Hot Day @ Rainbow Falls With Andy 13Jun24

With most rivers raging Andy invited me out to Rainbow Falls. We knew the day'd be hot and departed at 6:15am for the spring-fed paradise. Even arriving that early we needed to move on to spot #2 on Andy's list of favs. NP, the whole stream is teaming with fish... or so we thought. Oddly it was 90 min before we hooked up in earnest. There were some faint passes at Griffith's Gnats prior but no subsurface strikes! It was very surprising for Rainbow Falls. Undeterred we swapped bugs, stayed top surface and ultimately broke through. Me with a brown on the chubby and Any with a decent 'bow. Ultimately we caught a couple dozen or so ~ a far cry from some 100 fish days here. It wasn't really and issue as we had a blast; this despite a Healing Waters mentor dropping right in on top of us. Hard to complain exactly as their doing strong work with vets, but yeah...

As mentioned, nothing worked early, but then the gnat worked a bit. I used a micro-caddis dry on RF Endless Wisdom, which got fish to look up but didn't fool any. Ultimately midges and mayflies and even the Perdigon took fish when flung on the Rodfather True 3. RF is a cool spot in a nice canyon with rampart cliffs, willing fish, but especially with a good friend.

 

I didn't eat out on the stream as we did depart early given the early arrival and the heat building, even @ 8Kft elevation so was famished when arriving back in COS.