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Conejos River, Colorado, July 29, 2021

I was ambivalent about fishing Colorado. I had this romantic notion of spending a month or so rambling around the state following inclinations and topographic maps to fish. Instead of a month we only gave Colorado a day. We didn’t even spend the night.

We crossed the border at Antonito, at the Sinclair station and the marijuana dispensary. I grew up in a county that prohibited alcohol sales, so the marijuana dispensary just over the New Mexico line made perfect sense. Since New Mexico has recently legalized pot and in-state sales will start soon, I guess the dispensary will move on to Clovis, in legal New Mexico just over the illegal Texas border, so that it’s ready for the next dry state.

From the Wikipedia entry for Antonito:

The area’s economy has recently experienced an upsurge with the passage of Colorado’s recreational marijuana laws. A 420-friendly town, several recreational marijuana dispensaries have opened within the city limits. 

We didn’t visit any of the dispensaries, but there are also a bunch of fly fishing businesses–lodges, cabins, shops, and guides. Every other car sported a rooftop rod rack. I own a rooftop rod rack, but it’s one of the few I’ve seen in Houston. In Antonito they’re required by local law. Given the dispensaries, I suspect there are plenty of mellow anglers trying to remember where they put the key to their rod rack.

This is a car with a rooftop rod rack. I knew where the key was.

Back in New Mexico on the Cimarron, Shane Clawson and I had talked about not catching fish at all. I lose a lot of fish before I land them, and since catch-and-release is the goal anyway, that’s perfectly ok with me–fishing is cruel, and a remote release helps fish survive, plus I always remember the fish I lose better than the fish I catch.

I mentioned to Shane that I’d thought about cutting the point off my flies at the bend of the hook and playing tag with the fish, just watching them rise to my disabled fly but never hooking any. Shane said that a Taos friend did something similar. Most of us already fish with barbless hooks, and Shane’s friend widened the hook gap so that any hooked fish was almost certain to shake loose before landing. He could play them for a second, then watch them disappear.

“Of course he’s Buddhist,” Shane said.

Well of course he is. He’s from Taos. Buddhists are more common in Taos than pot dispensaries in Antonito. I’m pretty sure there’s a prayer wheel aisle at the local Walmart.

That’s a long introduction to hanging out early on Thursday at Conejos River Anglers, waiting for the guide, and saying that I didn’t really care if we caught fish or not. “Bullshit,” someone snapped. I guess so, some anyway, but truth is, I’m always a bit ambivalent about catching fish. I’ve got my Buddhist tendencies, plus if I didn’t catch a fish on the Conejos, I’d still have my chance at a month-long ramble.

Then I went out and caught a fish.

Which is skipping way ahead. To get to that fish–and it was a lovely, fine cutbow, about 19 inches, fat and healthy, and caught not on my first cast but on no more than my tenth–anyway to get to that fish we had to meet our guide, Micah Keys, at the fly shop and then drive. Antonito is at 7,890 feet. Where we fished on the Conejos, near its headwaters below the Platoro Reservoir, is around 9,900 feet. To gain that 2000 feet of elevation we drove 48 long winding miles up the Conejos River, much of it on gravel mountain roads.

That’s a lot of river, and from time to time during the year I suppose almost all of it is fishable. In high summer though we went as high as we could to beat the heat. Fish mortality increases when the water temperature approaches 70 degrees, plus the fish stop feeding. Even at elevation the water was too hot to fish by 2 o’clock.

Before the water temperature stopped us, we caught more fish, all browns. Micah had us fishing size 18 bead-head nymph droppers, not much more than a bit of colored thread with a tail for visual balance and a tungsten bead to make it sink–fished about 20 inches under a parachute Adams floating in the surface. Micah said his name, by the way, was from the sheriff on The Rifleman, not the Old Testament Minor Prophet. That’s probably for the best, since it seems to me that the Minor Prophets would be lousy fishing companions.

