Ed Engle: Beaver pond cutthroats in the high country

I arrived at the trailhead into the Buffalo Peaks Wilderness Area as early as I could because I knew it was about a three-mile hike to the beaver ponds that I wanted to fish.

Cutthroat trout themselves are always a draw. I knew most of them would be small, probably 6 inches long or less, but you never know, and besides big trout aren’t the reason I hike into the high country to fish. If I wanted to catch big fish, I’d head to a tailwater or one of Colorado’s trophy trout lakes.

Along the way, I remembered other dry fly tips for fishing beaver ponds such as, “Just leave the fly sit and let the trout find it, and if that doesn’t get their attention, give the fly a little twitch.” Or better yet, if nothing happens when you twitch the fly, try retrieving it very slowly so that it causes a rippling wake on the water’s surface.

That’s the way I caught my largest cutthroat of the day — a chunky 10-incher.at the trailhead into the Buffalo Peaks Wilderness Area as early as I could because I knew it was about a three-mile hike to the beaver ponds that I wanted to fish.

That was the first of many cutthroats.

But wait – I thought that beaver dams raised the temperatures and ruined things for trout? And that recent master’s thesis got published saying beavers destroy conditions for native fish and bring invasives? And in PEI watershed folk were ripping dams out to protect cuttthroat? How could this crazy outdoor reporter ever get things so wrong? Doesn’t he realize how much damage beavers do to fish? What does he know about fishing the high country anyway?

Ed Engle Fly Fishing

FLY FISHING PRESENTATIONS

Ed has a wide variety of fly fishing PowerPoint programs designed especially to meet the needs of your fly fishing club, organization, corporate group or fly shop. Programs range from technical fly fishing topics to more general interest themes suitable for banquets and fund raising events. See the descriptions of Ed’s programs below.