Fishing the Middle Fork of the South Platte
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- Setting up the "Cabin", a 20ft. hunting/fishing trailer.


On Thursday, 5 July, 2007 Mark and I headed out of the 90 plus degree Denver heat. Mark is one of my oldest friends, a stout man and an ethical hunter and fisherman. Just before sunrise, we loaded his truck with flyfishing gear, food for a week, adult beverages and my .357 S&W "Black Bear Repellent"pistol. We left Mark's house at 06:00. Two hours later, we arrived at his land in South Park.

Mark purchased his two parcels of land, a total of 5 acres, about eight years ago. The land sits on a wide ridge top which, more or less, runs east to west. His parcels set on the North facing slope. The year after the purchase, he bought an older, twenty foot travel trailer and placed it on a leveled flat facing almost due West.


It is simple, almost rustic. There is no inside toilet and the water system no longer functions. The convenant controlled land association provides a "public" outhouse for the use of the recreational landowners, like Mark. There is a year round spring at the base of the ridge which provides clean, cold water at some five gallons a minute. Mark carries four, two and a half gallon water jugs which are filled at the spring used as a water source at the "Cabin." The only truly modern convenience to which Mark has aquiesed, is the installation of a small electrical generator. It provides light and allows the heater to be run on cold autumn nights.


- View from the "Cabin" facing West by Northwest, across Buffalo Valley.


Mark's land is located near the center of South Park, just North of the legendary fishing reservoirs of Antero, Spinney and Eleven-Mile, impoundments which breech the main channel of the South Platte River.

South Park is a huge glacial valley encircled by great mountain ranges on three sides; East, West and North. All of these ranges dump their valley facing snow-melt into the South Platte, making it a grand and powerful river before it exits the valley through Eleven-Mile Canyon, turning Northeast towards Denver.

The South Fork, Middle Fork, Tarryall, Jefferson, Michgan are main tributaries which feed into the central river at various points in the valley.

In most years, it is a lush and fertile valley. Still, there are the years when snowpack is low and the summer rains are driven North or South, or are simply non-existant. Those years are reminders to us all that Colorado is mostly a semi-arid desert.

The following pics were taken on the Middle Fork within the Tomahawk State Wildlife lease. Mark and I fished this beautiful, glacial valley for three days.




- Gear at the ready, streamside.

I fished my favorite set up:

An old, eight foot, five weight Orvis rod; Battenkill reel with weight-forward line and a seven foot tapered leader with two feet (more or less) of 4X tippet.

The first day we threw every fly in our arsenal at the water. Dries, Wets, Nymphs...specific imitations and attractors of every size and color were tied on and cast in every possible style. I had only three strikes and one hook up in three hours.

Mark did about the same. Neither of us brought a fish to hand, much less to the frying pan. It was a frustrating, yet gorgeous and restful day.



- The Middle Fork, facing north to its headwaters.

Where we fish, the Middle Fork runs cold (never over forty degrees,) even in the middle of Summer. The Tomahawk State Wildlife lease is only forty-some odd miles downstream from its headwaters at the base of Mount Democrat (14,148 ft.). It becomes quite a formidable river in those forty miles, carrying snow melt down from five of Colorado's fifty-one (or fifty-two, depending on who you believe) peaks reaching over forteen thousand feet in altitude.

The Middle Fork, like the main river and all of its tributaries in South Park, is rich with native species of aquatic insects. There are multiple, overlapping hatches of major insect groups during the seasons when the waters are open. The Caddis (Trichoptera) was the hatch that Mark and I hoped to be lucky enough to catch. Six years ago we experienced the full Caddis hatch. The two of us spent two days catching and releasing at least twenty-five fish of nine inches or better during each day. We were sore, sunburned and smiling from ear to ear for weeks after.




- The Middle Fork athe mouth of the the glacial valley, facing South.

The drainages of all Colorado streams and rivers are formed by one of two geological phenomenon; glacial activity or water errosion. The Middle Fork, as is moves through the Tomahawk State Wildlife lease, twists and turns, creating oxbows in a gentle "U" shaped glacial valley. Over thousands of years, the river has carried silt, rock and rubble down during the wild Spring run-off and depositing it in this valley. The ox-bows which twist and turn, sometimes turning into woven side channels, allow the run-off to slow, and the deposits fill the channels creating pools and estuaries which eventually fill with the silt creating peatbogs, and rich soil and finally, this rich subalpine hay and grazing land we call South Park.


