The Rio Costilla up in the Valle Vidal is one of the great conservation stories of the Southern Rockies — a long, patient project to bring back the Rio Grande cutthroat to a high mountain stream where it belongs, and it has worked. This is not a numbers-and-inches fishery and shouldn't be sold as one. It's a chance to fish a wild, native trout in the country it evolved in, on a small meadow-and-willow stream high in the Carson, and to leave it the better for having been gentle with it. Where it's open, it fishes like the high small water it is: a single dry, a careful approach, a soft presentation to fish that have never been crowded. Seasons and reach closures protect the spawning and the restoration, the access is remote and weather-dependent, and barbless single-hook handling is the spirit of the place. Go for the experience and the fish, not the tally.
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