Days 30 & 31, June 19 & 20, San Juan River, New Mexico

One month. That’s how long since I’ve been home. I’m ¼ of the way through my trip, and ¾ seems like a long way to go. But in another 10 days I’ll see my wife Trish, and that’s going to help a lot to refresh my enthusiasm. Not that my enthusiasm is waning too much. Every time it flags a little, something happens to renew it.

Yesterday I left my campsite in the Sangre de Cristo mountains bright and early, and stopped in Santa Fe so I could use the internet for a couple of hours to publish my last blog post and put together the video that’s in it. I had plenty of time to get to my next destination, so I decided to take an indirect route. Leaving Santa Fe, I could see the fire that I mentioned in my last post in my rearview mirror, which was a good place for it. I paused in Los Alamos, which is famous for its nuclear research laboratories, to buy groceries, then climbed the steep, curvy road that leads to Valle Caldera National Preserve. 

Valle Caldera is an interesting place.  As its name implies, it’s a broad basin of grass that was a crater of an ancient volcano. It’s hard to imagine the scale of it unless you actually see it, but it was impressive. Elk herds grazing in its center were almost impossible to detect with the naked eye. I put together a nice panoramic shot of Valle Caldera that I planned to show you here.  Unfortunately, my internet connection is poor and I can't upload pictures for now.



From Valle Caldera I started the gradual descent into the high desert of western New Mexico and its chain of Indian reservations, pueblos and sites of long-abandoned cliff dwellings. I passed over a couple of rivers I fished about twenty years ago. I hoped to stop and cast a line on the Jemez River, but every bridge and turnout was a mob scene. Hikers, bikers, climbers, swimmers and fisherman clogged every entry point, and I drove on. Through Jemez Springs I drove, and on to Cuba, where I stopped for gas. I was going to buy a milk shake there, but the line at McDonald’s was depressingly long. I drove on. Somewhere along the way I crossed the Continental Divide. A sign announced that from that point west, the rivers drained into the Colorado River and the Pacific Ocean. That would be true if anything was left of the water in the Colorado when it reaches Baja California in Mexico, but the water has pretty much all been sucked up by Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and the farms and other communities in that area before it makes it that far. North through the Jicarella Apache Reservation I drove. It looked like a place out of a John Ford western movie such as the Comancheros. I half expected a new age Geronimo and his renegade band to appear on a ridge, but Apaches were never actually in evidence except at the casino I passed when I entered the reservation. I drove on, finally arriving at my destination early in the evening. Or so I thought.

I should learn not to depend so much on my GPS. When I first set eyes on Navajo Lake and the sign for the state park there, I thought I was in the right place. Suddenly I found myself perched high atop a long dam on a narrow road with no guardrails, peering down long, steep embankments on both sides and feeling, deep in my bones, every gust of a powerful crosswind that threatened to send Camelot plummeting into the deepest part of the reservoir. On one hand I was quite taken with the incredible view of the braided, shimmering San Juan River far below me on the left. On the other hand I was scared out of my mind. Ever so slowly I proceeded, pausing for breath when I reached the west side. There was no campground there. A motorist on the road that descended the river side of the dam informed that the campground I sought was several miles down the river. I could have driven directly to it and saved a lot of miles and fear sweat if I had known. I guess the little lady who lives inside my GPS and calmly gives directions thought she’d play a joke on me. Ha ha.

After a good night’s sleep at Cottonwood Campground, I took my time making coffee, pancakes and bacon and getting organized for the day’s fishing expedition. It was obvious from the look of all the folks at the campground and the nature of the nearby businesses I drove by the previous evening that fishing was the sole reason the campgrounds and little hotels in the area were all full. I wasn’t surprised by that – in fly-fishing circles, the San Juan River is one of the three or four most highly-regarded tailwaters in the country. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, a “tailwater” isn’t something that happens when you eat bad Mexican food – it’s the name for a river that flows out of a dam that backs up a reservoir such as Navajo Lake. Because the water comes from the bottom of the reservoir, it is consistently cold year-round, and is therefore favorable to trout production.) The San Juan is a regular trout factory, and draws the crowds of fishermen one would expect from such a place.

