I watch or listen to a lot of baseball games. At some point every season every season, the announcers will say that “no matter how many times you come out to the ballpark, you are going to see something new.” Of course, this usually comes in response to a spectacularly athletic effort, a baffling managerial move,
or a truly boneheaded play. Still, it is true not just of baseball, but of anything we do often enough that even though it can become routine, something can suddenly surprise us. This past trout season, I had the chance visit several of my favorite meadow waters in the eastern Sierra. I have fished each of them before, some of them dozens of times. This time, I saw something new and, I hope, learned something valuable. It might be that I simply happened to notice what had been there all along. In any event, four creeks yielded four lessons.
An Owens River Tributary: Fishing in the Apocalypse
It was morning in a meadow in the Mammoth–Long Valley Basin. The temperature gave the slightest suggestion that summer had peaked and we might be winding toward fall. The skies were filled with haze from fires, and my wife and I had just come from an area that had seen severe, road-closing mud slides following a major rain event. We were about an hour or so into fishing the stream, working our way down from the stretch above the start of a meadow. A few fish in pocket water had taken mayfly imitations. We dropped into the meadow, where the stream became more meandering, even though it still flowed with a strong current. As we moved through the grass, I began to notice a grasshopper here and there. It got me to thinking maybe I should try one of those patterns.
Then, as we worked down through a copse of cottonwoods and into the heart of the meadow and the start of the meanders, we came upon what seemed like an apocalyptic plague of locusts to go with the fires and the floods. Every step produced an explosion of hoppers. They were gray, with a yellowish body, and they looked to be a size 10 or 12. As I walked along the stream, I seemed to be herding the things, and they would fly into the creek in groups of as many as twenty at a time.
The first time this happened, I expected to see an explosion in the water like feeding time at the fish hatchery, but nothing happened. The insects just floated down with the current. They had landed on the water’s surface rather gently, without any sharp impact, and they did not struggle much once they were there.
I tied on what looked like a credible imitation and wrangled up another herd, which I sent on their way to the creek. I cast my fly in their midst and waited . . . nothing. No fish rose to either my imitation or any of the naturals. I could tell my drift was OK, because it was moving along with the real grasshoppers without any discernible drag. I went through the process about five times. The fish did not respond, and my frustration level was growing by the minute. For a time, I tried to see this as an opportunity to work on my casting and mending so that my drifts matched those of the real insects, but that was just not what I was there to do.
I wondered what was going on. From driving by the creek during the summer, I knew it had been fished pretty hard on a daily basis. It was near noon, which is not the best time for taking fish, but while that might explain why I was having a tough time coaxing strikes, it did not help me understand why the trout were not feeding on the naturals. Was this a case of too much good stuff? Were the trout just sated from the bonanza?
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a hawk and watched it sweep into the meadow in search of its own meal. It did not appear to be doing any better than I was, but the grace of the bird served as a distraction and broke up the rhythm of unsuccessful casting. When my attention returned to the stream, I took some time to follow a specific natural as it was carried downstream. I noticed that at some point, the grasshopper would drown and disappear beneath the surface. Then I saw flashes in the area where the drowning had occurred. The fish were taking the hoppers subsurface.
I took my fly and soaked it with saliva to get it to sink, then fished it like a nymph. That was the answer. I began to get takes using a rubber-legged imitation fished with a very small split shot about a foot up the leader.
It had never occurred to me that a grasshopper imitation can be anything other than a dry-fly pattern. I would like to say that this discovery is original to me, but later in the day, I was talking with a friend in a fly shop in Mammoth, and he explained that this had been known to him for some time. He advised that he had great success fishing the imitation beneath an indicator dry — a hopper under a hopper. The point, I guess, is that if you fish every day, you figure things out a lot sooner. Had I not taken some time to stop fishing unproductively and try to see what was actually going on in the creek, I would not have figured it out at all.
Tioga Pass: What Are the Fish Doing There?
