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49 Trout Streams of Southern Colorado
Mark D. Williams and W. Chad McPhail,
120 pages, softcover:
$27.95.
University of New Mexico Press. 2013.

For southern Colorado anglers in search of plentiful, hard-fighting trout, getting to gold-medal waters is the easy part: there’s the Gunnison, the Frying Pan, and the Animas, to name a few. But as anyone whose ear has been pierced by an errant fly can attest, locating an unoccupied stretch of stream is often tricky. Fishermen who enjoy their privacy will find Mark Williams and W. Chad McPhail’s 49 Trout Streams of Southern Colorado a veritable atlas of solitude. Sure, this guidebook – brimming with color photos of the fish you’ll catch and the flies you’ll catch them on – includes all the big-ticket rivers, but its pages also contain less-traveled reaches: Pass Creek, Cebolla Creek, Osier Creek. These remote brooks may not always hold the biggest cutthroat, browns and rainbows, but if you’re looking for gorgeous fish in a spectacular wilderness setting, Williams and McPhail will point you to the right water.

This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline 49 trout streams of southern Colorado.

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Ben Goldfarb is a High Country News correspondent and the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.

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