Google Earth

Where we fished, the Conejos is a series of braids and random meanders through the meadow. I thought at first it was feeder streams, but it was only the river making it up as it went. None of it was slow, it had 2000 feet to fall after all, but wading wasn’t that hard either, at least not hard qua wading, because frankly any movement was kind of tough. Houston is 80 feet above sea level, and we were fishing close enough to 10,000 feet to make no never-mind. I’m in reasonable shape, but following Micah from the car to the stream was better aerobics than my daily run, and a lot harder.

After lunch Micah and I stood in the river and watched a brown 30 feet away consistently rise to something on the surface. I’ve never watched a fish rise so often or over such a long period. I thought for a while that there was more than one fish, but I don’t think there was. There was just one big fish, actively feeding.

What I should have done, and of course what I didn’t do, was get a photo of the fish before trying any cast, but I didn’t even bother getting a good photo of Micah, much less a hard photo of a fish. Micah helped me get positioned for the cast, and then the fish took my dry fly just like it was supposed to.

And then the fish was on and then it wasn’t. Dammit. Of course it never rose again. Dammit. I hate losing fish.

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Colorado

We were going to New Mexico for a week, and hadn’t really planned on adding Colorado. If you look at the map though, the state line is only 60 miles north of Taos. We could be in the next jurisdiction faster than Bonnie and Clyde.

I kept vacillating though. I could spend weeks fishing Colorado. I could spend years fishing Colorado. There’s a seemingly infinite number of places to fish–famous places, the Platte and the Gunnison, the Eagle and the Frying Pan and the Roaring Fork. There’s the St. Vrain for goodness sake. Some of those rivers I’ve fished before, some I’ve wanted to fish, and some I still want to fish.

But truth be told fishing 50 states has taken a surprising amount of effort. By year’s end we hope to have added New Mexico, Arkansas, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Georgia, Iowa, and Wisconsin. We also fished in Delaware (I failed, Kris didn’t). That’s a lot of travel, and it still leaves 22 states. Meantime I keep googling trips to Belize, Mexico, and the Bahamas. I keep thinking I want to see Arles, France, and–heresy–not fish at all.

But in Southern Colorado there are a bunch of rivers I’ve wanted to fish. The Los Pinos, the Dolores, the Animas, and the Conejos are all great trout streams. I’ve never fished there but I’ve wanted to, so, last minute, we decided to make a side trip to the Conejos in Southern Colorado. We gave Colorado short-shrift, just to get it out of the way, but there are too many places in Colorado, and the Conejos is as interesting as any, and who doesn’t want to fish a river named rabbit?

All of our preparation for a side-trip to Colorado consisted of downloading Rocky Mountain High, and calling the first guide service that popped up on a Google search for the Conejos. We also listened to about half of The Stand on the drive out, but that was only because I couldn’t listen to the other Stephen King novel set in Colorado. I read The Shining a long time ago, and I saw the movie when it was released, and it still gives me the willies. I’m not doing that again.

So Colorado called out, “come and play with us,” and we did. Not forever and ever and ever though. Redrum.

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Rio Costilla and Cimarron River, New Mexico, July 26-27, 2021

We fished with Shane Clawson through Doc Thompson’s High Country Anglers in New Mexico, and Shane was great. There are several well-known guides in Northern New Mexico, and I delayed choosing because I couldn’t decide. I called Thompson because he’s Orvis-endorsed. Doc himself was booked, but Shane contracts with him–our good luck.

Covid hit guides in New Mexico hard. New Mexico did what other states should have done to get rid of Covid, but Shane’s business was shut for much of 2020. Later our Colorado guide told us that during 2020 he’d never been busier. Now New Mexico will get hit with the fourth surge like the rest of us, because we didn’t do what was needed.

I told Shane that I wanted to fish for Rio Grande cutthroats in Latir Creek, and wanted to fish the Cimarron River. Ok, I’m lying. I told Shane that I wanted to fish for Rio Grand cutthroats in the Rio Costilla in the Valle Vidal, and that I wanted to fish the Rio Grande River. Apparently late July is too hot for the Rio Grande, so I picked the Cimarron because it’s not far from Taos, and because of the 1976 Poco album. I figured any day spent humming Rose of Cimarron is a day well spent.

