Has this ever happened to you?  You’re out on the water and swat a mosquito off the back of your neck, then you reach for the bug dope in your pocket only to find it’s not there?  Now imagine that instead of being half a mile from the truck, you’re twelve miles back in the Rockies and not planning to come out for five days.  This changes the scenario from irritating to potentially life threatening, especially if instead of bug dope you forgot a stove or water purifier (or tent poles --I speak from experience).

  

One of the most valuable things I use to plan my trips is a checklist.  I have refined mine over the years, and now have several specialized lists, depending on what I'm going to do --float trip, Alaska fly out, horseback pack-in, or international trip.  You will find that once you start developing your checklists, you’ll add or drop items after you return from your trips, and each time you go the planning will become easier. 

  

Choosing your destination

Deciding on where you’re going requires you to consider the following:

  

-          What’s my budget?

-          Do I have enough time to enjoy myself?

-          Will I need any specialized gear or support services?

-          How am I going to get in and out?

-          Who else is going with me?

  

If the destination is in an area you don’t know and you can’t find any good guidebooks covering the area, you'll want to call local guides and outfitters for more information.  For example, if you and a couple of your buddies are considering going ten miles into a Wilderness area to fish for three or four days, the guide may give you a variety of options, such as the following:

  

  

-          Hike in and out, but have your gear packed in for you

-          Ride in with your gear, but hike out

-          Ride in and out with your gear

-          Have a guide join you for several days

Additionally, your guide or outfitter may be able to supply you with camping equipment, food, and beverages.

  

Acclimating to High Elevation:

Most places in the Rockies are at much higher elevation than the rest of the country.  A variety of steps are helpful to ensure you get used to the elevation gain quickly.  Getting some exercise before you come out will help, and will also make your hikes more enjoyable.  If you have high blood pressure, asthma or a heart condition, check with your family doctor before you do an extended trip and make sure you bring along any medication you need.  If possible, you should plan to spend at least a day getting used to the elevation.  Also, stay well-hydrated and not drink alcohol.  Hydration is especially important.  Most areas in the country have much higher humidity than the Rockies, on average, so it is necessary to drink much more water than you otherwise might.  Several gallons a day is not unreasonable when it's hot and you're outside. 

  

Altitude sickness is another problem to be aware of.  If you get to camp and you have a headache that won’t go away, especially with nausea, go back down the trail to a lower elevation until you feel better.  If in doubt, head for the trail head.  You don’t have to be at 14,000 feet to suffer from the ailment.

  

What to bring

Let's say you decide you’re going to go cheap; you and your buddies are going to tough it out and hike in.  If you’re all in good shape and acclimated to the elevation, you should be able to carry between 45 and 65 pound packs.  Once you lay out all your gear and make sure you didn’t miss anything, pack it up and weigh it.  This is your first reality check, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly the weight adds up.  Because weight adds up quickly, you'll want to take steps to minimize the weight you carry as much as possible.  Click Here to download one of my checklists

 

Food:  Sit down with your buddies and decide what you normally eat on camping trips.  If you are hiking, you may want to go with freeze-dried meals, dried pastas and cereals, crackers, and other items that don’t have a lot of water in them.  If you are floating, flying or riding horseback to your destination, weight is much less an issue.  I would recommend leaving bacon at home.  It smells great when it’s cooking, but the smell sticks to tents and clothing, and the grease is difficult to dispose of; it also attracts a wide variety of carnivores that do bad things to your coolers.

  

If you’re using horses, rafts or aircraft, and going into areas with bears, you may want to consider using metal panniers to house some of your food.  Boxes such as this one allow you to keep your food safe in a cooler.  The alternative is hanging food between two trees, which is pretty hard to do with a 50 pound cooler. 

  

Camping Gear:    Selecting the right sleeping bag is getting harder due to all the choices.  Down bags are light and compact, but if they get wet they are useless.  The new synthetic bags filled with Primaloft, PolarGuard or Hollofil all work well and can be quickly dried even when totally soaked.  When you look at bags, compare their cold ratings, weights, and stuffed sizes.  For the latter two statistics, the smaller and lighter, the better.  Regarding cold ratings, a twenty-degree bag will be warm enough most of the time during summer in the Rockies. 

