Day 1 in the Black Canyon.
I was blown away by the beauty of the cliffs, the raging water, the insect life, and the opportunities for fishing. We started out with a dry/dropper rig but quickly turned to the dark side and started fishing with nymphs. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. We caught some beautiful fish as we baked in the sun relieved only by wet wading in the river.
We lost ourselves in the day as we focused on fishing and way too quickly found ourselves at our campsite for the evening.
Served at a table with chairs (did I say I was camping?) our gourmet dinner crowned a perfect day. After a few beers and a bottle of wine, bedtime came early. We stargazed for a bit in wonder of the heavens before we dozed off. Sometime in the middle of the night we heard the rumble of thunder in the distance. The storm moved in rapidly and before I could say “rainbow trout,” Angus and Josh were covering our tent with the tarp – and good thing they did!
It rained so hard that the river flow climbed from 550 cfs to 2000 cfs in a matter of hours. When we awoke the next morning, on either side of our tent were deep gashes in the soaked, sandy soil leading down to the river.
We didn’t think too much about the effect the storm would have on the river and instead settled in to our coffee and full spread breakfast. As it turned out, the storm caused a flash flood down lower in the river and although we had a good morning of fishing, the water turned a dark green in the afternoon and nothing that we cast seemed to make a difference – the fish were down.
Our rafting partners from the first night – Pat and Kim Dorsey left us behind as we were to spend one more night on the river.