- Willow breaks surrounding the main channel.

The willow and the beaver helped create the riparian envrionment of the Middle Fork, just as they have done for all the rivers in the Central Rocky Mountains. Since the arrival of European man in the early 19th Century, the beaver are no longer a major influence. However, the willows remain. And since there are few beaver to harvest them, they can become thick, entangled forests, prohibiting access to the rivers. European man has introduced their cattle, which can, under their watchful eye of the rancher, create breaks opening flats and access to the rivers.

Cattle do not, however, build dams. It is up to man to either reintroduce the beaver or replicate his work if the historic nature of these amazing watersheds.




- Dark storm clouds build over the Middle Fork Valley.

Mark and I fished that first day until about 13:00 hours when the storm clouds, thunderheads and winds drove us from the river. Cold rain pelted us as we reached the truck. The Mourning and Eurasian doves poured into the Ponderosa as we stripped off waders and boots and vests and jumped into the cab. Cloud to cloud and ground to cloud lightning struck all about us as we drove over the alluvial ridge down into the main channel valley south of Hartsel. Mark asked me if I wanted to check out the legendary "Dream Stream" that stretch of water between Spinney and Eleven-Mile. It is mostly public water and being the tailwater of a dam, open to fishing year'round.

The "Dream Stream" http://www.coloradotrouthunters.com/dreamstream.html , (the only hotlink in this little essay), is an amazing yet exasperating.... beautiful, glorious and very technical; or ugly, nasty, wind driven and completely unfishable five mile stretch of the main channel of the South Platte River.

The storm proceeded us. Driving wind blew the rain, rattled the truck and created an amusement park ride for us as we hauled our way across South Park. It was clear, or not so, that the "Dream Stream" was in one of her nasty and unfishable moods.

We headed back to the "Cabin" to dry out, share libations and lies, food and a short poker game. We each turned in to sleep a night of sleep in the rain-washed, Aspen spiced air of South Park.

At some late point, I woke to answer Nature's call, stepped outside to find a sky filled with dripping bright stars. The storm clouds were gone. I relieved my bladder, and bearing a grand smile, returned to dream of rivers filled with monster trout and endless plains filled with elk and antelope.



- A transitional ox-bow on the Middle Fork. (Mark is a tiny figure on the upper left
hand stretch.)

Day Two:
Mark and I returned to the Middle Fork on the Tomahawk State Wildlife lease. We spent the early morning drive discussing what had worked for us, at least to a minor extent, on the previous day. Mark tied on a #14 pheasant tail nymph with a strike indicator. I began with a #14, Blonde St. Vrain Caddis dry fly. We hiked down, heading North into the interwoven channels.

Mark headed upstream, I headed down. It was, after all, a "fishing" trip...not a "catching" trip.


- Mark fishing a short leader, nymph set-up.


An hour or so later, I walked upstream to find Mark.

Neither of us had caught anything.

Narry a strike.

Nothing.

I told him I was going to try a dry fly which had drawn one good strike early yesterday. I tied on what I could only describe as a strange and abberant mutation of an Olive Stimuator. It had a bright, lime green thorax and the rest of the body looked like a traditional Stimulator. (NO....not that kind of stimulator!!!) I walked back to a promising hole, tied the #12 monster on the line and flipped it over a ragged snag into the flow above the deep hole.

Faster than thought, a black shape flashed up from the deep, hit the fly and I raised my rod tip.

The fight was on. The fish dove, bending the light tip of my rod to the water...It had to be a Brown trout, heavy and thrashing... Less than two minutes later, a tired and gasping eleven inch Brown lay in the grass bank and I stood, smiling ear to ear.





- The dark line of the Middle Fork as it flows out to meet the main channel in South Park.

I told Mark what had happened as I handed him a clone of the mutant Stimulator.

As he re-rigged his line, I returned downstream. For the rest of the day, we worked the deep holes, riffles and snags all along the Middle Fork in the Tomahawk State Wildlife lease. Between the two of us, we caught and released twelve or so fish of notable size and a number of fingerlings.

Those fingerlings defined the future of this watershed. The Colorado Division of Wildlife no longer stocks what are called "put'n'take" clones in rivers. They stock the major lakes, ponds and reservoirs with what they call "catchable" size trout, seven to ten inches. They also monitor and maintain sub-alpine and alpine lakes with remnant spawn of native cutthroats.

Mark took two fish home for his daughter. I took none.

It is my way.

