Joe's Valley

Joe’s Valley—Cottonwood Creek

Second time fishing with Kolby—keeper. The guy is super funny and a great dude to fish with. Not all fishermen are compatible, some are; he’s good to go. It was actually his idea to fish the river that flows out of Joe’s Valley Reservoir; Cottonwood Creek—not to be confused with Big or Little Cott.

Let’s get technical with today’s report. The flows from the on-line site for the forest service said Cottonwood is below 15 cfs, which if true is so low you could call it a trickle. We went anyhow. Why you ask?  Well…we wanted to see it, plus I sort of had a feeling that that info was bunk (Bunk an 80’s term that should come back, meaning bogus). I can’t even tell you why I thought that, but just go with me on it. Also I know the Huntington area fairly well, and would love to fish it, plus there is always the Price on the way back home, or one of my beloved river, Diamond Fork. So really in my mind if Joe’s turns out to be a slow “bunk” squirt of a river, fine we have plenty of options.

As you can see from the photos, the flow issue is not an issue. The problem is not flow but the lack of fish. It’s not like I am a biologist and I can look at the river once and tell you that it has not fish, but Kolby is a biologist; so combine his biological knowledge with my hawk like vision and there you go—the river doesn’t have a lot of fish.

Here is our analysis of why we think Cottonwood Creek has very few fish given its size and the quality of holes: It really starts and ends with the amount of food the fish have to eat, and there are a lot of factors contributing to the propagation of bug life. Although the water is beautiful, with this sort of out of the ordinary blue green, something is up with the water. It is very clear, but I suspect it carries sediment in it that sticks to the rocks, a sort of clay film. Perhaps that sediment negatively affects the bugs, stunting their growth. This is merely speculation, but every rock I picked up was coated in this film, and had only a few big bugs and some very small bugs.

When you look at the holes, they just know they are beyond a doubt filled with a grundle of fish, and some of them huge. Not true though shocking but not true. We hovered above the river clear up on the bank with a sort of birds eye view, unseen by the fish and we saw very few fish, and the ones that we did see were small. Like a hawk I scanned. You also have to take in to account that with holes that deep the big fish, may have hunkered in at the bottom, especially this time of year. But as the heat of the day warmed up the water these little Guppies started feeding off the top—none of them were big, and their numbers were few.

We started the day off working down river swinging soft hackle. I used a beaded one as my lead fly, and then off the bend tied a lighter, soft hackle to drift up higher in the water column. My goal was to get some weight, but still work up higher in the foam. I then tried a number of hackle variations. We had very little success, got one or two, and missed one or two but not much action. This usually works well with water like this. We would swing at a 45 degree, and kept our line very straight through the drift. We then did a little Czech Nymphing, and on the way back up river Kolby went indicator dropper, and I went hopper dropper. He had more success on the way back. But for the most part we should have a least had more action simply due to the variation in our two techniques.

Here’s my conclusion and judgment of Cottonwood Creek. Now keep in mind it is not in peak season, and this is one afternoon on the river, so that should limit to some degree my opinion and comments of it. But here it is none the less: the flows are not managed to maximize the life of fish on that river, but we both guessed that it is managed more with farming in mind. With inconsistent flows, that also means inconsistent water temps; and we all know that makes life tough on the fish, limiting their growth and existance. I really suspect that something in the soil is negatively impacting the growth of the bug life. Again its simple if there are a lot of bugs and they are plentiful then the fish have a lot to eat; and if they have a lot to eat…well.   

Even though there are not a lot of fish in Cottonwood, it is still a wonderful river. It has a lot of out of this world beautiful holes riffles and runs. As I mentioned before the water color is beautiful. The canyon is filled with huge boulders on the banks and in the river, really adding a dramatic look to it, as well as creating those big deep holes. The entire river is easy to access, without a lot of overgrowth on the banks. If you are a local it would be fun to fish now and then. But there is a reason you don’t hear guys talk about it, or you don’t hear the fishing guides whisper about it, because I think I’ve mentioned this once or twice: it doesn’t have a lot of fish in it.