Blue Lake, snowshoe style

Hey the last time I tried this - hiking in over snowbanks - it worked great and I caught some big brook trout a few feet from shore, though that was a different lake.  But I've been paddling this tube around Upper Blue Lake for an hour or so, scanning the overhanging mounds of snow beween the willow bushes on shore, probing with a big Bird's Nest to imitate a dragonfly nymph, and I still haven't found the inlet stream.

When I started out, the camp host told me some nice cutthroats had been caught near the inflow stream, and though I had checked that a stream was shown entering on the west shore in the De Lorme atlas, I must have failed to remember exactly how far round the lake it was!  Finally I change to a black woolly bugger and count the Type 3 sinking line down really deep.  As I'm paddling through the depths at the mouth of this bay I miss a tug, then land a planted rainbow.  He goes back, and on we go. 

Red Lake, Blue Lake ...

OK, I give up, maybe we will never get to fish California's rivers this year.  I'm heading for Alpine County in late July, and the mountains across from Silver Lake, then Caples Lake, are well-covered in snow for their top thousand feet or so.  I might not expect the East Fork of the Carson River to be fishable yet in an average year.  It drains really high peaks in the Carson-Iceberg Wilderness, with extensive north-facing slopes where snow stays nearly all summer, and valleys of glacial moraine soil that any surface run-off puts into suspension in the river.  The East Fork often doesn't clear until August anyway, but its West Fork and most of the smaller streams are always fishable by now - except this year.

The first lake after the scenic drive through Carson Pass is Red Lake, so named for the red peak that stands starkly high and close above it.  Highway 88 snakes down its side to a dirt road access you come upon all too quickly, particularly if you're trying to check out the lake for rising trout.  There aren't any, but it is brim-full of greenish water, showing the fertility of this medium-sized lake.  I meet a flyfisher who's brought his pontoon raft in to re-rig.  He says it's very quiet, except for one fish he just pricked.  Minnow imitations are good he says, particularly for the big brook trout.  But he also says they can be moody, and he thinks the water's a few degrees too warm at 61 degrees. He prefers 58 to 59, and expects it to drop if the wind does (it's very cool today in the shade, but the sun is hot and the strong breeze warm.)

Hat Creek -Back in my Life

Windmills stand on Hatchet Mountain, as I drop down into the flat volcanic bowl that holds California's two largest spring creeks; Hat Creek and Fall River.  It's been fifteen years at least, since I last fished the public water on Hat Creek. But this strange, late, cold and water-rich spring, it's almost the only place to fish.

Previous years, I'd be tinkering on some small low-elevation mountain stream, chasing the elusive ten-inch brown among seven inch rainbows. I would dash in quickly, hike an hour away from imaginary crowds yet to arrive, catch a trout or two I could define as a trophy by my own standard and drive home, all in one day.

But time and abundance have slowed my step.  Today I need to be somewhere for a while, and why not this old acquaintance of a spring creek.  The salmon flies should be out, the giant, bumbling stoneflies with the hint of hot orange about their bodies.  Twenty year-old memories return; of their gentle touch as they crawled on me; of the big brown that ate the salmon fly I unwittingly knocked into the water, and the boil as he ate the foam-bodied artificial that I'd tied myself.