How do you know I'm about to have another surgery?! Mr Pain told me it would not wait until fall, so I'm going to miss a chunk of fishing this summer. :-( Best times for fishing/hunting are in the fall anyway, so hopefully I'll be up and going after a few months.
I lived in CO for many decades and was outside a lot--camping, four wheeling, trail riding (horses), and fishing. But wife and I finally moved as CO became not much different than a smoggier los angeles but with more crime and kids doing mountain dew commercials, tearing up the national forests. It literally seemed like the floodgates were opened in the 90s. We had to go further and further away from the front range in order to avoid the hordes of idiots.
Don't know if you are not aware of the environment around you or you just have a very limited frame of reference, but CO (and most of the mountain west) is semi-arid to desert. Or rocks/clay with yucca dressing. I know, tv commercials don't show that, but it really is.
I still have family and friends there and this year has been another one of their drought years, very little snow fell in the mountains. That's bad as that's where the water comes from. And the snow is a drier snow than elsewhere--thus, the "champagne snow" that skiers like to brag on. It's pretty airy.
So the reserviors are very very low again...and they'll start to drain them in an effort to stop some of the water from evaporating. Deserts have a lot of sun. When they did that before, the limit on trout would be eliminated as they were going to have a die off anyway, so we'd stock up our freezer in those times. Yeah, they are all stocked, liver pellet fed fish, but we gave most of them to our neighbors anyway. Taught my wife to fish and she became quite proficient.
Antero is now being drained (again) in an effort to save water. They'll move it down through some of the other reserviors--thru spinney, eleven mile and finally into cheeseman. They'll keep doing that until water runs out or cheeseman's full as cheeseman's the deepest.
Cheeseman's in los angeles colorado, aka denver metro, aka front range. Smoggy, congested zoo there, but some people for some reason think it's a wonderful place. So it's people's frame of reference I guess.
You one of those people that take your boat and get in line at 4am at the entrance to one of the reserviors that allow boats? It's always funny driving by them later in the morning--there's still a line of cars with boats waiting/hoping people will leave so they will be allowed to be let in. I'd call it a day at 9am if I were in that line, but then again, I'd not be one of those people waiting in that line under the sun for a hope at using my boat in an overcrowded, drying up reservior.
Whitewater river paddling is even bad as, well, not much water and too many rocks. It's another bad year for water in the arid, desert west. Remember lake meade shrivelling down? That's fed w/colorado water too. In WY, ranches are selling their cows because it's too expensive to feed them--due to yet another drought. Now is calving season btw. Big "fire sales" going on.
Where I am now, I have 2 RVs and 2 boats. One for big water and one for more inland water. I can go a block from me, put in, and go anywhere in the world via boat. Due to our experience in CO, we chose this place to live because of all the water, everywhere, big lakes, little lakes, rivers, streams and creeks.
We'd laugh wife and I, thinking back about CO and the people there, lining up or hiking/four wheeling to find water. Some even own a gravel pit that flooded--and have ski rentals on it. Can't go far before you have to turn around. Brown isn't the color here--green, lush green is. And blue and clear for the water.
So I guess it's all relative after all. Enjoy the traffic and the hordes so you can experience desert fishing while the water level is high enough to support fish. People do. A lot of people. Literally, lines of people....
Oh, and the wildfires too. Part of that desert thing....