We fished a bit more, then returned to the "Cabin" for celebratory drinks and dinner. We woke more later than early the next morning, ate breakfast, closed up the trailer and headed down to the valley floor.

07 July 2007.....07-07-07, the Birthday of Robert Anson Heinlein and TUA.

We stopped here and there, visited old friends, talked of the passing of parents and friends taken too young, too soon. At some point near mid-day, we turned our heavy hearts homeward, eastward, back to the heat of the high plains and this new Los Angeles, the megalopolis of Denver.

Thanks be to God.

Memorial Day ~ 28 May 2007

Aaron Boggs Anthony - Captain, U.S. Army Air Corp, 13th Air Force – 5th Heavy Bomber Group in the Pacific Theatre during WWII. Bob and his crew, members of the 31st Bomber Squadron, flew their Consolidated B-24 Liberators on 51 missions in and around the Philipine Islands.

Dad was born 23 May 1917 and died 21 Sept. 2005.

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Clayton Charles Kemp, Jr - Aviation Antisubmarine Warfare Technician 3rd ClassHS-8, CVSG-59, USS BENNINGTON United States Navy.

09 October 1947 - 12 January 1967 Wheatridge, Colorado

Panel 14E Line 017, Viet Nam Veteran's Memorial, Washington, DC

Chuck died in North Vietnamese waters when the helicopter on which he crewed went down. His body was never recovered.
It was three months and three days after his nineteenth birthday.
He was more than just a friend, he was like a brother.
As long as I draw breath, his memory will not be forgotten.

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Pearl Harbor survivor, Houston James of Dallas, embraced Marine Staff Sargent Mark Graunke Jr. during a Veteran's Day commemoration yesterday. Graunke lost a hand, an eye and a leg while difusing an IED in Iraq last year. - 11 November 2005, Associate Press

Live Oak Canyon Road, Trabuco Canyon - Courtesy of Orangecounty.net

Lady Silence

It was 1969. In the rugged, rolling foothills above Laguna Beach, a canyon snake twisted two lane blacktop slipped back and forth across the creek bed on bridges set perpendicular to the creek. I loved driving there, under the live oaks at night, in the spring, lit by a full moon. It was a road that seemed carefully constructed for British sports cars. Maintaining speed and RPM required constant, delicate, heel to toe braking and accelerating.

As I remember it, in mid-canyon one left turn led up Modjeska Canyon to the state park bird sanctuary. Another right turn later headed south to a quiet overlook, then down into Trabuco Canyon.

It was there, off on a southern facing slope, Bob the Bandit kept a home. It was stone, built in the twenties or thirties by some long-forgotten craftsman who made love to the land with his hands, tools and materials, wood and stone and cement. The tiny house looked as if it had grown slowly up out of the sweep of the sloping meadow.

The house was comfortable there, exactly where it belonged.

Bob had no electricity. He pumped his water by hand, heated and cooked with wood. Kerosene lamps danced in the dark. Baths happened once a week. If he wanted music, he ran a cord to a voltage inverter hooked to his ancient Toyota Land cruiser. Most of the time it was simply silent, deep profound silence that seeped into the soul, feeding an unnamed hunger.

Up in a box canyon behind Bob's house someone had turned the earth and planted a secret crop. So said Bob, and he said little else 'til September when the heavy seed heads drooped, thick with a fragrant resin. Then the crop disappeared.

Bob would lay in his winter stock of foodstuffs soon after those plants vanished. His smile grew wide, he whistled aimlessly and pretty young, longhaired ladies materialized from smoky, early autumn sunsets.

It was late Summer when Renee introduced me to Bob. We spent one long September week with him till the silence permeated every dusty pore and fold of gray matter in our combined heads. At night, the stars slipped low, dripping with diamond light, so low one could almost suckle their magic draughts. Then that fecund stillness slipped into our hearts, left a summer-dried seed, fertile and pulsing.

We woke one morning to deeper silence. Bob was gone. He left us a scribbled note asking that we close up the house and take the key taped to the wrinkled and wine stained note.

He would be back. That's what he wrote. He would come for the key. That's what he wrote.

Bob did not return.

Remember those long haried ladies? Oh beloved, one had been police science major at Cal State Fullerton. She had begged him to set up a drug deal. He refused. She did him, he did the deal and Renee and I were the last to see him at his home, there in the silence, there in the September sun in Trabuco Canyon.

