Time: 12:00PM – 3:00PM

Location: Boulder Canyon

Boulder Creek 07/24/2021 Photo Album

Wet wading on a hot Colorado Saturday is the greatest compliment I can provide for my day of fly fishing on July 24, 2021. After being forced to prematurely abandon my quest for cutthroat trout at Ptarmigan Lake on Wednesday, I was itching to record another day of fly fishing for the week of July 19. July is typically one of my best months of the year, and the days were slipping away rapidly. I reviewed the nearby stream options with extra concern over the batch of thunderstorms that rolled through the area on Thursday evening. Boulder Creek was running at 75 CFS, it was an hour and fifteen minutes away, and it provided an opportunity to stop by my son’s house in Louisville, CO to wish my grandson a happy first birthday. The proximity of my destination prompted me to complete my normal morning workout along with a forty minute run, but these choices may have impacted my fishing experience, as they delayed my fishing time to the middle of the day.

Clear with Decent Flows

I arrived at a wide pullout in Boulder Canyon by 11:30AM, and after I pulled on my wet wading pants and socks, I decided to munch my lunch. The air temperature was in the eighties, but the water looked very encouraging with no turbidity and above average flows based on my knowledge from previous visits. I hiked along the shoulder a short distance and then dropped down a steep bank. Since it was July 24, I assumed the trout were in a surface feeding mode, and I began my day with a size 12 peacock hippie stomper and trailed a size 16 gray deer hair caddis.

Number One

I spent the first thirty minutes prospecting all the likely holding spots with the double dry fly offering, and I managed to land one seven inch brown trout that boldly rushed to inhale the hippie stomper. This bit of action was accompanied by a quite a few frustrating refusals to the hippie stomper as well as landing a few tiny trout less than my six inch cut off. I felt that I could do better, so I began cycling through a host of fly changes that included a user friendly green drake, gray stimulator, olive-brown deer hair caddis, Jake’s gulp beetle, purple haze and peacock stimulator. At one point I decided to experiment with a dry/dropper rig and added an iron sally and pheasant tail nymph to a Chernobyl ant, but the local trout demonstrated zero interest for the subsurface offerings. By the time I quit at 3:00PM the fish count rested on three, as the user friendly green drake and Jake’s gulp beetle beat the odds to fool two seven inch brown trout.

Juicy Bank Lie

Number Two Was a Carbon Copy

Three hours of fly fishing yielded three seven inch brown trout, and the last hour was characterized by extreme futility. It was not a good day on Boulder Creek, and tailwaters and high elevation creeks will probably be my destination over the next eight weeks. The wet wading, on the other hand, was superb; as I felt comfortable and cool throughout my three hours of fly fishing with temperatures spiking in the mid–eighties. On my return trip to Denver I stopped at my son’s house and played with the birthday boy, Theo, for fifteen minutes, while Dan put away the groceries, that he purchased in preparation for the big birthday bash on Sunday. That was another highlight of Saturday, July 24, 2021.

Fish Landed: 3