As for the Valle Vidal, I had fished there once before, almost 25 years ago. We were on a family camping trip through Northern New Mexico—I promise, if I’d known my daughter had that tiny stress fracture, I wouldn’t have forced her to backpack into the Rio Grande Gorge. And she wasn’t carrying much besides her sleeping bag and some clothes. That and a couple of gallons of water.

Ok. I didn’t really make her carry any water. I made her little brother carry the water.

During that trip I stole an hour from my family to fish the Rio Costilla, and I remember the Valle Vidal as one of the prettiest mountain meadows I’ve ever seen. I didn’t catch anything, and Julie Andrews never sang, so I’ve thought ever since that I’d left something undone–at least for the fishing if not for the singing.

No luck though. The Valle Vidal is closed to fishing for two years for Rio Grande cutthroat trout restoration. Everything with gills in the Rio Costilla will be poisoned, and a pure strain of Rio Grande cutthroat will be reintroduced. Closing the Rio Costilla for two years to remove invasive species is absolutely a good thing, except of course that the two years is smack in the middle of when I finally decided to go back again to the Valle Vidal. Dang it. Dang invasive species.

Cimarron River

Except for the San Juan River, New Mexico doesn’t really have the fishing reputation of other Western states. It’s harder to get to, and except for the San Juan it’s not known for trophy fish. Most New Mexico rivers are small. New Mexican food is special, the mix of people is unique, and the art can be magnificent, plus there’s great high-desert scenery, but some of the best fly fishing is for some of the smallest fish.

Second things first. We fished the Cimarron the second day. It’s popular, and gear anglers are as common as fly anglers. We were in Cimarron Canyon State Park (elev. 7500 ft.) in Carson National Forest, on highway 64 between Taos (elev. 6969) and the town of Cimarron (elev. 6430), with considerable ups and downs thrown in for good measure. It’s a tailwater out of Eagle’s Nest Lake, but the river is still only 25 feet or so across, and that’s being generous. Because it was midweek, we had no problem finding space on the water.

With some detours for downed trees, the Cimarron is wadeable, and there are lots of wild browns. We started in the morning on San Juan worms under a dry dropper. It had rained, and Shane said he only fished worms while they moved in the soil after rain. Later we switched out the worms for small nymphs–WD 40s–still rigged under a dry dropper. Only one largish fish–maybe 12 inches and fat–hit the dry, and it had taken the nymph first and then just kept going. Our tippets were small, 5x, and leaders were short, 7.5 feet.

Cimarron River Brown Trout

The Cimarron was interesting, but the day before, the day we fished for cutthroat, was the reason I was there. I told Shane I wanted to fish for Rio Grande cutthroat. Shane misheard me, or maybe I misspoke. He heard I wanted to catch a Rio Grande cutthroat. I guess I did, but really, I just wanted to be in a high place that held cutthroat. If trout live in pretty places, cutthroat live in the prettiest places.

Latir Creek is part of the Rio Costilla drainage, so it’s not far from where I wanted to be. To get there we drove 45 miles north of Taos to Costilla (elev. 7700 ft), turned right on a paved county road that turned into an unpaved county road, then turned right again on a double track road that kept climbing until it petered out into a jeep trail. It’s a satisfying drive, and a drive that I thought justified that extra money for four-wheel drive, though to be honest we didn’t really spend any time on the jeep trail, and drove nowhere my father wouldn’t have driven a Buick LeSabre. Still. I’m manly. I have 4-wheel drive.

Mary Orvis Marbury, Royal Coachman Wet Fly, Favorite Flies and Their Histories, 1892, via Wikipedia.

If the Cimarron was small, Latir Creek was tiny. If I were a jumping man, I could have had a good day jumping back and forth across it. Not being a jumping man, we fished, sometimes from the bank, sometimes wading. Here’s the really cool part though: all day long I fished a parachute Royal Wulff, about a #14, which is like saying that all day long I played Ringo’s drums. It’s iconic, unmistakeable, a beautiful dry fly that floats on top of the water and that has a lineage back to the 1800s. It’s got its own Wikipedia page! Ok, what doesn’t, but still . . . . If I could spend the rest of my fly-fishing-life catching fish on a Royal Coachman descendant, I’d take that deal.