I returned some fifteen years later with a young wife. I wanted to show her Bob's house on the knoll, in the meadow. I wanted her to know the silence. A busy four lane had replaced the twisting two lane. The turn off to south-facing knoll was crowned with ugly, soulless, mindless condominiums. And as to Lady Silence; she had long ago gathered up her Autumn skirts and departed, leaving no trace.

I have yet to find the likes of her, forty years later.

California died that Autumn. And sometimes, when the post-modern noise and the filth of the city withers my soul, I still grieve the passing of those sun dappled innocent days and star laced wicked nights. But most of all, I grieve Lady Silence and her soft, healing touch.

Ronaldus Magnus, President and Statesman


"Any day you wake up on the right side of dirt, is a good day! It’s another opportunity to do something… to be free and be in the fight. It’s another day to influence someone, to teach, to lighten the load of another and to try and give back part of what I’ve gotten from living in the greatest nation on Earth. It’s a gift from God that I hope I don’t waste."

Fight ‘em till Hell freezes over, and then fight ‘em on the ice!!


- Thanks to Trooper John Smith over at ://www.sondrak.com/index.php/P35/

It would be easy to reach out and take hold of the remote control and slip into a drooling, semi-sonambulent state, dumbed and numbed by post-modern, negative seeking, and decadent media.

There is some truth in the Wachowski Brother's film odessey, The Matrix. We are surrounded by Addictions and those who seek to placate us, remove us from the fight, keep us powerless and addicted.

Ronald Reagan chose to walk a separate path. He believed the following:

- There is EVIL in the world and we are called to name it, defy it and defend against its influence.

- There are those who are pluralists, grey in heart and spirit, servants of Communism and/or Social Fascism. They do not believe in a higher power, God, other than self or the collective state.

- It is our job, in this great land, to stand against the evil, fight against the godless and take personal responsibility for making this world a better place, by the gifts and grace of God.

I think it a good time to consciously take time to stand against the onslaught. Turn off the talking heads and their endless stream of their poisonous, soul killing drivel. Take a day to fish with an old friend or some lost member of your family. Split some firewood. Talk to your neighbor, help him or her fix a broken stairway, roof, walkway. Look your mate in the eye, take a breath and tell him or her that you love them...and say it with conviction. Dig up a forgotten corner of garden somewhere and plant a future. Read a book. Take ten minutes and be quiet, reflective, prayerful.

Take time to join in worship with those who believe as you. Join them this week at your temple, synagogue, church, chapel, some chosen place of praise.

Thank that being, however you choose to see that higher power, for the gift of life and citizenship in this great and powerful land, blessed by God. And thank that same God for the gift of Ronald Reagan, President and Statesman.

California Dreams

Over at the sadoldgoth, the thoughts have turned to times long past in California.

His tight prose rattled my soul and I was drawn back in time to write of Renee and this place:

Remembering Renee

In the rundown old town section of Orange, CA, a shabby and dirty pink stucco home stands entrapped by vines. The greenery has blurred whatever defining features the old house might show. I just know it feels ancient. It is September, 1968. Evening wanders up Almond Street, hot, humid and dark. I open the door of my old, rust bound Mercedes sedan and with a tentative sigh, step onto an alien sidewalk. "801 W. Almond, yep, that's the address." I whisper to myself, trying to crank up my courage.

No need, for she has opened the front door to the house. Light shines around the tiny woman, a halo of blonde welcome, her whole body smiles under thin, clinging, cotton print. She waves slowly, beckoning me.

Renee is her name. Her family has owned this house since the 1940's...and here I am, not more than 8 months out of Colorado.

One week ago, at a gathering of young hipsters, she sought me out, took my calloused hand between her soft girl fingers and pulled me into the darkness, pulled me deep inside her slippery, hungry woman's well. She told me she had been waiting for me....She whispered that I lived in her dreams.

Now, this night, I chose to respond. Dreams or no, I was accepted and engulfed in her sweet selfless hunger. Darkness covered us that night, a blanket of sweat and passion.

That was the way of her. She welcomed me whenever, wherever and held me close... no questions, no expectations, just quiet and deep.

Less than a year later, I left California, burned out, disillusioned. Renee didn't cry. She just smiled her shy smile and turned away without looking back. I often wonder, almost forty years later, what became of her. I have attempted to contact her through old friends. She seems to have disappeared. And the house, so long in her family, has been sold.

Perhaps she and the house were just the fevered dreams of a stoned and lonely young mountain man who found himself in that hellish paradise of SoCal in 1968.

I think not. I can still taste her sweet kiss.