For me, there is one word I want to describe my tents  --bombproof.  Most trips won’t require your tent to stand up to 80 mph winds and torrential downpours, but these things do happen.  For your selection criteria, consider the following:

-          weight  vs roominess

-          water and wind resistance

-          cost

  

If you’re going to be in crummy weather, a larger tent is really nice.  I prefer to have at least one big tent in camp so we can get out of the weather and play cards or read, but if you’re hiking in, the weight makes this impossible.

  

Your choice in camp stoves also takes some planning.  If you’re flying instead of driving to your destination, and consider a propane stove.  Bring your stove and buy fuel at your destination.  On horseback trips we use two to three burner Coleman stoves and lanterns, and on our hiking trips we use lighter and more compact MSR mountaineering white gas stoves and candle lanterns or headlamps.

  

Navigation:  The bare minimum anytime you leave the road system is a 1:24,000 USGS topographic map and compass, which you know how to use.  The same goes for your GPS (bring two sets of batteries).  If you use a CD-ROM mapping program, print out maps on “adventure paper."  This paper is waterproof and tear resistant.

  

Water Purifier:  You could drink straight from a lake or stream during your entire trip without getting sick, or you might do it once and get a case of Giardia that makes you so sick you need a med-evac.  For this reason, purifying your drinking and dish-washing water is a necessity.  The most popular option is a mechanical water purifier.  They cost as little as $35 and combine a pump with a filter system.  Throw one end of the tube in the water, pump like mad, and clean water shoots out the other tube into your water bottle.  A new alternative to filter pumps is the Miox pen from MSR.  It works by creating a powerful dose of mixed oxidants (MIOX), which is then added to untreated water, inactivating all viruses, bacteria, Giardia, and Cryptosporidium (which even iodine doesn’t kill).  Other options are boiling water for about ten minutes or adding iodine tablets.  Regardless of what you decide, the key here is making sure to treat the water!  You will need to drink at least 2 liters of water every day you’re in the mountains, more if you're exerting yourself. 

Communications:  You will not be able to get a cell signal in most places deep in the Rockies.  The best alternative for emergency communication is a satellite phone.  Unless you’re in a steep ravine and have a very limited view of the sky, you can usually get a satellite phone signal anywhere in North America.   A satellite phone combined with a GPS provides insurance, especially if anyone in your party has a medical condition that could require assistance.  You can rent one for about $50 a week.  If you are doing a remote fly-out, you may also want to consider a VHF radio.  In Alaska these are frequently used to communicate with your pilot when they fly over to check on you.

  

Clothing:   In the Rockies it's not unusual for temperatures to fluctuate sixty degrees or more over the course of a day.  You may start off wearing everything you own, and be down to a tee-shirt and shorts by lunch.  The key is to dress in layers, and wear mostly clothing made of synthetic materials that dry quickly and wick away moisture.  Zip-off nylon pants, fleece jackets and good rain jackets are a great combination.  Fingerless wool gloves and a watch cap don’t weigh much and can really come in handy.  Think about how there are national news stories just about every July in which video of some location in the Rockies is shown, either buried in snow or on its way there.  Without warm clothes, Murphy's Law ensures that this will be you, even if the forecast called for it to be in the eighties.

  

Let’s say I’m guiding in the mountains and planning to hike in a couple miles with clients to an alpine lake.  We start off early and the temperature, even in July, is in the 40’s, so I wear Redington Versi-pants, Thorlo synthetic socks, a well-broken in pair of Merrell light-weight hikers, a Redington Gasparilla long-sleeve nylon shirt, and a Patagonia fleece vest.  In my pack is my Q-Nimbus rain jacket that weighs about 12 ounces but keeps me every bit as dry as a heavier jacket, wool fingerless gloves and a fleece ski cap.  Oh yeah, did I say that the lake we’re going to sits at 11,000 feet and even on a good day the water is about 40 degrees and the wind chill could be 30 degrees?  Hypothermia is a real danger anytime you’re traveling in the backcountry, so I’m always prepared for the worst.  Since my clients often don’t bring the right gear, I end up loaning out my stuff, so I always bring extras.  I typically do not wet wade, but a lot of locations allow me to wear my hiking boots and only get a little wet crossing streams.  Sometimes I’ll wear my Simms neoprene booties inside my hiking boots, then change back to socks for the hike out. 

