Every spring, I get the urge to make a premature fishing trip to the mountains. The snow has held them long enough; the fish are still up there, why shouldn’t I try to catch them? That year was no different, so I went. I could smell the wet pine trees from inside the cabin of my old Subaru as I trundled up the 4×4 trail, and I imagined the music of snowmelt raining from a thousand evergreen boughs. It almost drew my mind away from the creaking suspension and the engine-temp gauge creeping steadily towards the red line as I gained elevation. Rounding a bend in the trail, I stopped abruptly — the trail was blocked by a waist-high snowbank. A pair of deep trenches cut through it, veering downhill and to the right. At their terminus, a red Dodge Ram lay at rest on its flank, abandoned. This seemed as good a place to stop as any.
I continued up the trail another mile on foot until I reached my destination, a yawning subalpine meadow formed by the breaching of an old reservoir. A shimmering brook meandered through the wet grasses, pocked by the annular ripples of rising trout. Fat caddisflies fluttered from streamside sedges, and twisting plumes of midges swarmed above thickets of warming willow. Meltwater rivulets plunged into the meadow from the high-sided basin, filtering through the thick floodplain vegetation and saturating the valley floor. But I was not just here to observe; this mission was to be a proof-of-concept for a project that would span the next three years and define a chapter in my flyfishing journey.
I carried with me a small acrylic opentopped container, about half the size of a shoe box. I placed it on a low bank and filled it with frigid stream water. I tied on a trusty elk-hair caddis and started casting, and in no time I had brought several fish to the net. The first few, brook trout, were small and less colorful than I wanted. I needed a standout specimen for this task. The third fish was long and broad, with incredible contrast on its dorsal markings and a brilliant red belly. This one would do. Into the water-filled box it went, thrashing for a few moments before settling in with remarkable poise.
Now I arrived at the crux of the mission. My concept was simple, to create portraits of every species of trout found in Colorado using this acrylic box to temporarily bring the fish out of the river and onto the overbanks, creating a visual link between riparian habitats and the fisheries they support. This fish was to be the first. I did not yet know how vast the gulf between idea and execution would prove to be for this project, but as I crouched there on the bank with this brookie, camera in hand, and captured my first Troutbox images, I sensed that this fish had placed me on a new path that I had to follow.
I next set my sights on Colorado’s native cutthroat species. Referencing Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) news bulletins and stocking reports, I quickly notched the Colorado river cutthroat and our state fish the greenback cutthroat. Both came from idyllic tumbling freestone streams in high, rugged basins, just the sort of places one might expect to find healthy populations of native trout. As I prepared to chase the final fish of the trio, the Rio Grande cutthroat, my concept of what constitutes perfect habitat for these sensitive and particular fish began to shift and crumble. Inhabiting the relatively warm and low elevation headwater basins of their namesake river, these fish rely even more on intact, robust riparian habitat to thrive. As I was to learn, this entails a level of natural complexity that even now strikes me as counterintuitive.
I took a long weekend trip to a southern crevice of the San Luis Valley, turning off the highway and making my way up a sandy Forest Service road. Temps remained high as I climbed through the sagebrush and mountain mahogany. The sun was harsh on the desert rock of the canyon walls. Beside the road snaked a stream that looked nothing like the picturesque mountain brooks I was familiar with; the waterway was unbelievably chaotic and barely even identifiable as a river. Silt bars dressed in fresh green shoots stretched along the banks, telling the story of a highly mobile channel incessantly pushed back and forth across the floodplain by obstacles and high flows. In some places, the water completely disappeared under house-sized heaps of racked-up wood, only to reappear as a pond held back by sprawling beaver dams. Willows twice the height of a person overhung the channel from all sides, finding a footing in debris piles and fortifying them further. This was a marsh. Could there really be trout in here?
There were. The water was stained with willow tannin, but beneath the riffles, brilliant forms swam, blazing like seams of incandescent coal. Under the outfall of a large beaver dam, fish slithered and prowled in the turbulent murk. I floated my caddis over a foamy seam, and in an instant it was engulfed by a rising trout. The cold, oxygen-rich flow gave him great strength, and my 3-weight rod bent over in the tussle. Even after landing the fish and sliding him into Troutbox, he swirled and splashed against the acrylic as I prepared my photography gear. Despite the swampy, opaque water and apparent lack of habitat connectivity along the channel, these were some of the most vivacious fish I had yet encountered. His photoshoot completed, I tenderly lifted him from the container and returned him to the stream. As he thrust himself from my hand, a powerful slap of his tail left me with a face full of frigid beaver-pond water.
Up until this point, two of Colorado’s most notable trout species had been conspicuously absent from Troutbox: browns and rainbows. Thankfully, I live near one of the Front Range’s premier fisheries for these species. Tumbling from the foothills, South Boulder Creek alights upon the prairie at the mouth of Eldorado Canyon, embraced by willow-cottonwood galleries. It curls around the southeast corner of Boulder before joining mainstem Boulder Creek and continues across the shortgrass until it meets the South Platte. Along its length, agricultural ditches siphon lifegiving water to irrigate crops and cattle. It conveys water to treatment plants, serving Boulder as well as several adjacent municipalities. High in the foothills, a large reservoir holds back the creek and provides critical flow control to ensure water is available year-round for its many uses in this community.
For aquatic life in the stream, this arrangement isn’t quite so rosy. The intense manipulation can at times result in extreme or unnatural flow conditions: During the winter months, the creek may carry as little as 1 cubic feet per second in some reaches, icing out streambed invertebrates and trapping fish in isolated pockets. Ditch diversion structures span the channel, blocking fish passage and obstructing spawning access. These challenges have resulted in a noticeable impact to the fishery since I have lived here.
Nevertheless, the fish persist. Despite functioning more as a natural-looking canal than an actual river along much of its length, it is filled with channel complexity and rich in insect life. The trout here are survivors. Braving low flows and disconnected habitat, they remain relatively abundant and both of my target species can be found from their headwaters to beyond the mouth of Eldorado. I found no shortage of willing subjects among my outings to the creek, checking nice browns and rainbows into Troutbox among the granite freestones and beneath the shade of enormous cottonwoods.
The remaining species came and went: grayling from the deep hypothermia-inducing lakes of Cameron Pass, stunning maroon hybrid cutthroat from some of the highest fishable lakes in the state, and even a golden trout from a never-to-berevealed alpine lake suitably bedecked in a halo of aspen sunflowers. It was the final species on my list, and in that moment the realization that I had finished this project settled on me uncomfortably. This had been my primary motivation to fish for three whole years; where did I go from here? Releasing the golden back to the lake somehow felt more melancholy than satisfying.
After three years of active duty, Troutbox now bears the scars of its service. The acrylic is pocked by the gravel of a dozen rivers, scratched by narrowly-avoided tumbles on slick boulders, clouded by hours of exposure in the harsh mountain sun. These blemishes tell stories, not just of my adventures in deep canyons and alpine meadows, but of the fish themselves. Stories of fragility in unsullied landscapes, of abundance in the face of hardship and of a hundred marvelous, quiet places these fish call home.
When I pulled Troutbox from my closet this spring for its first jaunt to the river, I saw the acrylic’s marred panels and felt a swelling excitement to wet a line. There are fresh subjects to capture, new riffles and pools to plumb, and even one or two individual fish I’d like to meet again. This project has only just begun, and I can’t wait to put a few more dings on Troutbox.
Alex Bauch is an author and photographer. This article is copyrighted by the author
This story is from the 2026 Colorado Outdoors Fishing Guide. View the table of contents.
The Colorado Outdoors Fishing Guide is a special annual edition of Colorado Outdoors magazine.
