Have you ever driven by the entrance to a spot you’ve either never fished or haven’t fished in years and thought to yourself, “I really should stop and fish there”? That’s pretty much how I found myself driving up to the small parking area at the Jenks Lake Day Use Area. I can’t tell you how many times I drove by the lake’s entrance, fully intending to visit it one day. But not once in many years did I head up the little side road off of Highway 38, one of the “back roads” to Big Bear lake.
This “lake” is really more of a pond at just 5 surface acres (or perhaps 10 — different sources disagree on the size of the
lake, and I’d say that 10 is probably closer to the truth), and at 6,700 feet in the San Bernardino National Forest, you wouldn’t expect it to be much in the way of a warmwater fishery. To my surprise, after avoiding Jenks Lake for something like two decades, I found this little body of water to be an attractive and easy-to-reach spot that was both a decent bass and panfish lake and a better than average trout fishery, albeit of the put-and-take variety.
One of the first things I learned about Jenks Lake is that the Adventure Pass required for parking in most places inside the boundaries of the San Bernardino National Forest is not valid there. Yes, the lake is situated inside the forest, but you have to cough up a five-dollar bill to park. The pass is not accepted.
Access to the lake itself is slightly downhill from the parking area. There are cement stairs, or you can walk down the ramp that’s been added for the benefit of those whose mobility is limited.
Once you reach the water, what you find is a pretty impoundment in an equally pretty pine forest. The lake, which was created by damming Frog Creek, is an attractive oval shape, with most of the amenities — picnic areas, restrooms, and so on — concentrated on the north side. There is good access for shoreline fishing
along most of the north side and somewhat less on the south side, where the bank tends to be steeper.
A trail runs around the south side and ends at the southeast corner at a beach used by groups (Boy Scouts and such — the last time I was there, a couple of hundred yelling kids were launching canoes and rafts from that spot while adults cooked a barbeque meal on the shore). There is also a very well-built fishing pier on the northwest corner of the lake. Something else that I like is that smoking is strictly forbidden all around the lake.
What this lake is best at, however, is not casting from the shore, but fishing from something that floats. You cannot launch a power boat at Jenks, and there are no concessions that rent boats. You can, however, launch your own rowboat, kayak, canoe, float-tube, or other non-motorized watercraft.
And really, this little mountain water just cries out for the use of something simple, like a float tube. There’s no launch ramp or even a specific launch spot. In the summer, the weed beds grow up through 10 to 15 feet of brilliantly clear water all along the shore, and getting to the deeper water outside of the weed beds can be a struggle. Since the only fee you need to pay to fish Jenks is the parking charge, this lake is a bargain in an area of California where multiple fees are levied for nearly everything.
The Fishery
Jenks Lake receives weekly plants of hatchery-raised rainbow trout. If you don’t mind fishing alongside the lure-and-bait anglers who come to the lake on and just after the stocking day, you can phone (562) 584-7268 to get the weekly stocking report from the Department of Fish and Game’s Region 5 office.
I would suggest, however, that if you want to get the best of what Jenks Lake has to offer (and by logical extension, most other mountain lakes in Southern California), you should avoid the day when the trout arrive and also most weekends. I know that advice, which I’ve been giving to Southern California fly anglers for at least a decade now, is often hard to follow. A weekend day may be your only shot at this fishery, in which case, try early Sunday morning. You may fish for a few short hours without a whole lot of company.
The trout I saw on my most recent trip to Jenks looked pretty good for stocked fare. They certainly weren’t giants, but there were enough 10-to-12-inch fish to make most of the lure-and-bait guys happy, and I did see a couple of larger, possibly holdover fish in the 14-to-16-inch range. These larger fish, by the way, had not been caught, and I suspect they were survivors of the put-and-take system and probably would be hard to fool with most lures and baits — which gives the fly angler fishing there a leg up.
For me, an even better part of the fishery is the “warmwater” angling for bass and bluegills at Jenks Lake. Bluegills seem abundant, as do the smaller bass. I suspect that Jenks Lake has a pretty short growing season for bass and panfish, mostly due to its elevation. This is a lake that can freeze over in the winter.
On the other hand, winter woes or not, the bass and bluegill populations seem quite robust. In half an hour of walking around the shore, I saw literally hundreds of small to medium-sized bass and more bluegills than I could count. The weed beds create excellent shelter for the smaller fish and are prodigious providers of aquatic insect life.
While I didn’t catch any large bass and didn’t see anybody actively fishing for bass and bluegills, I suspect there are at least a few bigger bass in this little lake. I did spot what probably was a bass of three or four pounds for a few seconds down by the fishing pier. If you see a three-pound bass, there’s usually a five-pound or six-pound fish somewhere in the same water.