One of my favorite streams is accessed from Tioga Pass Road. The smoke that filled the Sierra this past year from so many fires was absent at this particular location. The creek flows through a long valley. It drains a fairly big area, and on the day I was there, it certainly did not seem like we were on the verge of autumn conditions. It was warm, but not hot, and the meadow seemed alive with birds and other creatures. The creek is choked with willows, and it meanders between cut banks, alternating with freestone sections, with a lot of larger rocks scattered across its width. The high peaks of the Sierra rise in the background, and the trout rise to a decently presented dry fly.
On this morning, I was not exactly on the summit of my game. My casting, not a particularly strong suit to begin with, was hardly a pretty sight. I was fishing a Parachute Adams in one of the swifter sections. I made several poor casts that delivered the fly to unintended locations that I immediately identified as not worth fishing. But I believe in fishing out every cast, so I did not immediately pick up these errantly placed flies — I let them drift where they were.
To my surprise, there were strikes. They could have been fish in hand, had I not been so surprised that there were fish in these places. Once this got my attention, I noticed that there were narrow slots in the water that connected the obvious pocket locations. Some of these were close to the bank, and others were out in the middle of the creek. Often, they were no more than three feet in length and less than a foot wide. What they had in common was that although when I initially had looked at them, I had seen only broken, choppy water, they had a slightly softer current. There was a little less bounce to the fly as it rode in this water, and intervening currents notwithstanding, the fly could be drifted with less drag. Once I began to focus on these stream features, they became obvious, and I noticed there were a lot of them.
A cast made to the top of these slot flows produced a strike more often than not. Some of the slots were difficult to cast to because they were so tight to the brushy bank areas, but every one seemed to be worthy of attention. Often, it was not possible to get more than a foot or two of drift because of the multiple currents between me and the fly, but if I exercised a little bit of patience and accepted the idea that I needed to find some creative ways to place my fly, I started to get a steady rate of response from brightly colored brown trout. They were not large, but they fought with spirit. Because there are rarely any obvious hatches on these high alpine streams, I was using a mix of generic patterns that included Parachute Adamses, Parachute Caddis Emergers, Royal Wulffs, Royal Parachutes, and Cutter’s Perfect Ants. It was a glorious morning. Although there were still fish in the pockets and eddies that I was used to fishing, on this day, there were also a number of fish in the newly discovered slots in the currents.
Had these trout always been there, or was this some kind of aberration? I intend to return this coming season to put the question to the test, but I suspect that I have overlooked them for a long time. Whatever the answer, I hope I will not forget this little piece of structure on this creek or elsewhere.
There is a tendency to think that a challenging place such as Hot Creek or the Owens River demands a particular mental approach — that you have to concentrate, pay attention, try to be as technically proficient as possible, and carefully fish the whole stream. Although this overlooks the fact that there are times when these trout can be just stupid, it also creates a misapprehension that there is a category of other streams where it is OK to be more nonchalant. However, this is not the case at all. Every location should call out your best effort, your most mindful observation. My little Tioga Pass stream is certainly not in the difficulty class of Hot Creek, but my accidental fish there taught me a lesson about reading water and about the rewards of fishing hard wherever I am.
Up Bishop Creek: Be Here Now
I fish parts of the forks of Bishop Creek a lot. Several years ago, I did an experiment to see what I could learn if I fished the same spot every week through an entire trout season. I still wander up the canyon at least several times a month, often trying to fit a little fishing into a day that contains meetings or appointments. The theory is that some time on the water will be an effective antidote to my experience in town.
Not long ago, I went up after a particularly dismal meeting: no good news, very few good ideas, lots of complaining, no fun. It was a little later in the morning than I would have preferred, but this was bonus fishing, so it was hard to be choosy. It was certainly a pretty day, and the stream looked really inviting. It was good to be on the stream, and I wanted to surrender myself to the sounds and feel of moving water.
