With Rod and Line in Colorado Waters

by Lewis B. France

AN IDLE MORNING AT GRAND LAKE.

From under the shelter of a friendly pine I look out upon a long stretch of water, two miles and more, to a sloping beach of a few yards in width, and then a belt of young trees growing back to a rugged mountain gorge. The bright green of the growth contrasts with the time-stained hues of the great piles of rock, and these grow more wild as the eye follows up the defile. Then a white patch, the length of a man’s arm and the breadth of a hand, glistens in the rays of the morning sun, here inaudible, but there a roaring waterfall a hundred feet high.

The gorge widens and drifts away to the right and left, but reaching high, with irregular outlines traced against the blue sky; the tints of brown and gray and green intermingle in bountiful confusion, but never wearisome; then, seemingly, blocking up the gorge in huge and awe-inspiring massiveness, a dome-shaped mountain, with miles of base and height far reaching above the growth of vegetation; just below its summit a bed of snow, shaped like a dove, defying the hot rays of an August sun, sparkles like a jewel on the mountain’s brow. Silent and grand, it o’ertops the beautiful lake, mirrors its rugged outlines upon the calm surface, and faintly tints the clear waters with the colors of its robes. To the right and left the nearer and lower-lying pine-covered hills reach round and down to the water’s edge.

And the lake, a gem in the mountain fastness, how calm it is! There is no melody in the pines this morning, their sighing is hushed, and the lake is still, its smooth surface only dotted here and there with the widening rings made by the leaping trout. How deep it is no man knows; how cruel it has been is the subject of many a story within the experience of the whites about its shores, and legends not a few among the red men. Seductive it is in its silent beauty, and treacherous as grand. Cold and relentless as fate, “it never surrenders its dead.” The Ute cannot be induced to approach it, and mentions its name with a shudder, while ye gentle angler commits his frail bark to its bosom with commendable prudence. There is no telling when a storm may come; the clouds are not always the harbingers of a gale; it may come when the sky is clearest, and the awkward skiffs that prevail hereabout are not the safest, even under skilful hands.

But, as the sun puts behind him the early morning hours, the dark tints of the smooth waters change, and a mile or more away a ray of silver flashes across the lake; its outer line moves my way, and as the tiny waves reach my shore, the breeze that moved them brings the sound of the waterfall. I listen to the melody it sings, always mellowed in its highest notes by the distance, and then dying gradually away as if sighing the requiem of the lost lying buried here, or as fade the last moments of a weird dream.

And, while I am dreaming, a friend of mine, to whom this ripple is a never-failing sign, pulls out into the lake. I mark the long, steady stroke, and wonder how it is that one so long out of practice can feather his oars so well, when he catches sight of me, idling away the time, and stops. But I wave him on, and watch him as he makes for a point on the western shore that we both know; where the light tint of the water changes suddenly to a hue almost black; where the depth on one side the boat is six feet and on the other may be six hundred; where the trout are large, and where we have had many a good fight. In a few minutes he has business on his hands. I can see his rod, against the dark background of the adjacent pines, bend and spring back, and bend again, and then the flash of silvery spray as the stricken trout breaks the surface in his vain effort to free his mouth from the cruel barb. But a few moments, and the mastery is awarded to human skill, and I see my friend hold up his capture for my delectation. In his enthusiasm he does not stop to consider that I have to take a great deal for granted, that I can at best see only a minute something glisten in his grasp; but he takes off his hat, waves it over his head, and I conclude he has a pounder at least. It turned out to be a little short of double that.

As I lazily wave a response of appreciation my boot-heel comes in contact with a small stone. Something in its shape leads me to pick it up; I find it scarred, and know enough to understand that it is a scratched stone from the till. And so my eyes wander from this product of nature’s great lapidary over to the waterfall and the mountain gorge, which had been his workshop, how many thousand years ago, who can tell? The beautiful waterfall is all that remains of him, but his handiwork is abundant.

Stretching along the east shore lies a great lateral moraine, even now twenty, and, in places, thirty feet high, made of great rocks, thousands of tons in weight, down to mere grains of sand. How many generations of pines have found precarious foothold there and died, may be conjectured only. But a new growth is springing up, as if it were the pleasure of the present to keep green the grand monument of the dead glacier.