The Boulder Mountains...Thats More Like It!

If you've read my previous post on the Boulder Mountains, then you know it wasn't the best fishing experience of my life. I had such high expectations of landing the big trout that the area is known for and came away a little disappointed. Although I learned better fly fishing skills on that trip, I wasn't able to catch the big one so to speak. Well, I regrouped, decided to take my spinning rod this time and headed back down with my older brother Jason. We arrived late, set up camp and got a few hours of sleep before we headed out. Jason and I had higher expectations on this trip and it just felt like it was going to be a good day of fishing.

The first lake we hit was one that I fished the last time I was down. I knew that it held huge brook trout and it was just a matter of hooking up with one. My brother brought his fly rod and fished the way I was taught on my first trip. He is far superior to me with a fly rod and had a lot more success hooking into fish than I did when I was down a month earlier. He hooked into several brookies in the 16" range. I tried fly fishing the first two hours with a single bite and decided it was time to stop messing around. I went back to shore set up my spinning rod with one of my favorite jigs and within no time had a fish on! It was like that the rest of the day. I landed 12 brook trout with my biggest going 18 inches and just a complete toad. These brookies are footballs in this lake and put up a really good fight. I hooked one 16" fish that had an 11" girth!

The next day we made our way to two other lakes but instead of going after brook trout, we were targeting tiger trout (hybrid between a brook trout and brown trout) and splake (hybrid between a brook trout and lake trout). We first went to a small lake that is known for monster tiger trout that you can sight fish for. Boy did we see some absolute hogs! The only problem was that they didn't want to take anything we were throwing. we fished for the first half of the day with no luck. there were a few other fisherman on the lake that were having the same success we were. I was able to land 2 tigers the last hour we were there and one of them was well worth the wait! It measured out to 22" and is the biggest Tiger I've ever landed. The crazy thing is that there was a tiger in that lake that we saw that made the one I caught look small and I'm not kidding. I believe the Utah state record tiger is swimming in that lake. We had some lunch and headed down to our final lake of the trip. I started fishing an inlet while my brother made his way around the lake. No sooner did he make it over to where he wanted to be that he told me to come over. I made it over and he was laughing to himself just telling me to look into the water. I couldn't believe what I saw! there where fish everywhere! It looked like the bottom of the lake was moving. We quickly cast in and both of us had fish on. It was really fast fishing. There were tigers, spake and colorado cutthroat trout and we caught all three species. It was a really good trip for us. Jason caught three new species that he had never caught before and I caught my personal best for 3 species. The biggest of this lake was a splake that took my jig off the bottom. when I got him in I couldn't believe how fat it was. The fish was wider than my hand from the tip of my fingers to my wrist! The only bad thing about this trip was we were only there for 2 days. Needless to say, we are already planning a longer trip for next year! This trip ranks among the best fishing trips I've ever had.

18" Brook Trout

16" Brook Trout

22" Tiger Trout

Check out the patterns!

Check out the colors!

Spake on the fly...

All day long!

21" Splake. What a hogzilla!

16" Colorado Cutthroat Trout