THE IRIDEUS - SEPTEMBER 2020
Colorado
By peter burrows
I
’ve always had a thing against Colorado. I’ve looked for any excuse to fish in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming or Utah, but never even wet a fly in the Centennial State. Why so biased? I really don’t know. I think it has something to do with watching John Denver’s Rocky Mountain Christmas special in 1975 as a kid. All that cringey, fake cowboy stuff left me thinking of Colorado as the “fake” West. How wrong I was. I spent the first two weeks of July, travelling from Alameda to Fort Collins with my son Ari. I managed to squeeze in four days of fishing, on everything from roaring rivers to placid Alpine lakes. I saw some of the most beautiful country of my life, and definitely the most beautiful species of trout (the greenback cutthroat). And once in CO, no ride took more than four or five hours. They all felt short, next to schlep to the McCloud.
Why am I telling you about this in the Irideus? Because if you like long, extended road trips – and I’d bet this will be a more popular option in the “new normal” – you could do a lot worse than northern Colorado. It’s closer than Yellowstone, for example, but offers a huge variety of water and probably less crowds. The first good thing about the trip is that it doesn’t require taking Rt 80 route across Nevada. Been there, done that. We took Rt. 50 out of Reno, and drove a section once dubbed by Life magazine as the “Loneliest Road in America.” I’ve been on lonelier, but it is a varied, interesting landscape, with everything from moonscape-like desert to pine-covered mountains, with a few former ghost-towns mixed in. We made it to Ely in eight hours or so, just in time to grab a decent prime rib at the Cellblock Steakhouse. The next day’s seven-hour drive, mostly through Southern Utah on Highway 70, was spectacular, much of it looking like a backdrop to a John Wayne flick. Some spots actually were. Once we turned south off the highway in Grand Junction, CO, the scenery became lusher and greener, as we were now on the west slope of the Rockies. Our destination was Montrose, a lovely small city with an idyllic 1950s vibe, of the Red State variety. I’m told its Trump Country,
14