I fished on the San Juan once before, many years ago, so I had reason to expect that I would have a good day, fishing-wise. The fierce winds howling up the canyon and the dozens of fishermen departing the campground to occupy the prime spots upstream dampened those expectations, but as it turned out, they shouldn’t have. I decided to do a little scouting, and hiked a barely-there trail through the sagebrush and cottonwoods down to the river to see what the conditions were. Much to my surprise, there was only one person within sight as I surveyed about a mile of river. Apparently all the fly fishermen had taken their positions upstream on the “quality” section, but my campground was about a mile or two downstream from that section.  The water was clear and low, flowing through braids and channels beneath spectacular cliffs of yellow sandstone, and it seemed impossible that trout weren’t there. (I later found out that the flow from the dam had been squeezed back from about 5,000 cfs [cubic feet per second] to about 900 cfs only a couple of days earlier, which for us fishermen was like being handed the keys to the kingdom.) So I hiked back to my campsite, assembled my Sage XP 9-foot 5-weight rod and Battenkill Large Arbor III reel, packed some jerky and corn nuts and water bottles, and headed back to the river as fast as my felt-soled wading boots would carry me.

What a day this was about to become! The wind was brisk, but the cornflower blue sky and cotton-puff clouds were as inviting as could be. I waded about twenty yards out into the river to a promising V-shaped, ripply pool between two currents, and started throwing a rig with a split-shot, an indicator and two tiny mayfly nymphs. On the fifth cast I was tight to a 19-inch, deeply-colored rainbow trout who was quickly departing for a deep hole. Fortunately, I managed to stop him, and after several minutes of tug-of-war, I removed the fly and released the rainbow, feeling a surge of optimism. 

I’m sorry to say I have no pictures or videos to document the prime fly fishing that ensued, but I hope to take some over the next couple of days here. To summarize, I caught about 40 fish. The first one was the biggest but about half of the rest were very nearly as big – mostly thick, hardy brown trout and about a half-dozen rainbows. By 4 o’clock I caught so many fish that I started to get a bit bored and was planning to leave the river. Then I happened to notice that there were a few caddis flies skipping around on the water and trying to take flight. I hadn’t seen many rising fish all day, but suddenly there were small fish coming to the surface here and there to eat the caddis flies, and the goal of catching a fish on a dry fly began to preoccupy me. I tied on the smallest elk hair caddis (a dry fly with wings made from, you guessed it, elk hair) in my fly box and went to work.

At first this exercise was frustrating. For a half hour I couldn’t get a taker on the elk hair, and thought of giving up. Then a couple of fish came up and tapped the fly, refueling my desire. Then I got a few eats but the trout quickly unbuttoned themselves. Then I got two firm takers – big fish! – but got too excited and snapped the fly off in their mouths when they began their runs. By then it was about 6 o’clock and I was getting tired and hungry and discouraged. Perhaps it just wasn’t a day for catching fish on dry flies. I noticed that a spin fisherman with a couple of fish on a stringer was standing across the river just downstream from me. I got the feeling he was having a good laugh at my expense. Now I was obsessed, and with obsession came focus and determination.

I saw a trout rise for a skittering caddis about 20 feet in front of me and threw my fly four feet in front of where I’d seen him. I carefully mended the line to get a natural drift. Boom! My second-largest catch of the day, a fat brownie, was on the end of my line putting on an aerial performance worthy of a tarpon. I soon brought him to hand, found another target, and boom! Another large trout, then another one, and another and another! I looked across the river. The spin fisherman, who was quite nattily dressed for a sportsman of his sort, had stopped casting and was just standing and watching me. I wasn’t sure what he was thinking but his posture wasn't a happy-looking one. Maybe he didn’t like it that I was releasing the fish he longed to consume. Or maybe he was thinking he should learn to fly fish. I don’t know, but I was damned happy to show him up. I looked over my shoulder and there was a kid in a red ball cap standing on the bank with his eye on me. I caught another big fish and held it up so he could get a good look and he smiled. The spin fisherman was still staring, just standing there with his free hand on his hip. I waved at him. He pulled up his stringer and started up the far bank to his car.

Today was a grand day. On the way back to camp I managed to get a cell phone connection and called Trish. We talked for a long time. I can’t tell you how many men I’ve met on this trip so far who’ve expressed wonderment that my wife is letting me do what I’m doing. Obviously their wives are less tolerant. Guys, I just want to say this: it’s karma. I never forget to love her, and I give her all the room and respect that she gives me.