I have fished this place so often that a pattern has developed about where I begin and how I proceed from there. It is sort of like fishing without thinking. Unfortunately, that was just what was happening. I missed a couple of early strikes, but I took this as a positive sign of things to come. I missed them because I wasn’t paying attention, but it had to mean the fish were on the feed. As I continued on through the stations of the stream, everything began to deteriorate. I started making some really bad casts, misread water I had fished twenty times before, lost track of my drifts, and missed take after take.
What was happening, of course, was that I was replaying the meeting in my head. I was thinking about what other people said, what I should have said, why the whole thing wasn’t productive, and why I keep showing up at these things at all. What I wasn’t doing was fishing. I was literally “standing in a stream waving a stick.”
I suppose this all sounds a bit like whining, but that is not what is intended. The lesson here is simple, but it eluded me on this day. If you are going to reward yourself with time with the trout, then fish as though you were glad to be there.
Thinking about this later, it seems that every stream, even the ones in the backcountry, where the fish will rise to a ball of cake icing, deserves your best shot. I deserve my best shot. I fish more than I did in the past, but I still don’t feel as if I fish as much as I’d like. Given that, it doesn’t make much sense to foul up an opportunity by not giving it my full attention. I like to say that one of the things I enjoy about fly fishing is that you can get into a zone, but that does not happen just because I would like it to happen.
There is a deliberate (but fun) effort required. In all the wonderful days on the river, there is not one that I remember fondly as the time I was preoccupied by something I should have left behind when I rigged up the rod. I wonder how many guides have had the experience of trying to work with someone whose mind was clearly somewhere else. The point isn’t to be a knuckle-rapping schoolmaster, but rather to remember to pay attention because you are likely to have an opportunity to figure out something new every time you are lucky enough to get out on the water.
Tioga Pass: Meadows Really Are Important
Where I live, in the eastern Sierra, last winter was a “below normal” snow year, whatever that means. Heading into the trout season, I was concerned that this would translate to low flows and difficult late summer and fall fishing. The creek I’m talking about here can be reached with a relatively short hike from a trailhead located on Tioga Pass Road. The stream runs through a fairly large meadow that, early in the year, displays a profusion of wildflowers and summer migrant birds. The creek is small and can be problematically low following the disappointing winters of multiple drought years. As I approached the top of the ridge to drop into the meadow, I worried about what I would find, deep into what had been a record hot summer. My first view of the stream showed an unexpectedly strong flow. This turned out to be the case on every stream I visited during this period, particularly those not subject to managed flows from an upstream impoundment. I also found standing water and boggy mud in the low vernal ponding areas in the meadows, as well as along the watercourses themselves. There was an abundance of vegetation and grasses.
What happened was the unusually high snowpack of the previous year had been retained by these meadows, which absorbed it like a sponge and was now releasing it, even though it was more than a year later. This phenomenon occurs at high-altitude meadows and at those farther downslope. We can see how this water retention works when we notice that the flow of a stream is greater at the bottom of a meadow, where it has cut its path into the water table. In addition, meadows located at the edges of lakes have benefited from the fact that these bodies of water filled during the big runoff year and pushed groundwater back into the nearby vegetation. In addition, the storage and outflows of impoundments can benefit from the slow release of water by meadows. Meadows like this one make up less than 2 percent of the Sierra landscape, and yet they play an important role in sustaining the overall Sierra ecosystem as well as domestic water supplies. Properly functioning meadows add resiliency to California’s water supply in times of drought and filter out sediments and pollution, providing protection to downstream water quality. These functions are likely to be of greater importance in the future, if predicted changes in snowfall, seasonal precipitation, temperature, and water demands come to pass. High meadows are protective of fish populations not only within their specific boundaries, but downstream, as well. I knew this intellectually, but its reality was brought home forcefully by these meadow visits at the end of a very hot summer.
Fly fishers need to do more than simply appreciate these lovely Sierra places. We need to do whatever we can to maintain the viability of these natural water-management systems. Whether it is by supporting policies that push for meadow enhancement, sharing information and observations about their importance, or participating directly in a restoration project, it is important that we do everything possible to maintain and enhance meadows as vital parts of our mountains.
