a ten-inch trout or less, but wreck two or three by the “yanking process,” or otherwise. Then, when you feel that you can handle a rod with the same deftness a mother her first-born, save up your money and buy a first-class split bamboo. When you get it have faith in it, for if properly made it will bend, if necessity demands, till the tip touches the butt, yet do not needlessly try that conclusion with it; neither must you attempt to lift your fish out of the water with it. When you have fairly exhausted your trout, take the line in your disengaged hand; there are moments between struggles when you can swing your catch safely to land, without a movement on his part; when he will came out as straight as the plumb line Amos saw. If in his struggles his troutship should clear the water, something I never saw a trout do, bow the rod to him, of course, as he returns, so that he may not get his unsupported weight upon the beautiful toy. Keep a taut line upon your prey – by this I do not mean that you should give him no line, but let the strain be steady, giving only when you must. After the first few rushes, you may generally with safety press your thumb upon the line, and let him feel the spring of your rod; that will kill him quickly. The climax in the poem of trouting is the spring of the split bamboo. In striking, remember you have not a plum bush sapling and that it is not incumbent upon you to bail the stream with an artificial fly; let it be done with a quick motion of the wrist; a motion which, if you should miss the game, would move your fly but a little way. If your catch is too large to lift out as I have suggested, in the absence of a landing net, you can generally find a place, always down stream, where you can safely, if you go about it gently, snake him out, or get your finger under his gills. Much more might be written, and what I have said is by no means new, but the purpose is to put you in the way merely of avoiding the calamity that befell the tackle of my acquaintance in the drab pants. Have a taste for the sport, “let your own discretion be your tutor,” and you will work out your own salvation more surely than by a library of directions, remembering this for an axiom, that: The true sportsman does not go down stream and afield for the mere love of killing something.

BLACK LAKE IN 1878

Two or three years since, a couple of divines, imbued, doubtless, with a spirit of adventure, found their way up one of the tributaries of the Blue. They discovered a lake nestled away in the grand old hills, and in about the last place one would think of looking for a lake. They called it Black Lake, very appropriately, and when they made known their discovery there were found some of those disagreeable two-legged animals who are never surprised at anything, and who knew, of course, that “the lake had been there all the time.” The ministers, however, took away with them the credit of the discovery, though but few people manifested any interest in the matter. As a result of the indifference, the merits of the lake have been but little talked about, and when mentioned at all, it has been treated with a sort of indefiniteness, as a place that had been heard of, but was not known, except that it was “up there, somewhere,” in the rugged range of the Blue. One was, and is, also, always reminded by the would-be informant that “a couple of preachers found it;” in that particular sort of tone that at once conveys the impression that, because a preacher was instrumental in making the discovery, it must be a kind of slough of despond, or an eight-by-ten waterhole, or a beaver pond, with a few decayed water-lilies mourning round the margin. It may be that there is much skepticism hereaway concerning the general level-headedness of gentlemen in orders, where our mountain scenery is involved. Your “rugged frontiersman” – to whom these grandeurs are every-day affairs, still new every day, and not the less revered – worships in silence, and is apt to think your enthusiast off his tender feet the moment he opens his mouth. “There is no use trying to do the subject justice by attempting to describe what you see. Just look about you, realize that you are not the greatest thing in creation, and, with a chastened spirit, go tell your friends to come and see and worship.” So your gentlemen in flannel shirt and foxed breeches would recommend, and they mean well. But if enthusiasm is pardonable at all, it may be overlooked in a man fresh from his books and his daily, dull routine, suddenly set down in the midst of such evidences of God’s handiwork as one finds here. The ordained discoverers of Black Lake did not, evidently, adopt the reticent method of expressing their veneration for the grand surroundings, and their delight at the beautiful lake so unexpectedly revealed to them. They were unquestionably very enthusiastic, and consequently more the object of doubt. If they had said simply: “We found a lake up there, just under the base of that cone-shaped peak,” and pointed out the mountain, there would have been a dozen visitors to the spot before the end of the summer. Your pioneer would have told it that way, and that would have been notoriety. As it was, Grand Lake, the Twin Lakes, and other known lakes in the mountains, made Black Lake a possibility. A few have taken the trouble to go in search of it, the Doctor, who is no tenderfoot, and myself, a little younger, among the number.

The trip determined upon, the next step was to make preparation. The experience of my indefatigable Mentor enabled him to speedily devise all plans and complete them. A pack animal was at once forthcoming, and upon it were secured four days’ provisions, a coffee pot, frying-pan, two tin cups, a pair of blankets and a rubber poncho; the limited number of utensils inculcating a lesson in economy – a practical illustration of what we need and what we think we must possess to be happy. With our four days lares and penates thus secured and armed with our fishing tackle, a bright August morning saw us in the saddle and on the road.

The first few miles of our route were by the Indian trail, already familiar as far as Williams’ Fork, thence up the long mesa bordering that stream, toward Ute Mountain. Bands of antelope frequently starting up and scampering away refuted the insinuation of another young gentlemen in glasses and lavender pants who had been hunting up and down the high roads for a week, within half a mile of the Springs, and “couldn’t find any game in the Park.” The same young gentleman told me that he had seen what he understood to be sage hens, but could not kill them with a rifle – he must have something larger – and then wanted to know of me if there were no “sage roosters.” I told him there were, lots of ’em; that they were web-footed, had ruffles round their necks and wore lavender-colored legs at this season; whereat he expressed himself satisfied and said he would find one. I expect to see him chased into camp some day by a mountain woodchuck – then we’ll have another bear story. While I am writing this, that same young man is fishing in the Grand in sight of my tent; he has waded out and is standing knee deep, whipping the stream just where a hot sulphur spring bubbles up throwing the steam above the surface. He, too, has a valuable rod. I wish he had to stay there enjoying his homeopathic sulphur bath till the fellow with the club could come along and kill him.

Looking round after the antelope resulted in our losing the trail. We started in the direction to cross it, but, with the exasperating contrariness peculiar to the country, traveled parallel with it for more than a mile, and until we ran into a body of timber which the Doctor knew the trail had nothing to do with. Then we struck off at right angles. I told the Doctor that he was heading for camp; he said he intended to make camp about six o’clock. I urged him not to be discouraged, that we might yet reach our destination, and that I did not like to be disappointed. But he trotted on, in silence, found the trail within two hundred yards and turned into it. By this time I did not know Ute Mountain from Gray’s Peak. We jogged on to the timber clothing the hills on the north side of Ute Pass, crossed a little brook, left a blind trail to the right, recrossed the brook, and in about five minutes we were playing circus among a lot of fallen timber, with no more sign of a trail in sight than there was a prospect of our getting out of the blasted place inside a week. Had the devil been really a man of genius, instead of covering Job with boils, destroying his flocks and killing his relatives, he would some forenoon have inveigled that much abused patriarch up a steep mountain side and deposited him in about forty acres of fallen timber. Then when Job’s dinner-hour came round he would have tried to get out of that, and after about ten minutes of that kind of pastime he would have begun to realize that old Mrs. Job would be looking for him with the same kind of disposition they keep dinner waiting for us in these days. Just then the devil would have gained his point.