We caught rainbows and cutthroats; rainbows in the lower drainage, and then in the meadows and higher we caught cutthroats. All of the fish I saw were small, five or six inches, and their parr-marks–that’s a series of thumbprints extending down the fish’s body to its tail–hadn’t faded. Parr marks tell you that the fish are less than a year old. They also had the orange cutthroat on the Rio Grande’s lower jaw. I was happy as I could be to see those fish.

Shane wasn’t satisfied. In addition to the orange, on some of our fish there was a line of reddish iridescence–a rainbow–with the parr marks. Shane was concerned that the red line indicated that the fish were cutbows, rainbow-cutthroat hybrids. After the first couple of those, we moved further upstream (just verging on the jeep track), where hybridization was less likely.

Latir Creek Rio Grande Cutthroat

There wasn’t a lot of casting going on during all of this, not the kind of fine, artistic casting at which I am most likely to do injury to those around me and avoid the fish altogether. I would flick the leader a few feet forward in a half-assed roll cast, or just dap. What’s dapping? It’s not casting at all. It’s letting out just enough line to lay the fly on the water beneath the rod tip. Shane kept reminding me to take in more line. He said if I couldn’t make my cast (or in fact my dap), it was because I had too much line extended. By day’s end, I was fishing with only a few feet of leader extended from the end of the rod. It’s the earliest kind of fly fishing, say the mid-1300s, but the lies of the fish were so tiny, so pocketed into bits of soft water in the midst of a mad downhill rush, that nothing else worked. So there I was, happily dapping with a royal coachman for a fish that’s continuously declined in numbers and range since the 1920s. Don’t nobody ever tell me I ain’t hidebound, or at least nostalgic.

Even at the higher elevation, Shane was worried that our fish might be cutbows.

Latir Creek

When we met Tuesday Shane told us he’d spent Monday evening talking to other guides, who assured him that Latir Creek fish were almost certainly pure cutthroats. Apparently for parr fish it’s difficult to tell the difference by color, and other indications include the shape of the tail (rainbow trout caudal fins–tail fins–are square and not forked, while cutthroats’ are forked) and the place. I told him that he could have just told me they were cutthroats, that he didn’t need to spend all of his evening looking at pictures of fish tails on the internet, but he told me he wasn’t that sort of guide. I told him that I was that sort of client, but I really didn’t mean it. Cutthroat or no, I’d done what I wanted.

Latir Creek
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Joe Rogers’ Photos

Joe Rogers, image copyrighted, used with permission.

To see more of Joe Rogers” photos, go here.

Critics generally agree that this is the best photo Joe Rogers will ever take:

Ok, that’s if you confine critics to the two people in the photo who live at our house. Joe took photos at our wedding. He also took photos of our children when they were small. My parents hired Joe for both, because they thought the world of Joe. They told me that very thing so often, frankly, that I was just a wee bit jealous.

Joe has a photography business. He takes photos of weddings, and of families, and if we needed an important photo, we went to Joe. He is a photographer in a pretty small town. There are other photographers there, but we went to Joe.

Joe is older than me, somewhere fewer than 10 years older, somewhere more than five. He was enough older that while I knew of him, I didn’t know him. I knew Joe’s wife, Becky, better than Joe. She was only a couple of years older than me, and we overlapped both in high school and at the University of Texas. As I recall, she worked for a time in Austin television news after she graduated. How did I know this? We were from a pretty small town, and you just know things. She was a smart, personable, pretty girl, and I’m certain she still is. When Becky married Joe it was a bit of a topic among my friends.

Joe Rogers, image copyrighted, used with permission.

At some point long ago I realized that Joe was taking photos of cowboys. This wouldn’t make sense in a lot of places, but out of my small high school class, I always say that three of us ended up lawyering, and three of us ended cowboying, but I’m probably undercounting the cowboys. Ranching and beef production in that part of the world make cowboys real. On ranches, at large animal vet clinics, at the stockyards and sale barn, there are cowboys. I expect that our high school is still turning out as many cowboys as it turns out lawyers.

