Recently, in the middle of this month, October, my husband, Bob and I headed for the Fryingpan and Roaring Fork rivers in Basalt, Colorado. We had been reading about these rivers in a book called America’s 100 Best Trout Streams. Basalt is about 10 miles west of Aspen. T
hese two rivers run right through the town of Basalt. The Roaring Fork river is a fork of the Colorado River which has more than 75 miles of river, most of it wadeable. The Roaring Fork is a wild river and its flows are unimpeded by any dams. This river can run very heavy due to snowmelt in early spring and summer. You will find Rainbows, German Browns, Brook and Cutthroats and White Fish in the Roaring Fork. The Fryingpan called “Pan”, is a tailwater fishery below Reudi Dam. Reudi Lake above the dam is what feeds the river.
The water released from the dam can verify. When we were there the river was running at 253 cfs (cubic feet per second). You will find Rainbows and German Browns in the Fryingpan.
We arrived in Basalt, on Sunday, after an 11 hour drive from our home in Alpine, AZ. The drive was beautiful going through the Rocky Mountains with all the colors. The aspens and oaks were changing and the hillsides were bright with yellows, reds, orange and green. We went up through Durango, up over the mountains to Silverton to Ouray and then to Basalt. We hired a fishing guide for the first day of fishing. I think that is always good to do especially if you have not fished an area before.
The guide is helpful because he shows you areas to fish, teaches you about the river, you learn what patterns work better at what time of the day and in general, gives you helpful hints. One of the best things that the guide does is tie your flies on for you. I like that because they can always tie them on faster than I can, especially when you are using size 22 and 24.
The wind was pretty bad for the first 2 days. The guide had to retrieve my hat that blew off in a 30 mph gust. We did some fishing on the Roaring Fork but mostly on the Fryingpan. I did catch my first white fish on the Roaring Fork and that was fun. We fished for 5 days, Monday through Friday from 8:30 AM until dark. We caught some of the biggest fish we ever have caught there. The rainbows are pretty comparable to the rainbows in San Juan River in New Mexico. We caught many rainbows and they were in the 4-6 lb. range. The browns are something else. I got so excited when I hooked into a 24” brown on my 4 wt. using 6X tippet. It took me over 30 minutes to land the fish.
One good thing about the Fryingpan is that you can follow the fish down stream. The Fryingpan is also noted for their dry fly fishing, but because the wind was so bad I only had one afternoon, for about 1 hour when we were able to do that. I did catch 6 fish on dries and that was a hoot since it had been years since I had done that.
The flies that we did the best on were: nymphs on an egg patterns, mices shrimp, flashback pheasant tails, beadhead pheasant tails and RS 2; dry flies were blue wing olive.
We had a blast and the river was definitely everything that we expected. I will return hopefully next year during the off season, since these rivers get hit pretty hard by fly fisherman during the peak season.