Fly Fishing Colorado Trout Fishing Guides

Fantastic Float Fishing in Colorado !

Why do we prefer to float? The short answer to this question is threefold: access, diversity, and impact.

Access

Where Colorado's rivers are concerned, much of our wonderful wealth of natural resources has been made exclusive by an antiquated law, which allows for a landowner to own, and therefore prohibit trespass upon, the actual riverbed. While the state owns the water and technically the fish that live in it (although ownership in this context is questionable at a very fundamental level) the landowner can and usually does prohibit any contact with his or her land including boat anchors.

Public access extends only to the "posted" property line of the landowner who is unwilling to share his or her state owned resource. (If that does not make sense to you, you are not alone. The discord between intelligence and this law is the source of your confusion. I know many intelligent people, some of whom are landowners along a river corridor, to whom this makes little sense as well). The lack of any high water mark law further cements the barriers a landowner can build between the public and the state owned natural resource. We believe in the resource as a public trust and we exploit it as a trust and not an exclusive right.

Unfortunately, the only way to share with you much of the water that has the best fishing is to float through it.

Diversity

Much of the beauty of fly-fishing, and fishing in general for that matter, is that it is constantly changing. When Heraclitus says, "You can't step in the same river twice," his irony is meant as a blessing. We have infinitely many rivers to step in, or fish in, in just one river. Each moment that flies is pregnant with a whole new set of possibilities and opportunities altogether different from its predecessor.

Floating a river as opposed to planting your feet on the bottom of it all day is how the ancient Greeks intended for us to fish. We see far more water types, situations, and opportunities when we float a five to fifteen mile stretch of water as opposed to wade fishing two or three spots by the road. Heraclitus, by the way, was a fanatical streamer fisherman.

Impact

All of the fishing we do is catch and release with barbless flies, which means we do not intentionally kill fish for harvest or otherwise. The strictest catch and release fly fishing is, never the less, a blood sport and we do have an impact on the environment with which we interact and participate. As fly fishermen, we are acting, in a sense, as gentle predators and when predation occurs there is mortality.

One of our goals as professionals and as stewards of a natural resource is to communicate to you the intrinsic and transcendent value of the resource exclusive of our interaction with it. In that way we might occasion a better understanding of your participation with it, the significant role you play and the value of that role as it is dispersed among the varied fields of environmental, economic, and social influences.

By floating we have far less of an impact on the natural environment upon which wild trout and all the other organisms in a river ecosystem depend. Just one step on the bottom of the river, which is the very nursery for every living organism in the watershed, has an impact. Indeed, one step on the riverbank has an impact. Floating one of these great rivers will be a great fishing experience, but neither more or less importantly, it will be an exercise in stewardship as well.