The first step in developing travel time and water quality models in streams is to correctly model solute transport mechanisms. In this paper a comparison between two solute transport models is performed. The parameters of the transient storage model (TS) and the aggregated dead zone model (ADZ) are estimated using data of five tracer experiments carried out under different discharges in a mountain river of the Colombian Andes. Calibration is performed using the generalized uncertainty estimation method (GLUE) based on MonteCarlo simulations. Aspects of model parameters identifiability and model parsimony are analyzed and discussed. The TS model with four parameters shows excellent results during calibration but the model parameters present high interaction and poor identifiability. As a conclusion, it is stated that the ADZ model with only two parameters is a parsimonious model that best represents solute transport mechanisms of advection and longitudinal dispersion in the studied mountain stream. Since the ADZ model parameters have a clear physical meaning a parameter estimation methodology as a function of discharge is proposed in this paper. The model predictive ability of transport processes using this methodology is sufficiently precise and the results could be used for the hydraulic characterization of mountain streams.