Ice Fishing

Since Colorado has turned into an icebox this year is seemed appropriate to go ice fishing last weekend. Friend Steve Heibert and I set out at 4:30 Saturday morning so that we could be on Williams Fork Reservoir by sun rise. On the way we passed through Fraiser (see previous post on this icebox) and the exterior temperature reading from Steve's Duramax was -31 F. Yes you read that correctly, and man was it cold. Arriving at WFR it had warmed up to a balmy -2F.

Today we debut my new second generation homemade electric ice auger. It worked great of course, and we proceeded to drill holes and fish for the wiley Laker's that are most commonly caught here. Well, ...5 hours later we were still waiting for a bite. That's why the don't call it "catching".

Seemed like the thing to do was change venues, so we loaded up and drove over to Willow Lake near Granby. Our luck really improved then and we started hauling in the big ones. Careful Steve, better use both hands on the that whopper. (Damn dinky rainbow trout.)

Check out the moose in the background, yeah, that little dark square right of center along the tree line. OK so it was too far for a decent photo but this was pretty much the highlite of the trip. A cow, and calf moose which we did actually see closer up, but they were in the trees, and too hard to get a clear picture. Don't get to see moose to often in Colorado.

Well the epic wasn't over yet. As we approached Berthoud Pass on the way home we got turned around at the Mary Jane Ski area exit by a police road block. Seems an avalanche earlier in the morning (10:30am) swept some cars off the road, and they expected to have the pass closed all night. Guess we just missed that by about 4 hours. That was a major bummer since we basically had to turn around and drive about 60 miles out of our way to get around to I-70, and we had already been half the way there at WFR. I can't believe they didn't post warning signs at more advanced points on the road so we won't have wasted all this travel time. To make it worse, we hit rush hour ski traffic on this detour, and with ground blizzards now blowing at the Eisenhower tunnel, traffic was moving at a brisk standstill. Well five more hours later we finally got home. That doesn't quite match my record 6 hour trip from Breckenridge 2 years ago (normally a 90 minute drive), but it was close.