Tackle, Tactics, Flies
Fishing for Jenks’s larger bass can be more of a subtle endeavor than at your typical bass lake. The water is extremely clear, and the weeds are thick. I think a finesse approach with smaller bass flies and bugs will work better than just heaving a big cork or foam popper over the weeds. Although power boats are forbidden on the lake, a variety of other kinds of watercraft, from float tubes to a navy of kayaks and canoes, ply it on weekends. The bass in this small water have probably learned to keep their heads down to avoid being run over, if nothing else.
I’m not certain of Jenks Lake’s depth, but examining the visible terrain leads me to think it’s probably 20 to 30 feet, at least, and I suspect the bigger bass tend to stay in the depths during the daylight hours, snatching up the occasional bluegill or trout and keeping out of the upper top third of the lake.
For that reason, I would not expect to catch a large bass on a surface bug except at dawn or dusk, and during the majority of the day, a subsurface fly fished on a sinking line would be the way to go. (A sink-tip line might work, although all things being equal, I’d rather fish a full sinking line in the open water away from the weeds.)
Flies? Well, you could probably tie on a standard Woolly Bugger in size 8 to 12 and catch just about anything in the lake. I fished a fair-sized conehead Bugger in dark olive off the handicapped dock and got a heck of a strike that lasted about a half second, then the fish was gone, and so was the fly. It could have been a lousy knot, but I like to think it was a big bass.
Other potentially useful flies include any number of small streamers. Clouser Minnows tied on the sketchy side with plenty of translucent material should work pretty well, as should patterns that imitate baby bluegills. I suggest that rather than large bass bugs, you stock your fly boxes with a few simple streamers designed for trout. You don’t want a lot of noise and commotion going on during the retrieve, so the really big, water-pushing type of streamer is probably an unwise choice.
If you insist on fishing top-water flies and poppers, another reason to stay on the small side is that the bass are not all that large. Consider using a foam popper sized for panfish. I would also think about fishing terrestrial patterns. During my visits, I’ve noticed a glut of beetles and ants around the lake. A small beetle imitation in black would be deadly on the bluegills and the small bass, too.
Also for the bluegills, that aforementioned Woolly Bugger, but in a smaller size, will probably work as well as anything. Your selection of nymphs, especially if you have dragonfly and damselfly imitations on hand, should prove attractive to the bluegills and the smaller bass.
This is a lake that seems to invite light tackle. I have fished it with a 4weight, but when the wind blows, which is almost every afternoon, that becomes a chore. A 5-weight in the 8-to-9-foot range is a good choice for both tubing and shore fishing. There are a few spots along the edge of this lake where you can make a full back cast, but you’ll do a lot of roll casting, and the bit of extra length that a 9-foot rod gives you is helpful.
Is Jenks Lake a big deal? The short answer is no. On the other hand, despite the picnic areas and the multitude of camps and campgrounds along Jenks Road, it retains a bit of the simplicity that you won’t get at Big Bear Lake. I like it primarily because it isn’t a big deal. It’s just a spot where you can have a few hours of fun in a beautiful setting and probably catch some fish in the process.
If You Go …
Getting to Jenks Lake is fairly straightforward. From most of the Los Angeles– Orange County area, take the 10 or 210 freeway toward the San Bernar dino–Redlands area, then go east on Highway 38 (Lugonia Avenue in Redlands) through the city of Redlands and the smaller community of Mentone, then up into the San Bernardino Mountains toward the Angelus Oaks area. About five miles of twisting road after passing through Angelus Oaks, you arrive at Jenks Lake Road. From there, it is just a little over two miles to the lake.
Remember that you do need your California fishing license, but you don’t need a Forest Adventure Pass to park at Jenks. The group that manages the lake charges $5.00 for parking. There is no fee to fish. The lake is open from sunrise to sunset from March through mid-October and possibly through the end of October in some years. Some anglers continue to fish the lake until it either snows or the lake ices over in November or December. They park along the road (for that you will need an Adventure Pass) and hike into the lake past the locked gate.
You can’t rent a boat at Jenks, but you can launch your own float tube, pontoon boat, rowboat, or other non-motorized watercraft. This is black bear country, so be prepared to make enough noise while hiking to let the bears know you are there.
While you are in the area, think about fishing the Santa Ana River and Bear Creek, located north of Jenks Lake in the Seven Oaks area. For more information, see the San Bernardino National Forest Web site, http://www.fs.usda.gov/sbnf, or phone the Barton Flats Visitor’s Center, (909) 794-4861 (during the summer season only) or the main office at (909) 382-2600.
Richard Alden Bean
