Today a couple of the local fishing guides took it upon themselves to come up and post some more No Trespassing signs on my land. Chuck and Rick, both older guys close to 70 years old.

They brought wire and signs and spanned the river in hopes of catching the eye of trespassers coming from the Sleepy Hollow Park upstream from me. I figure they would know more about where trespassing fishermen would see signs than I would since I don't fish or wade around in the river and come up on the bank.

State laws differ. In Colorado our parcels go to the center of the bottom of the river, and in my case I own both sides of the river, so the width of it is my private property. The public can float through our property on the river, as long as they don't touch the banks or the river bed. Other states create a public easement that allows access to the point of highest water on the river banks.



Rick looked familiar, but I don't remember specific times when he's been here. Chuck, on the other hand, was here several times this summer with clients, and he is such a good teacher I've seen his inept customers catch fish right near our bridge where everyone tells me the fish are elusive. When Chuck was here and I had the time I baked up some cookies to give him. I never knew if he shared them with the customers or just kept them for himself.



Chuck's kind of a crusty guy, a smoker, but today I noticed a cigarette butt in the back of his truck so maybe he tosses them in there instead of around the property or in the river. Would be nice if true, because we spend a lot of time in the summer policing our fishing parking area and trails for butts and wine corks and designer beer bottle caps. We provide a trash can at the parking area and it gets good use, but some people think small stuff doesn't count. One group threw a bunch of miniature candy bar wrappers in the can, and the raccoons came and ate them. I'm pretty sure it was raccoons and not bears because the contents of the overturned trash can were neatly arranged on the lid, candy wrappers missing.



Besides the problem of trespassers conflicting with the club fishermen who pay for the right to exclusive use of our piece of the river, there are liability issues. In April 2003, before I moved up here, a trespassing fisherman was killed by a large boulder that rolled on him on the riverbank. The soil had been loosened up by recent heavy snows.



Fortunately there was never a hint of a lawsuit because the guy was obviously trespassing, and had gotten through our land through a closed county park, so it was like double trespassing. That wouldn't keep a lot of people from trying to make something of it anyway, but that particular family was very philosophical about it. They were quoted in the paper as saying: "It was Frankie's day to die; he's fishing in heaven."