Clear Creek Fly Fishing September 30, 2023

Temperature: high 70's
Flows: ~100 cfs
Fish Landed: 4

Summary

I got a text from my buddy Art on Friday asking if I could fish over the weekend. I quickly checked the kids sports calendar and lucky for me, the last game ended around 12:30pm leaving me a whole afternoon to fish. To make things even better, I was already going to be in Arvada cutting down the trip time to reach our destination, Clear Creek Canyon. Clear Creek is a great local fishery about 45 minutes from Denver and Boulder. There are ample pull of spots along highway 6 from Golden, west through the canyon, until you reach I-70. While the river is much longer than this strech we decided to focus on the areas in the canyon.

Traffic today was pretty miserable. Being September, the beautiful fall colors are in full effect in the high country and it seemed like everyone in the Denver metro area was trying to make their way up I-70 or through the canyon. After slowly creeping west through the canyon we arrived at our destination roughly around 2pm. There were a lot of pull-offs full of cars but we found an empty one and after looking over the cliff side we founds some nice pools and a relatively easy route down to the river.

With our rigs set up we were ready to go. Art was using a hopper dropper set up and I was torn between my going the hopper dropper route with my Douglas LRS 5wt 9'6" or my euro nymping set up with my 4wt 10’Moonshine Epiphany . Ultimately, I decided to stick to the euro rig since Art was doing the hopper dropper and I thought it’d be good to have a variety today. It was time to hop in the river. Clear Creek is notoriously slippery so I was thankful to have my Patagonia Foot Tractors on today.

Within about 10 minutes, I landed a small (about 6") brown trout using a #16 tungesten bead duracell as my lead fly trailed by a #22 rainbow warrior. Not long after I had another fish on and in the net. Art also had some luck on his hopper dropper rig. After a couple of hours on the river we called it and I ended the day with 4 fish in the net.

I love Clear Creek for it’s close proximity to Denver & Boulder. The fish in this stretch of water aren’t going to be trophy size trout like you’ll find in other rivers around the state but the chances are good you’ll net something.

Products used

Duracell Fly Brown Trout