- Mike Gnatkowski
Many a fly fishers has reacted with distain when he found that the fish pulling on the end of his line
turned out to be a whitefish. But the truth is that something pulling on your line is far better than nothing and
whitefish put up a pretty good account of themselves. They’re not bad eating either and are wonderful in the
smoker.
The upper Colorado River hosts a huge run of whitefish each fall. “The only two native salmonids in Colorado are
the cutthroat trout and the whitefish,” said CPW Aquatic Biologist Jon Ewert. “Ironically though, whitefish are not
native to the Colorado River. Whitefish are native to the Yampa and White river basins, but they were planted in
the Roaring Fork early in the 1900’s near Glenwood Springs and then spread into the Colorado River.”
Ewert said that another separate population of whitefish exists upstream of State Bridge. “We don’t really know
how whitefish got into the Colorado River above State Bridge, but it was in the last 30 years,” stated Ewert. One
theory is that whitefish that thrive in Yampa River reservoirs migrated down an irrigation ditch that lead into
Egeria Creek and eventually into the Colorado River.