You have to be living right when friends change their vacation plans to deliver a full case of special favorite IPA ale directly to your campsite that’s more than 500 miles from home.
Yes, that’s exactly what happened when former neighbors Mark S. and Suzanne D. made the decision to alter their travel plans and rendezvous with me in Gila National Forest.
Well, it wasn’t all about heeding my laments about being down to my last favorite can of ale, it was also so Mark and I could explore the river for the elusive Gila trout, a subspecies of cutthroat trout indigenous to parts of Arizona and New Mexico. It’s a very handsome looking cutthroat with gold tones and fine spots adorning it’s upper flanks. Here’s an image of one in a diorama displayed at the USFS visitor center at Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument.
Nice fish, ‘eh?
So, Mark and I share the same goal in finding and catching a rare Gila trout – and rare they are because they are harder to find than in recent years due to major forest fires that essentially destroyed the habitat they were released in for restoration in their natal waters. Finding and catching one in mind, we both researched where we might have a shot at landing a few, so we set off to a nearby stretch of the West Fork of the Gila River to look for them.
No luck, but instead, a short, intense bushwhacking adventure.
Yes, so the research I did before Mark’s arrival suggested that a stretch of the West Fork of the Gila River would be a convenient place to look for a Gila trout. Portions of it looked fishy enough from a vantage point off the main road, so this would be both Mark’s and my intro to Gila trout fishing. We’re off…
An infrequently used fenced parking area right off the road revealed a faint trail to the river that flanked massive sandstone pillars downstream from where we started. After fewer than two minutes on the path, we both realized that it petered out against an overgrown gauntlet of cottonwood trees, bluestem willows, box elders, and sycamores, plus tall, thick swaths of spent Scarlet Penstemon and various tall grasses. It is a formidable fortress of plant life, seemingly determined to prevent fly anglers from doing their duty.
After backtracking through this thicket, we found the river, noting that beavers had effectively dammed portions of the river, creating long pools of slow, deeper water that showed little sign of normal trout activity. That proved to be the case until we managed to penetrate our way to a stretch of water below the largest beaver pond, where we actually saw fish working near the bottom of a deep run.
Rigging his three-weight fly rod up, Mark quickly put out careful casts of a small weighted nymph pattern held right off the bottom with a bright, high-floating indicator. Nothing moved for the fly even though I watched intently from a favorable position on the bank and could see what was going on below the surface pretty well. The fish had the silhouette of trout, but Mark quickly theorized that these fish looked as if they were spawning and were probably suckers. I agreed. We were done for the day… Gila trout were nowhere to be found here.
