Time: 11:00AM – 3:00PM

Location: West of Idaho Springs

Clear Creek 07/14/2021 Photo Album

I was completely humbled by the upper Arkansas River on Monday, and I was anxious to atone. Jane and I were scheduled to have dinner guests on Wednesday evening, so I needed a close destination that would allow a return by 4PM. I scanned the DWR graphs for all the Front Range streams, and I narrowed the options down to Boulder Creek and Clear Creek. While most of the state suffered below average snow packs and drought conditions. the Front Range was an exception, and many of my favorite locations were inundated with continuing high flows in the middle of July.

I settled on Clear Creek, because I viewed it first hand on my trip to and from the Arkansas River. In my way of thinking personal scouting always prevails over a graph. When I arrived at my chosen section of Clear Creek, the thermometer registered temperatures in the upper fifties. After a string of days in the nineties, it was refreshing to pull on my fleece and raincoat, as I strung my Loomis five weight line. The reel seat on my Orvis Battenkill reel was loose, so rather than risk it falling in the creek, I elected to dust off the Loomis, since it is shorter than my Sage One and more appropriate for the tight quarters of small stream fishing.

Lush

I hiked a short distance from the car, and I was prepared to cast by 11:00AM. The thick overhead clouds remained throughout my time on the creek, although I did remove the raincoat at noon, as I was feeling a bit overheated. The flows on Clear Creek were high but clear and close to ideal in my opinion. I began prospecting with a size 12 peacock hippie stomper and a size 16 olive-brown deer hair caddis on a twelve inch dropper. Between 11:00AM and noon I landed six cutthroat trout, as two nabbed the hippie stomper, and the other four sipped the caddis. I was pleased with my one hour of morning fishing, but I also felt that I was failing to catch fish in locations that offered potential productivity.

Melon Cutthroat

I used the lunch break to reconfigure my line, and I shed the deer hair caddis and replaced it with a beadhead pheasant tail nymph on a three foot dropper. In a brief amount of time the pheasant tail produced a vividly colored cutthroat, but then I lost both flies, when an errant backcast snagged an evergreen limb. The branch was too high to attempt a recovery, and I broke off both flies, when I applied direct force. I replaced the hippie stomper with another similar version, but I migrated to a hares ear nymph as the dropper fly.

Promising Runs Ahead

The stomper and hares ear combination remained on my line for the bulk of my remaining time on the water. I also experimented with a sunken ant for a brief amount of time, but the fish count surged from six to twenty-five mainly on the strength of the hares ear. I estimated that 75% of the afternoon landed fish snatched the hares ear, and the remainder surged to the surface to crush the hippie stomper. In short, I had a blast and moved from likely spot to promising location at a steady rate. If I encountered slower moving water with enough depth for the fish to hide, I typically managed a landed fish or in the worst case a refusal.

Look at the Neon Orange on This Cutthroat

At one point I actually had two fish on my line at the same time. An eleven inch cutthroat sipped the stomper, and as I began to play the aggressive eater, a smaller cousin grabbed the hares ear. I was rather excited, but the larger of the two slipped free, and only the small one was constrained in my net. I would not characterize the catch rate as torrid, but an average of six fish per hour was certainly hot fishing.

Next to the Roots

Splendid

Light Olive Dominates

Wednesday was a nice bounce back from Monday, and I was thrilled to land twenty-five cutthroat trout in four hours on a small stream. The striking colors of the cutthroats made the day worthwhile, and the cool weather was a nice reprieve from the dry heat of July.

Fish Landed: 25