Today was a go for fishing.  After skiing the past two days, it was time to wet a line.  The temperature was around 15 degrees and the sky was overcast: perfect winter fishing conditions.  I made the two mile walk from the parking lot to the tailwater section of the Stagecoach.  It was truly a labor of love; the access road had about 1 fresh inch of snow on it.  By the time I remembered that I had snow shoes in the car, it was too late to turn around.  I pushed on through.

After the last bend, I finally hit the tailwater.  The water had a lot of structure: pools, pockets, and slicks.  It was perfect trout habitat.  I setup my rig for standard indi-nymphing.  I used two flies that I designed last year winter fishing the San Miguel outside of Telluride, CO.  A 8 Simple Stonefly at the end of the leader.  Off the eye of the stonefly, I tied a size 20 variation of an Al’s Rat (red wire body and dubbing on the thorax).  All using 6.5x TroutHunter Fluoro.

I worked my upstream, nymphing for about 200 yards.  The fish were scattered everywhere.  I had to keep adjusting my split shot and indicator for the different conditions for each pocket or pool or slow riffle.  The adjustments paid off.  I pulled out 8 nice rainbows, indi-nymphing my way up.  Two on the stone and six on the midge nymph.

The beat that I worked had a decent amount of surface activity from the fish.  After I pulled out that 20 incher, I wanted to try some dry flies.  After re-rigging, I had a size 18 Grey Comparadun attached by 7x TroutHunter mono.  I worked two medium size slicks, and stuck two and lost two others.  It was surreal casting dries while it was snowing.

It was an amazing day, but it was a haul to get back there in the winter.  10 bows in total and some dry fly action to boot!