Calendar

March 24 Ice fishing closed
April Office is closed, leave a message at 970-881-2175 and we'll return your call within a week
May 1 Office opens with summer hours
May 11 Summer fishing season opens!
May 25 Guest fishing begins (Saturday of Memorial Day weekend)
July 4-6 Ramona closed for the Kids Fishing Contest

Headlines

Water Status - We topped off the lower lakes last fall and all the lakes are in good shape for the winter. The big snow in March will be a big help in our quest to fill the lakes this spring.

Fishing Wrap-up - Last fall we stocked Letitia, Snake, Ramona, and Apache; and added trophies to Hiawatha and Erie. Last year in April and June we stocked all the lakes with at least 10% of each load being trophy sized. We added a few more Donaldson's to Shagwa and stocked some very expensive brown trout in Erie, Apache, and Nokomis in May. As for dealing with the explosion of perch at Nokomis, we're attacking them with a similar approach that we used at Apache about 12 years ago. One, it's open season on perch, if you catch any - keep or throw them away, do not return perch to the lake. Second, stocking additional large predatory trout. To that end, we stocked 250 pounds of expensive trophy sized browns, brooks, rainbows, and tiger trout in Nokomis in early May. Overall, many anglers commented on how good fishing was in 2023!

Fall Projects - We completed a number of small maintenance projects last fall - work at the upper Mitchell headgate and Elkhorn headgate, cleaned out the toe drains at all the lakes, cleaned out the culvert east of Apache, and removed willows off the Hiawatha dam.

Boat Cleanup - We removed 4 boats from the lakes at the end of last fall's fishing season. Only one of the boats was properly stickered. If you forgot to remove your boat, you can arrange with the office for a time to come to our boat yard and identify it and bail it out for $200 + $5 boat registration. We want to thank everyone who removed their boats last year, this was the fewest boats we've ever had to deal with at the end of the year.