  

Fishing Gear:  This is a good news/bad news situation:  The good news is that most places in the Rockies don’t require a huge fly selection and a vest full of accessories to be successful; the bad news is that some places do require specialty patterns.  Check fishing reports on the Web and see what is working locally, and try to keep yourself to no more than a couple fly boxes in a chest pack or belly bag.  Nippers, hemostats, leaders, tippets, floatant and strike indicators are also required. 

Choosing your rod is mostly personal taste.  Most fish in the backcountry run eight to fourteen inches, but be prepared for fish that over twenty-four inches.  Always bring two rods on backcountry trips, preferably one light rod (two to four weights) and one heavier rod with a faster action (five to seven weights).   I recommend two reels for each rod, just in case something goes wrong mechanically or you happen to drop it off your float tube in 75 feet of water.

  

Flies: More than just about any other question, I get asked which flies I carry.  As you compare hatch charts in the Rockies, you’ll see some common bugs in virtually every location.   Most insects will be smaller than those found at lower elevations and warmer temperatures.  

  

I typically carry three boxes that include the following patterns.

  

	Fly	Size	Color		Fly	Size	Color
DRIES	Humpy	18	Red		Stimulator	16	Yellow
	Humpy	20	Red		Stimulator	16	Orange
	Humpy	18	Yellow		Stimulator	16	Black
	Humpy	20	Yellow		Foam Ant	14	Black
	Wulff	18	Royal		Foam Ant	16	Black
	Wulff	18	Black		Foam Ant	18	Black
	Yellow Sally	16	Yellow		Joe's Hopper	14	Yellow
	BWO	12	Olive		Joe's Hopper	16	Yellow
	BWO	14	Olive		Parachute Adams	14	Gray
	BWO	16	Olive		Parachute Adams	16	Gray
	BWO	18	Olive		Parachute Adams	18	Gray
	BWO	20	Olive		Parachute Adams	20	Gray
NYMPHS	Black Beauty	18	Black		Mercury Midge	18	White
	Black Beauty	20	Black		Mercury Midge	20	White
	Copper John	16	Copper		Brassie	18	Copper
	Copper John	18	Copper		Brassie	20	Copper
	Copper John	20	Copper		Brassie	22	Copper
	Copper John	18	Dk Green		Desert Storm	20	Orange
	Copper John	18	Red		Soft Hackle	16	Orange
	Copper John	18	Chartreuse		Soft Hackle	16	Yellow
	Prince	16	Green		Pheasant Tail	16	Brown
	Prince	18	Green		Pheasant Tail	18	Brown
	Tungsten Prince	16	Green		Tungsten PT	16	Brown
STREAMER	Conehead Zuddler	12	Olive		Muddler Minnow	14	Silver
	Conehead Zuddler	14	Olive		Muddler Minnow	16	Silver
	Conehead Zuddler	16	Olive		Muddler Minnow	14	Gold
	Conehead Zuddler	12	Black		Muddler Minnow	16	Gold
	Conehead Zuddler	14	Black		Wooly Bugger	16	Brown
	Conehead Zuddler	16	Black		Wooly Bugger	16	Olive

  

This is not a definitive list, just what I’ve found that works virtually everywhere I fish.  I carry at least three of each size and color, so you can see where this could get pretty bulky, but you have to remember that you’re a long way from a fly shop.  There are many times that you will find that the fish hit one pattern, in one size and one color --that’s it!  After you lose your three flies of that pattern, you may be done for the day.  Of course, if you’re carrying an arsenal like I do, you can almost always find another pattern that works.

  

One more note on flies --cutthroat trout seem to have an uncanny ability to recognize a fly that just hooked them and refuse it on subsequent casts.  They will make a pass at a fly, then swim off.  I’ve had Greenback Cutthroats come up off the bottom of a lake, swim vertically twenty-five feet, get within twelve inches of a fly they already hit, then turn and head right back for the bottom.  The good news is that they are otherwise quite gullible --I have changed flies and caught the same fish four or five times.

