| A Great Place to Hang Your Waders |
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A Great Place to Hang Your Waders by The Editors of Field & Stream Magazine The way you’ve lived your life may not get you into heaven, but you can still go to a first-rate fishing lodge, which is the next best thing. Imagine a place where you have gorgeous scenery, great food, and excellent accommodations and you catch fish! Forget that stuff about being here last week, or next week. A first-rate lodge cannot stay in business if you go away disappointed, so they make good and sure that the fish are there, and that you get into them. And for once in your wretched life, you don’t do the grunt work. Your hernia-inducing duffel bag is carried for you. Someone else does the cooking (and they will be very good at it) and the dishes. You do not clean the fish you keep, and if you choose, you do not even untangle your tippets. You can get used to this kind of living pretty damn quick. Here are seven top lodges for trout, salmon, and steelhead. They will show you not just a good time, but a memorable time. If you talk with their guests, you’ll find that many of them come back year after year after year. And there is good reason for that. What places like these offer is the very best of angling. Broadacres Ranch Creede, Colorado When Charles Nearburg, a geological engineer, first visited this ranch in south-central Colorado, it wasn’t for sale. But after he walked its 900 acres, he approached the owner with an offer. “It was a jewel,” Nearburg says. “The three kinds of water on it really got me going—big, hard-flowing water on the Rio Grande, intimate freestone water in Shallow Creek, and 11 acres of lakes.” Plus, Broadacres was rich in history. First homesteaded in 1891 by a Scottish family, the ice from its lakes was sold to the nearby Watrous Saloon in the days of Doc Holliday and Calamity Jane. Nearburg bought the ranch in 1998 and spent almost three years improving its trout habitat, constructing a new main lodge, and restoring its original log buildings, some of which date back to the 19th century. He hired fisheries biologists and hydrologists to stabilize the banks and create spawning beds and good wintering habitat. Then he established a beat system and instituted catch-and-release and flyfishing-only policies. The resulting populations of wild browns, cutbows, rainbows, and cutthroats are so robust that there’s no need for stocking. A roster of full-time guides puts anglers of all abilities onto these wild fish that reach 24 inches in the Rio Grande and average 15 to 18 inches throughout the property. Nearburg and his family focus on making visitors feel welcome and limit the number of anglers to 10 at any time. “We want people to feel like they’re on their own ranch,” he says. |
