Angling 101 for beginners casting into mile high rivers, lakes

By Eric Peterson

Andre Egli, an angler education coordinator at Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW), worked in the film industry in California before switching careers nearly a decade ago.

“I’ve been fishing my whole life,” Egli said. “My most enjoyable time out there was long weekends when I could run up to the Sierra Nevada and go fly fishing.” He eventually moved on from the film industry and decided, “I’d much rather be in the mountains.”

Egli subsequently moved to Colorado and joined CPW as a seasonal hunting instructor before moving into educating anglers on a statewide basis. “I parlayed my love of fishing into a full-time job,” he laughed.

A big part of the job is coordinating fly fishing and tying clinics around the state. “We have park rangers, as well as volunteers and district wildlife managers that do fly fishing clinics,” Egli said.

Spring brings the free Fly Fishing 101 clinics for beginners to a number of state parks, including Chatfield, Staunton, Barr Lake and Mueller. In the fall, once the snowmelt has passed and it’s safer to wade in the rivers, CPW hosts Fly Fishing 201 clinics, “where we go on water and we get into aquatic entomology and reading the river and mending your line and stuff like that,” Egli said.

The 101 classes for 2025 will begin in the spring and continue through the summer. The 101 clinics typically attract about 20 participants, and then graduates are invited to the 201 clinics. Thousands of people have gone through the programs.

Egli said the barriers to trying out fly fishing are mostly mental. “I think there’s this misconception that fly fishing is really, really hard and super complicated, and that’s kind of perpetuated just by the industry itself,” he explained. “Just the way all of the gear is set up can be very confusing for newbies.”

But that’s a bit of a smokescreen: “The art of the cast isn’t that hard to grasp,” he said. “I think it’s just this preconceived notion that fly fishing is harder than spin casting. There’s nuance to it, and it’s a new way to cast, but it’s not that tricky, as long as you are taught by the right person.”

Another common preconception involves the cost of the gear. “When you’re just starting out, if you’ve never cast a fly rod before, you will not notice the difference between a $100 combo that you can get at Cabela’s and a $1,000 Sage rod,” Egli said.

Beginners can easily hone their skills close to home. “We get a little trout-centric in Colorado, and people think for fly fishing, you have to be on this beautiful mountain stream,” Egli said. “But what I tell people is bluegill and sunfish eat the same bugs that trout eat, and they’re in every little local pond along the Front Range.”

Bluegill and sunfish “are very eager to bite, they’re a lot of fun, they jump, they fight pretty good,” he continued. “So if you’re just learning, you don’t have to drive a half an hour up into the mountains. If you have a little pond somewhere near where you live, you can try out your fly fishing skills on those bluegill.”

Egli also pointed to the Colorado Fishing Atlas on the CPW website as a great resource. “You can just click on whatever is closest to you, and it’ll tell you the types of fish that are in that body of water, if it’s stocked, if it’s not stocked, how much pressure it gets,” he said. “If you’ve never caught a grayling, it can just show the bodies of water that have grayling in it, or show the bodies of water that have a golden trout in it, or whatever. And you can go to those bodies of water, then catch that elusive fish that you want to check off your bucket list.”