Originally Posted by greenstork
Being a trout fisherman, the biggest thing that bugged me about Colorado was that land owners actually owned the river bottom, therefore it was trespassing to wade in someone's river to fish. And invariably you would get chased out, yelled at and it wasn't all that uncommon to see guns brandished. Too bad, because Colorado has some excellent trout rivers.
There's lots of public water but, yes, our water laws are rather 'funky'. For example, the water belongs to the people of the state. The river bottom can be owned by a landowner. They can't stop you from traveling
on the water, i.e. floating, but touch the bottom and you are trespassing. Generally speaking, there's enough public land that finding someplace to fish isn't usually a problem.
Most people do post signs and fences since they want to keep people off their property. The real confusion arises when you try to determine what is public land, which is usually fenced, and what is private, which is also fenced.