Fly fishing in Colorado is a paradise at this US$6 Million compound

Robert Sinclair was in his early 30s when he began looking for a property out West. “I was starting a family and was looking for a place to go fishing and get out of the Texas heat,” says Sinclair, the owner of Castleton Energy, an oil and gas investment company.

Montana was an obvious choice, but when he discovered the state was changing its stream access laws (which dictated who could have access to a river, and when), he began to look in Colorado. “It’s one of the few places where private water property is, in fact, private,” he says. “If you own both sides of a river, you can fence it off if you want.”

Soon after, Sinclair came across just such a property during a summer bike ride. About 30 miles from Telluride, the 318-acre parcel hugs the San Miguel River for more than three miles. “I grabbed my rod, went down, and caught a few fish,” he recalls. “The only thing on it was an old barn, an electric line that ran across the property, and a gravel pit.”

After conducting some water tests and what Sinclair called “minor due diligence,” he determined the river had an ample stock of fish in need of minor improvements, at most. “Something as basic as [instituting a policy of] catch and release” for visitors, he says. After a bit of negotiation, he bought the property in 1986 for US$356,000.

Since then, Sinclair and his family have developed the property, building three houses and three guest cabins along with pavilions and support structures; for more than 20 years, it’s functioned as a private fishing club for the Sinclairs and 10 to 15 other families—all of whom bought membership shares. Now that all the sustaining families’ children are grown, “we all seem to be travelling to them, rather than them coming to us,” Sinclair says. With his sister, he bought the other shareholders out and has put the property on the market, listing it with Jeff Buerger at Hall and Hall for US$5.95 million.

And not for nothing, the fishing is remarkable. The San Miguel River, which eventually connects with the Colorado, “has really cold trout water and bugs galore, which means plenty of fish food,” he says. “What happens is all these fish end up stacking up—we learned that over the years.”