David Gerth

Help me spread the word about something big happening in the Colorado public land world, especially you fly fishermen. The Lower Blue River is one of the best places to float the river on planet earth. If you’ve never done it, please make it a point to get out there, I don’t care that I’m blowing up my favorite spot, I like it when people get out and enjoy the resource. The scenery is gorgeous and the bite is out of this world. It’ll be the best day of fishing in your life and it’s a public river (for now). There’s an eccentric billionaire that owns the 25k acre Blue Valley Ranch (Paul Tudor Jones), who has been painstakingly stocking his private stretch of the the Lower Blue river with what are called ‘triploid’ trout, genetically bred to not reproduce and expend all their energy getting huge. This area’s actually nicknamed “Jurassic park” by locals because the trout there are absolute monsters. He’s also put millions of dollars worth of boulders and manmade eddies to grow big, fighting trout (honestly, respect). Right before he comes into town, his ranch managers stop artificially feeding the resident trout so they’re hungry and he has a great bite. In recent years, he asked the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to do a land swap of nice public areas with crappy private areas. They agreed (another story for another time). Jones said that even though what we got was crappier, he’d make improvements to the put-in and take-out locations to float the river, so public access would improve. Well, fast forward to today, he’s reneging on his part of the deal, and saying actually there’s too many people on ‘his’ river. We are negatively impacting his private fishery! He set up a cardboard cut out NGO (which he pays for) that’s campaigning to put a day permit system in place to aggressively keep you off this public river. And of course, no access improvements promised in the land swaps have been made. This is about to blow up the conservation/public land/access world and I’m just asking that you make yourself aware of it, and when we get the chance, and I’ll let you know, make public comment on how losing access and privatizing this marvelous river for Mr. Jones’ private use is pure evil. You might say, “I don’t live in Colorado so what does it matter.” This is a test case, there’s a lot of people watching what happens here who’d like to make their own private river just like Jones. It’s beginning on the Lower Blue but next stop might be your favorite river. If you want to do more, Trout Unlimited is gearing up to possibly protect public access by any means necessary, they’re a very reliable partner. A gift of membership to yourself or your family will put you on the front lines of the Lower Blue access fight.

Fernando Mendoza's speech after winning the Heisman 👏