Glen Canyon — Home of Trophy Trout

It was fish-caused embarrassment. And an enlightenment. Tommy Carr and I were casting from a rocky island in the middle of the Colorado River just below the 5,370,000 cubic yards of concrete known as Glen Canyon Dam. Looking southwesterly, rustcolored Navajo sandstone walls soared 800 feet to a crooked turquoise sky. Sandbar willows and purple-fringed tamerisk, previously uprooted by raging flood waters, had now gained a foothold along the banks of the controlled river.

Where once muddy torrents tumbled, a bright, clear stream sparkled in the spring-morning sunlight. It was a haunting, vertical panorama. An aggregate of aesthetics you could feel.

Our island measured about 60 feet long and was but a few yards wide. Tommy and I rotated around it, and the fishing was no less than sensational. I kept no score for Tommy, but more than 40 rainbow trout had taken my lure in a couple of hours. They averaged between 10 and 14 inches, and the latter is a keeper by any fish-eater's standard and a fine fighter as well. All of mine, however, were released.

With this kind of prosperity any fisherman can get a little cocky. When I saw yet another rainbow rush my lure, I tried an experiment, retrieving faster than the fish could swim. No way. The fish struck, and its speed of attack carried it into the shallows at my feet. I was flabbergasted at its more than 20 inch length.

I lost my cool; I tripped and fell to my knees, trying to grab it. At the same time, somehow, the fish leaped into the air and for an instant seemed suspended just a few inches from my face. Still off balance and trying not to fall completely into the river, I made a wild grab for this wearer of shimmering silver and red scales. And missed. It touched down. The line snapped. The fish was gone. I was kneeling in the water like I was praying, and Tommy, witness to it all, was slack-jawed. “I saw it, but I don't believe it,” he said. “Tommy,” I said, “something great is happening here.” Great? A watered-down word considering the moods and magic of Glen Canyon and totalling in what has happened to its trout fishing. Here is a place that honestly deserves the description of unique. Yet, it remains practically unknown.

The Glen Canyon rainbow trout story started with the impounding of Lake Powell. As is the trend in modern times, all waters capable of supporting gamefish are eagerly sought after by fish and wildlife agencies. So, in 1963, when the gates of Glen Canyon Dam clanged shut, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Arizona Game and Fish Department (AG&F) hurried to stock rainbow trout in the tailwaters. As a writer-photographer by trade and a fisherman by peculiarity, I applied for and got a job with the AG&F in 1964. And so began a 16-year span of close association with Glen Canyon and its rainbow trout.

About two years after the original trout plants, I fished above the Paria Rapids near the mouth of Glen Canyon, along with some other AG&F personnel. Jim Bruce, then coldwater fisheries supervisor for the department, told us the fishing there was “too good.” Field men reported that Glen Canyon fishermen were catching two and one-half to three fish per hour. The national managed fishery standard is one fish per two hours, averaged between the best fishermen and the worst.

Bruce was wrong.

According to our rod and reel research, the hourly average was better than ten fish. Biologist Joe Stone, assigned to study Glen Canyon rainbows, said that in two years some of the 10-inch fish from the first plant had grown to 23 inches. The reason being that in Arizona the rainbows had a longer growing season than in troutassociated states such as Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. Water temperatures stayed warmer longer and subsequently fish were active and feeding longer. (With river degrees constantly in the trout's near-optimum low 50s, the fish now feed year-round.) None of the rainbows we caught exceeded 14 inches, but the experience was enough to influence me to buy a fishing boat to explore the upriver mysteries within Glen Canyon itself. Once around the first bend above Lees Ferry, the jumping-off place for Grand Canyon river-runners as well as Glen Canyon trout fishermen, civilization is shut out. An inner-sanctum that echos a strong siren's call.

Glen Canyon was named by Major John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran and scientist who explored, mapped, and intimately documented the canyons of the Colorado River; he also had a brilliance for descriptive appellations. Most of Glen Canyon, as he knew it, lies in the melancholy depths of Lake Powell; slightly less than 15 miles remain. Even preoccupied, diehard trout-men give testimony sometimes vocal, often silent, to the mesmerism of Glen Canyon, perhaps identifying with Powell - a sense of discovery is always there. I have watched these men stand with arms hanging limply at their sides, entranced.

On my first trip, Glen Canyon hooked me, and I hooked a 15-inch rainbow on the first cast. It made several two-foot-high jumps and was gone. But before I could finish the retrieve, a second trout of the same size took the lure. That uncommon event became common in Glen Canyon. My biggest of the day measured 181/2 inches long and had more muscles for its size than any trout I could remember catching, or even seeing before. Such a rainbow three feet in the air, casting diamonds of reflected sunlight, will bring oooh's and aaah's even from folk who couldn't care less about fishing.In December, 1966, I resigned my AG&F position and spent most of the following spring and summer fishing for Glen Canyon rainbows. Occasionally I hosted friends and acquaintances, and always to the man, woman or child, they were infected with the canyon's overall vibes. The often incredible fishing sharpened my fishing senses, and I could practically guarantee a trout from specific riffles, runs, and pools. Dick Hoffman, a former national park ranger at Glen Canyon (Glen Canyon is part of the Glen Canyon Recreational Area and administered by the National Park Service) and an avid fisherman through daily association, became so proficient at prediction he picked up coffeemoney making bets. “I've a dollar that says there's a 14-incher behind that boulder just off the bank,” he'd say. No fisherman with any confidence at all could pass up that one; he wins either way.

