Fishing; Pine Beetles; Got My Trout! Cream of What? A Floral Romance

Okay, you may have read in previous blogs about my bad luck in fishing for Colorado’s elusive and highly intelligent rainbow trout. My last venture into the quest for Oncorhynchus mykiss was in Estes Park; here I am patiently casting... and casting again... and again... finally time ran out, and we had to depart. 

I was determined not to leave the state before remedying this intolerable situation. I enlisted the aid of an almost-native Coloradan. Jerry was actually born in Pennsylvania, moved to New Jersey as a youth, but has spent the past 40 years here in Colorado. He is a very good fisherman, and assured me that we would have good luck at a nearby mountain lake. On the drive up, Jerry had told me about a local pest, the pine beetle, which has killed hundreds of thousands of pine trees in the state. Looking at some of the stands of pine, you see as many as 10% of all the trees brown instead of green, as you see in this picture. Evidently the forestry people waited too long to take aggressive action against the beetles, and now the pests are everywhere. They are hoping for a brutally cold winter to kill the beetles, but as we say in the military, “Hope is not a strategy.”  

We arrived and set to work in a beautiful dammed lake with lots of pine trees and boulders ringing the lake. There are supposed to be tiger muskies up to 4 feet long in this lake along with the much smaller trout. 

Jerry and I fished within sight of one another for an hour, but then decided to split up; Jerry would take the south shore, I the north shore. There was only one other fisherman on the lake, a guy sitting in a floating harness with flippers on his feet for propulsion. You can’t fish from boats here to give the fish better odds against the fishermen... what a joke! I could hear the trout tittering with amusement...

I fished the shore for almost three hours, changing from spinner to plug to jig to spinner. I fished shallow, bottom, and surface. I fished rocks and submerged trees and sandy bottom and deep holes. In three hours, I had only one bite, other than those from a couple of pesky mosquitoes. In shame and disgust, I called Jerry and told him lunch was calling. We drove to a nearby crossroads where there was a “Sportsman’s Café”. I passed up the cream of cabbage soup for the trout dinner with tater tots; I figured if I couldn’t catch my trout, I’d at least get some revenge on the species by eating someone else’s fish. It was pretty tasty, even if I didn’t catch it myself. The guy in the café said, “You should have been here last week...” Sigh... that’s the story of my fishing life.  

So, instead of a fish dinner, it was pizza from Whole Foods Deli, in an inside/outside dining area with a live trio. The brass section had a long-haired dapple dachshund, Gertrude, seen here. A cute dog, but Gertrude’s owner claimed that she didn’t get along well with other dogs because she felt superior to every other dog on the planet... so what’s your point? That’s what our dachshunds Rudy and Gretchen are like, as well. It must be genetic. His tee-shirt, emblazoned with "OBEY", is the unfulfilled wish of every dachshund owner.

Next stop was the Colorado State University’s Trial Garden, just in front of their Performing Arts Center, where Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors was playing. The Trial Garden is incredible, with every color flower you could imagine, and some that you couldn’t. 

Suzanne liked the potted plants best. She wanted to bring several of these specimens home in The Bus, but fortunately, they weren’t for sale.  

This couple was obviously enjoying the flower show; the young lady must have accidentally touched flowers with aphrodisiac qualities; perhaps the signs for those flowers should add “Caution: may produce R-rated behavior!” to “Needs lots of sun”...