Joe’s cowboy photos were ranch photos. To me they aren’t romantic photos, they’re not nostalgic photos, but photos of what most draws me to any photo of men doing hard physical work; their intensity, their effort, their skill . . . As often as not Joe’s photos seem like glimpses of a larger picture: a glove, a group of men on a rail, a man’s back in a steel pipe corral, all of those bits in the photo speaking to everything going on when the photo was taken.

Just to be clear, photos of guys lawyering don’t have nearly the same punch as photos of guys cowboying.

Joe Rogers, Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, image copyrighted, used with permission.

I assume no one paid Joe to take cowboy photos, though I hope he’s made some money from them, and that he’s received recognition for them. Me, I have no skill for photography, even though like everybody else with a smart phone I take too many photos. What I realize, though, is that my rare decent photo is mostly luck. That’s less true for Kris, she has a pretty good eye, and most of the photos I steal are Kris’s. Joe though makes a living taking photos. He has not just a good eye, but honed skill.

During a now long-ago Houston mayor’s race, the race when Annise Parker was first elected mayor, a friend suggested that I get on Facebook so I could follow the campaign–Facebook was still new for most of us, and in those earlier days there was a lot of useful information, or at least gossip. Political campaigns largely run on gossip. I was on Annise’s finance committee, and was more intensely engaged than I probably should have been, so I signed up for Facebook. Funny thing though, not long after I signed up I had 50 or 60 friends, most of them not from Houston, but from my far away and long-abandoned hometown.

Joe Rogers, Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, image copyrighted, used with permission.

That reconnection has been for me a joy. I don’t really have any ties there now, but thanks to Facebook I can see my classmates’ grandkids, keep track of their anniversaries and birthdays, and too frequently mourn their losses. I can also time the arrival of Houston’s next cold front by watching for snow photos from Vernon. It’s usually about a 24 to 36 hour lag, but the snow doesn’t often make it this far.

Through Facebook and mutual friends I somehow connected with Joe, and I liked him. I usually agree with what he says, and he posts great photos. Most are of the Southwest: Utah, Colorado, and of course New Mexico. At one point Joe posted a photo of doorways in Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon. I had been there twice. I had looked through those doorways. I could not have imagined that photo.

Shiprock, New Mexico, Joe Rogers, image copyrighted, used with permission.

Joe is a professional photographer, but he also takes photos as an avocation. I’ve been amused at the number of my friends and colleagues who have recently published books, or have announced that they’re writing books. Lawyers suffer under a curse. We write for a living. The best lawyers are excellent writers, and care for the craft. At the same time, most of our writing is ephemeral and narrowly confined both as to audience and purpose. I suspect that this rash of literary output by aging lawyers–and I’ll throw this blog into the rash–is in part because old habits die hard and in part because we want to leave something behind besides a finely crafted and long-forgotten contract clause. That and we find it hard to stop talking.

I think Joe’s impulse though is different. Getting ready to drive to New Mexico, I’ve thought a lot about Joe’s photos of the West, photos of red sandstone slot canyons in Utah, of a solitary fly fisher on the Frying Pan near Aspen, of those doorways in Chaco Canyon. I say too often that there are two kinds of Texans, Texans who vacation in Santa Fe and Texans who vacation in New Orleans, and Joe is clearly on the Santa Fe side of the ledger. Maybe a part of that difference arises from a small town sensibility, that for small town and country folk the difference between, say, New Orleans and Oklahoma City, is too subtle for us to be strongly drawn to one over the other. They’re both cities, and their charms, difficulties, and mysteries are, frankly, more of a kind than folk more attuned to urban subtleties can imagine. The difference between driving a country road in Western New Mexico and in the Panhandle, now there’s variety. Landscapes are something to ponder and appreciate.

Joe Rogers, colorized detail of a New Mexico church, image copyrighted, used with permission.

And for Westerners, the western landscape is infinitely magnificent. I guess that Joe’s impulse is different in part because Joe’s not merely trying to beat the clock. He’s taken his photos for most of a lifetime. I’m sure like all of us he’s imagined other lives, of writing a novel or cowboying or lawyering or whatever, but as a town photographer he’s taken not just excellent wedding photos, but he’s stayed close to the places that define the West. His eye is on the West, and he’s been kind enough to share what he sees.