Fly Fishing the San Juan River. Wanda Johnston

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      San Juan River (Northwest New Mexico)

       Location: Northwest corner of New Mexico, 1½ hours from Durango and Pagosa Springs, Colorado; 3 hours from Albuquerque; and 8 hours from Phoenix and Denver. Farmington, New Mexico is 30 miles; Aztec and Bloomfield, New Mexico are 18 miles.

      The headwaters of the San Juan is in the San Juan Mountains, north of Pagosa Springs, Colorado, and the river flows southwest into the high desert of northwest New Mexico, then northwest through Arizona and into the Colorado River in southeast Utah.

      In 1958, construction of the Navajo Dam began. Upon its completion in 1962, the earth-filled dam was the largest of

      its type in the world, built for flood and sediment control, recreation, and water for irrigation and industry. It also provides irrigation water for the 110,000 acres of the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project (NIIP). With the completion of Navajo Dam, the once high-turbidity, warmwater river became the beginning of one of the finest trophy trout fisheries in the world.

      In the early years, New Mexico Game and Fish stocked the river with rainbow, cutthroat, and brown trout. Trout in the San Juan showed phenomenal growth rates, due to the abundance of food. Over the years, rainbows have been consistently stocked in both the Quality Water and the lower river. Browns have reproduced naturally. The result is a unique tailwater river with remarkable consistency offering a year-round high-quality fishery, with approximately 20,000 trout per mile in the Quality Water.

      The San Juan presents both challenge and tremendous opportunity to fly fishers. You can catch fish with many methods and without