My Vacation

“One great thing about fly fishing is that after a while nothing exists of the world but thoughts about fly fishing.”  (Norman Maclean, 1902—1990)

I am now one week back from my car trip through Colorado.  I set out with three goals in mind; to learn about the geology of the land, to see Colorado’s four National Parks, and to fly fish in as many rivers as possible.  Mission accomplished.

For anyone travelling to Colorado, I recommend September in order to avoid the summer hordes of tourists and in order to enjoy some of Colorado’s finest weather.  In September the rivers are low and the fishing is generally good. The elk are mating.  Mule deer and moose are plentiful.  Late in September the Aspen’s are beginning to turn colors.  Travel in September and you will observe the migratory behavior of the Baby Boomers.

Regarding geology, my trip took me from a craton, to an orogeny and back again to the craton. The middle part of the U.S. sits on the Great Craton, a rather inert expanse of the earth’s crust where little activity has occurred other than oceans rolling in and out over millions of years.  This accounts for the flatness of Kansas, and the sedimentary nature of its rocks.  An orogeny is a rather sexy sounding word meaning ‘mountain forming’, the Laramide Orogeny occurring about 70 million years ago when molten igneous rock pushed upwards into layers of sedimentary rock, leading to the formation of much of the Rocky Mountains.

Each of the four National Parks (The Great Sand Dunes, Mesa Verde, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and Rocky Mountain National Park) is geologically distinct and each merits a visit, but for anyone who’s never been there, I highly recommend Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado’s southwest corner. Beautiful scenery and stunning vistas combine with the archaeologic remnants and the cliff dwellings of an early Native Pueblo civilization dating from 700 AD until 1400 AD.  Not only is it a national park but it is a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site.

As for fishing, I stood in the Arkansas River, the Animas, the Uncompahgre, the San Miguel, the Gunnison, and the Colorado River.  I stood in the rivers fishing, not necessarily catching.  Trout are finicky eaters and it took me time to figure out that a trout’s September diet is different from its summer diet of mayflies and caddisflies. In September, Colorado trout eat grasshoppers and ants that fall into the water as well as very tiny midges that hatch under the water.  I was eventually able to catch and release some nice fish, catching my last two fish near Sprague Lake on the east side of Rocky Mountain National Park.  My penultimate fish was a mere inch-and-a-half brook trout.  My final fish was my best catch of the vacation, a twelve-inch scarlet cutthroat trout.

Vacation has come and gone. Time is a strange thing.  From the perspective of geology, time is measured in millions, even billions, of years.  From the perspective of archaeology, time is measured in hundreds or thousands of years.  A lifetime is measured in decades.  A vacation is measured in days and weeks.  And from the perspective of fly fishing, time temporarily ceases to exist.