Ice Fishing in Winter Park

Fly fishing “Ice Off” on the sagebrush lakes of northern Colorado is a ritual considered by some to be the angler’s equivalent of a pilgrimage to the Promised Land. In other words, it’s a big deal. At no other time of year are you as likely to see pods of monster trout cruising the shallows of Lake John or the three Delaney Buttes Lakes as you are in the days immediately surrounding the week-long recession of ice from their frozen shores. Weather permitting, that is.

 

It doesn’t necessarily hold that you’ll catch one of these mythical leviathans though; it just means that you might actually get to see a few of them. Or not. Just ask me.

 

Sightings of slab-sided trout weighing up to eight or ten pounds abound, and occasionally some are even caught, but catching one is no walk in the park – especially when you consider this is Winter Park we’re talking about, a region that’s as notorious for its nasty weather as it is famous for its big, fat trout. On any given spring day you could be subjected to balmy blue skies and blinding sun or heavy black overcast, rain, sleet, snow, howling winds, and temperature swings that bounce up and down like a ping pong ball. If you fish North Park at ice off you hope for the best, prepare for the worst and wisely expect both. You carry sun screen in one pocket of your wading jacket and a couple of those nifty little chemical hand warmers in the other. Goes with the territory.

 

The operative theory here is that as the ice cap pulls back from the shorelines, sunlight warms the exposed shallows, stirring dormant insects, crustaceans and other aquatic organisms to life, and the trout move in to feed on the new spring menu. Conventional wisdom calls for anglers to stalk the banks quietly offering a variety of possible goodies including fly patterns that mimic midge pupae, scuds, crawfish, caddis larvae, leeches or small minnows. The trout are hungry, but they’re no fools; pattern and presentation have to be spot on. Luck helps immensely.

 

Last Friday, Steve Armstrong and Drew Voos made the pilgrimage again for the third straight year, arriving on East Delaney Buttes Lake at about 9:30 a.m. to find 20 yards of open water around the perimeter of the lake, clear blue skies and relatively warm, 40-deree temperatures. Surprisingly, there were very few other anglers. They stalked the shoreline and seeing no fish, resigned themselves to working the ice shelf, casting small leech patterns, midge pupae and other standard spring fare. Eventually, a fish grabbed Voos’s leech and after a hectic struggle he had one of Delaney’s big, fat mythical rainbows in his net. It looks like an easy six, or maybe even a seven-pounder in the picture, but I’m just guessing. Voos didn’t include any details. When he sent me the photo he just said, “Finally.”