  

Safety:

The Rockies are an unforgiving place.  If you twist an ankle half a mile from the truck you could probably tough it out and make it back.  If you cross a stream-spanning log five miles into the backcountry, slip, and crash onto the sharp, broken-off stubs of branches, you better have a plan on how you’re going to deal with the emergency. 

  

Here are some key points to consider:

  

#1 Take a buddy:  In my example of falling into sharp branches, if you had a buddy, he could get you stabilized and either head out for help, get on the sat phone or radio, or help you walk out.  Since he wouldn't be hurt, he'd be much less likely to panic than you would be.  If you’re alone, you may be able to treat yourself, but shock and blood loss could be life threatening, and you’d probably make bad choices.

  

#2 Have a good first aid kit (and know how to use it):  As a guide I carry more than I do when I’m alone.  The list of items in my backcountry kit is longer than my list of flies!  A short list of must have items follows:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Ace bandage wrap		gauze pad
antacid		moleskin
antiseptic ointment		New Skin
aspirin		penlight
band aids		Pepto-Bismal
butterflies		surgical gloves
CPR Mask		tape

  

In addition to the items on this list, a Swiss Army knife is always in my pocket.  I like the Climber model because it’s small, has scissors, and has a little eyeglass screwdriver in the corkscrew.  I usually carry a Leatherman, as well.

You may not be familiar with New Skin or its uses.  Typically it is used to treat an area where a blister has torn away.  You apply a couple drops onto the tender pink area, you yell and swear for two or three minutes, or until the fire subsides, then put your socks back on and continue what you’re doing.  It also works to seal wounds.  If you have a wound that you have closed with butterflies, but which threatens to break open and bleed again, you can apply the New Skin to the wound.  It hurts like you wouldn’t believe, and you’ll want to have a doctor clean and examine the wound when you’re out of the woods, but it works.

  

#3: Don’t take unnecessary risks:  If you’re alone, you need to think safety all the time.  This means wading a stream instead of trying to cross a wet log, not fishing a spot that requires you to put your rod in your teeth to get across a narrow ledge, not staying out on the water as a lightning storm approaches, and so on.  Basically, use common sense and consider carefully how to face all the obstacles you face.

  

#4: Watch the weather and respect Mother Nature: While my coffee is perking in the morning I check the weather forecast.  Which way is the wind blowing?  When is a front expected to come in?  Is lightning or hail predicted?  What time is sunrise and sunset?  These don’t just help you figure out where and how to fish, it helps you avoid risk.  Lightning and hail are the two most dangerous things that can come up.  I’ve seen golf ball-sized hail, and you only have to feel the impact once to know that these things really hurt!  The pain is only one issue; ice balls dropping out of the sky can reduce the temperature up to 30 degrees in a matter of minutes.  In alpine terrain, you often won’t have any trees to get under, but you may have a large rock-fall with some overhangs to protect you and keep you dry.

  

This doesn’t work with lightning, however.  With lightning, you either need to be in a depression that puts you lower than the surrounding land (which usually fills up with water as the rain comes through), or a cave that is at least a couple feet deeper than the opening is high.  If the cave is 3 foot high, you are pretty safe if you are 4 feet back from the opening.  There are no guarantees in life, but this is a good rule of thumb.

  

#5: Have the right gear (and attitude) to get you through:  From rain jackets to first aid kits, having the right gear can be crucial, but your attitude and how you face the situation could make the difference.  Be prepared for the worst, take your time and think about how to respond, and keep your cool.

  

  

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Author Bio:  Chris Conway owns and operates Wild Basin Outfitters  with his wife Belle in Allenspark, Colorado, offering guided fly fishing trips into Rocky Mountain National Park, as well as destinations trips to Alaska, Wyoming and the British Virgin Islands.  With over 30 years of wilderness experience in Alaska, 4 years with the 10th Special Forces Group, and 8 years exploring remote fishing spots throughout the Rockies, Chris is considered an expert in wilderness travel and survival.