The Black Canyon is the Gunnison at its most serious — trophy browns and rainbows in a sheer, dark gorge you reach by a brutal hike down or a raft through, under National Park rules that mean exactly what they say. Below it the Gunnison Gorge is BLM wilderness water, float-in trophy fishing of the kind people plan trips around. This is not a flatten-it-into-one-page fishery: the Park, the BLM gorge and the tailwater release each carry their own rules and risks. Flow comes off the Aspinall dams, the wading is genuinely dangerous, and the reward is some of the best big-trout water in Colorado for anglers willing to work and respect the regulations.
The Gunnison through the Black Canyon is less a river you fish than a place you descend into. The canyon is one of the steepest, narrowest, deepest in North America — walls of Precambrian gneiss and schist nearly black with age, dropping two thousand feet to a river you reach by a route with a name like the Gauging Station Trail and a warning about how much harder it is coming back up. The reward is a wild, powerful Gold Medal freestone of big browns and rainbows, plunging through boulder gardens and deep green pools in a slot where the sun reaches the water only a few hours a day. The bed is house-sized boulder and bedrock; the wading is genuinely dangerous and the crossings often impossible. This is a place for the fit, the careful and the slightly obsessed — which is to say, exactly the right kind of angler.
Wading: Dangerous boulder wading, brutal climb out
- Mixed
- Confined
- Step pool
- Pool riffle
