By Dennis Smith
A few years ago, a friend of mine who moved to Alaska called to say he was flying back to Colorado to fish the autumn brown trout run on North Delaney Buttes Lake. He planned to be here the second week of October and wanted to know if I’d go along with him. Personally, I thought he was nuts.
I couldn’t imagine anyone leaving Alaska to fly fish Colorado, but he had his reasons: He liked big browns and, I suspect, he was just a little homesick, too. “We don’t have any brown trout up here,” he said. “Plus, I really miss Delaney Buttes.”
Fair enough, I thought. I agreed to go.
As luck would have it, a nasty cold front came howling out of the Mount Zirkel Wilderness that week, and we found ourselves casting into bitter 25 mile-an-hour gusts of wind laden with sheets of stinging rain, sleet and snow. Skim ice formed in the shallows and freezing spray from the wind-whipped lake turned everything within 20 yards of shore into bizarre-looking ice sculptures. “You’re definitely insane,” I said.
When we arrived, Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologists were there collecting eggs from the spawning browns. They told us we were crazy to be out in this weather, too, but they also said they saw good numbers of browns staging in the shoals along the north shore. Reaching them involved a quarter-mile hike through a herd of cattle guarded by three monstrous range bulls who eyed us like we owed them money. We gave them wide berth, leaning hard into the wind all the way. I kept telling Byron he was crazy. He just laughed. Madman.
We were bundled in layers of wool, down, neoprene and Gore-Tex, so our bodies stayed warm, but our faces and fingers were numb as stones and we had to break ice from our line guides every two or three casts. We caught fish in spite of it all — some nice ones — and when Byron finally landed what we guessed was a 7-pounder on one of his big, ugly foo-foo flies, he was positively ecstatic. “Still think I’m crazy?” he asked, splitting his frozen beard with a big, toothy grin.
“Absolutely.”
“Wanna leave?”
“Heck, no,” I told him. “I’m having too much fun.”
The oddest thing is I try to get back there every October now. Crazy.