Costilla Creek

Everybody up here calls it the Rio Costilla, and what makes it worth the long dirt-road drive isn't the size of the fish — it's what they are. Costilla Creek below the reservoir holds one of the last stronghold populations of pure Rio Grande cutthroat, New Mexico's state fish and the only trout native to the Rio Grande drainage. The creek is the centerpiece of the Rio Costilla Native Fish Restoration Project, which cleared roughly 120 miles of stream and a string of high lakes of non-natives and put the cutthroat back where they belong. If you want to catch this fish on a dry, in water that looks like a smaller version of a Montana spring creek, at 9,000 feet in the aspen and open parks of the Valle Vidal, this is the place to do it.

It fishes easy and it fishes small. Below the dam the creek meanders through high meadow — undercut grassy banks, quiet pools, riffles, and beaver ponds — and the cutthroat are famously willing. Fish average 8 to 12 inches with the occasional 14-incher, and they're more eager than smart; this is dry-dropper and hopper water for a 2- to 4-weight, 7-to-8-foot rod, 9-to-12-foot leaders, and 5X-6X in gin-clear flows. The signature game is summer terrestrials: grasshoppers, ants, and beetles blown into the open meadows bring cutthroat up hard through July and August. Because the Valle Vidal reach is a tailwater below privately held Costilla Reservoir on Vermejo Park Ranch, releases are dam-controlled — they tend to run low Friday through Sunday and higher Monday through Thursday, so midweek is genuinely better fishing, not just less crowded.

The catch is access and timing, and it's a real one. The Valle Vidal stretch is closed January 1 through June 30 to protect the spring cutthroat spawn and doesn't open until July 1, running through December 31 — in practice it fishes best July through September before snow closes the roads. The last miles in are unpaved Forest Service road that turns to soup when it's wet, there are no services once you're in, and the lower five miles of good meadow water sit inside Rio Costilla Park, a private co-op (RCCLA) that charges a small day-use fee on top of your state license. Down across the Colorado line near Garcia the creek is so heavily diverted for irrigation that the gauge routinely reads zero; the fishable water is the New Mexico meadow reaches, not the dewatered lower end.