Some of the various and sundry fishing adventures I've experienced in Glen Canyon include the time when netting one good fish, a second feverishly tried to steal my lure from the first and nearly ran into my net, too; days when I got a fish or a strike 10 trys consecu-tively before drawing a blank; and trolling and getting only a few yards before catching a fish.One of the few times fishing was off, a thunderstorm you have not heard a thunderstorm until you've experi-enced the Glen Canyon variety turned it on. Jack Qualman and I were standing on a rock bar like drowned rats hooking sassy rainbows every few minutes (and marveling at the dozen storm-born 800-foot-high waterfalls cascading from the rim). Another time, I was on foot along the west bank near the dam, "where the big ones were", and returned to our boat anchorage with nothing larger than a 14-incher to find my wife, Vicki, landing a 22-inch lunker.

But the most memorable event occurred when a stout trout shook the hook on the second jump and then on the third leaped into the boat and nearly into my lap.

Then, dramatically and drastically, the vast populations of Glen Canyon rainbow trout diminished. Those days of standing in one place and beaching or boating 40 fish exist only in memories.

But now the fishing is even better. Tens of thousands of fishermen have never caught a rainbow trout weighing five pounds or more. Here, suddenly, at Glen Canyon, novice and expert alike began landing not only five-pounders regularly but much bigger examples, too. Add a stroke of luck and a dream could be turned into a 15-pound-plus reality. Quality had replaced quantity. From a numbers game to a size game.

But something perhaps even more interesting has occurred to the Glen Canyon trout. In October, a couple of years ago, Gene Henry, Steve Wurtz, and I got prime illustrations.

The fishing was off. We made dozens of casts each without the slightest bump from a half-curious trout. Persistence paid off, though, and we picked up a few oneand two-pounders. About ten miles upriver, at the head of a riffle, I seduced a three and one-half pound rainbow that did more acrobatics than an ag-wagon dusting a small field bordered on every side with mature cottonwoods. In a pool at the tail-end of the riffle, Gene connected with an incredibly colored sixpound, four-ounce fish. A couple of hours later, in sight of the dam, Gene zapped a ten-pounder. Though all were rainbow trout, no two of the fish looked exactly alike.

It's known that rainbows will hybridize with other trout species and gain or lose characteristics accordingly, and that turbidity of water influences trout color. But in Glen Canyon neither is the case, and the phenomenon is turning the heads of fisheries biologists. Here one fish may look like a steelhead, an ocean-going rainbow trout, and the next remind you of an arctic char. And in between, there may be a wide range of subtle and not-so-subtle differences.

Al Essbach, AG&F fisheries chief and an expert fisherman as well, explained, "Behind it all is a freshwater shrimp." That simple? Not so much the shrimp itself, but the abundance of them. Essbach said essentially that Glen Canyon rainbows could be the best fed trout in the U. S. Maybe anywhere and everywhere! The crustacean is loaded with nutrients and carotenoids. The first puts weight and size on fish, the second gives color inside and out. The meat of Glen Canyon rainbows is pink and the scales range from almost pure silver, through the oranges to deep, rich reds. Each we caught was an "original." You show me a Glen Canyon trout that isn't elegant, and I'll show you one dumb fish. Interestingly, no one seems to know where the shrimp came from. Essbach theorizes that a few could have beenin the Colorado River even in pre-dam days, but perhaps more logically they came from the clear side streams in Marble and Grand canyons. The shrimp explosion could have been triggered by the Bureau of Reclamation-indirectly-through the construction of Glen Canyon Dam and the resultant clearing of the Colorado.

Until the trophy fish of Glen Canyon appeared, the limit was 10 per day and 10 in possession. Because some fishermen failed to recognize the true values of Glen Canyon fishing, they would kill and take home limits that totaled 50-75 pounds - even more. Under pressure of ascetically minded sportsmen, the AG&F reduced the legal take to four trout and between the lines proclaimed Glen Canyon a trophy trout fishery. A first in Arizona. Still, with a little imagination in relation to those 15-pound fish, that could mean a 60-pound stringer.

Some anglers pushed for declaring Glen Canyon a lure and fly only fishery, which most always permits easy release of fish and their survival; bait fishermen usually wait until fish swallow the hook and this practically guarantees death. However, a trout or two would be allowed for dinner or for a prize mount. As we become more conscious of the earth and its creatures, we find fewer and fewer places like Glen Canyon. Here you can assimilate nourishment so necessary for the human spirit. With a fishing rod... or without.