My personal favorite fishing book is a small, out-of-print volume that I never lend out, because my copy cost $120 in a Bay Area used-book store. I’m hesitant even to talk about it here, because I hate to think that I’ll push people into going out and buying up the remaining copies and drive up the price more — a mint edition goes on Amazon now for $786. But the book, Charles McDermand’s Waters of the Golden Trout Country, is already an object of cult fascination for many California anglers, and maybe someday, someone will see the reason for all the interest and reprint it.
The book is less a fishing guide than a rambling narrative of trips through the Sierra Nevada high country that ends up being a bit of a sociological exploration of the people he met in his months trying to fish every water that holds golden trout and even a bit of a guide of how to backpack, from the era before synthetic fibers and freeze-dried foods simplified the operation. McDermand was adamant that all backcountry voyageurs carry bacon, both as breakfast and as a source of cooking grease, and he wore hobnail boots and carried no tent.
McDermand had some wacky theories about the natural history of the fish he found. One observation that hasn’t aged well was his theory that steelhead are a separate species from rainbow trout and can found native in high-country lakes.
And he seems largely to have preferred fishing from the bare and rocky banks of high-mountain cirques and lakes to the less glamorous drudgery of fighting his way through brush and up gradients to cast in the tiny creeks and small rivers in golden trout country.
This makes sense, and it’s a habit he probably shares with most people who head to the Sierra to fish for goldens, which are now widely distributed throughout the high country — in some cases, the story goes, transplanted by Basque shepherds who brought them from lake to lake in coffee cans to provide an easy and replenishable food source for their summer sojourns in the mountains. These transplanted lake fish largely retain their original genetic identity and exhibit the brightgold coloration and classic red bar and dark parr marks that make the golden trout one of the world’s most gorgeous fish. But goldens, which are three separate subspecies of rainbow trout that were cut off in the Kern River drainage from other trout populations tens of thousands of years ago, hide a paradox that many people don’t often think about when they think of chasing these fish: they’re more diverse than most people know, and their native range is much more limited than the one they inhabit now.
Most of those high-mountain lakes had no fish until goldens were brought to populate them. This means that if you want to be very strict about it, the goldens in all those lakes aren’t really native at all. This is why my good friend who works as a biologist in national parks once had the sad experience of running into a small boy hiking up to a Sierra lake with his grandfather, who told her that he was taking the boy to fish a lake that had always been one of his own favorites to fish when he was young. “I just poisoned that lake,” she told them, and had to explain that its goldens had been eating native amphibians and that the US Fish and Wildlife Service had decided they had to be killed off.
It also means that if you want to try to complete the California Heritage Trout Challenge, in which you’re supposed to catch six different native subspecies of trout in the waters that make up their original, pre-American-settlement distributions, the lake fish technically don’t count. I’ve been told that a fish that’s clearly a golden caught in one of the lakes in the high Sierra will still be accepted by the people who give out certificates, but I have found it fun and challenging to chase all three subspecies of goldens in their native streams, even though it can be tricky. The fish can be small and spooky, and all of these waters take a lot of time, some basic backpacking knowledge, or (at least in one case) a four-wheel-drive vehicle to reach.
The Forks of the Kern
I’ll start with a fish that many people have probably never heard of and that many people who have heard of don’t think of as a golden trout. Maybe they’re right: Kern River rainbows once inhabited the main stem of the Kern River and its tributaries, except in places where natural barriers caused fish to develop even more distinct characteristics of the mountain trout we know as goldens. They were mostly cut off from the wider population of their species, Oncorhynchus mykiss, as the Kern River’s terminus, Tulare Lake, became isolated thousands of years ago from the San Joaquin River.
Now, throughout all of the Kern below man-made Lake Isabella and for much of the water above it, the Kern rainbow has interbred with introduced and hatchery rainbow stock. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife considers it possible to catch a reasonably pure Kern River rainbow starting in the four-mile-long Wild Trout section of the river, about a forty-minute drive above Kernville and past the stocked and heavily hit socalled “20-Mile” section paralleled closely by Mountain Highway 99. The road and river part ways at the Johnsondale Bridge, which marks the beginning of the Kern’s Wild Trout water and which is a great starting point for anyone looking to chase these fish in a wild setting without having to spend a whole weekend backpacking in.
The Forks of the Kern trailhead, which gives access to nine river miles above the Johnsondale bridge, is close enough to Los Angeles that you can make the drive in a morning and still have time to rush into the wilderness and fish, though you’ll need to plan on backcountry camping that night. It’s also one of the rare wilderness fishing locales in the Sierra that’s readily accessible early in the season. The trailhead sits at an elevation of about 5,800 feet, and the hike into the river involves a 1,000foot descent into the Kern Canyon, meaning that the area can be balmy and even quite hot at a time when much of the higher-elevation golden trout country is still under snow. (I always pack for cold and mountain contingencies, however, because the area is very rugged.) The hike down to the river from the trailhead is only a mile or so, but it’s very, very, steep, and it can be brutal to have to hike back up if you’ve run low on food or rest. There are lots of rattlesnakes, and I would be careful about bringing a dog or even a fishing friend who doesn’t know how to avoid them. And at the bottom of the canyon, there is an unavoidable crossing of the Little Kern, which even in midsummer requires getting wet. When the waters are really raging, it is impossible to pass safely. The forks can fish well even when the Kern is running high, but don’t bother trying to fish there in periods of serious runoff, not just because the fishing would be bad, but because you won’t make it across the Little Kern to fish the main stem at all. A call or a visit to Guy Jeans’s Kern River Fly Shop in Kernville is a good way to find out whether the river is just a bit high or too blown out to bother with.
But obviously, this remoteness has its perks. These fish see few flies, and they can grow quite large and powerful. Above the forks, the fish start to look generally very much like classic Kern River rainbows, and if you’re used to the docile fish that get stocked in the lower river, they can be a real surprise. My best friend and I fish this area frequently, and we never bring waders — they’re heavy to carry backpacking, and usually, the river is tough to wade anyway. But we have started lugging in nets, because these fish fight incredibly hard and can get so big that losing them is heartbreaking. The longest fight I’ve ever had with a salmonid that wasn’t a steelhead or a salmon was with one of these Kern rainbows, a fish I caught on a tiny beadhead nymph and that had me running up and down the bank, crashing into the water. It left my arm cramping and exhausted by the time I brought it to hand. My pal tried to make a video of the battle, but it took so long that his phone died.
We always have our best luck working upstream in the frequent deep pools, fishing eddies and backchannels and letting nymphs drop out of the raging current into the small spots of soft water along the rocky outcrops, where we usually hook our biggest fish. Early in the season, when the fish hang in the eddies and back channels to get out of the raging current, fishing anywhere that the water swirls back behind rock jutting into the river can be unbelievably productive, and will often produce multiple fish from the same spot. We usually bring both a 5-weight rod and a 13-foot tenkara rod, which can be very convenient for steeple casts and long drifts into pools that are too deep to wade.
I used to think that fly selection doesn’t matter much on this river, because I’d always been able to take fish with a small homemade nymph dropped off a size 8 Stimulator. Any time the weather is warm enough to get the fish moving, this combination will in fact work, at least for some of the day, even or especially in the deeper pools. But I’ve also seen these fish key on a summer hatch for hours, and it’s probably worth bringing a range of general-purpose mayfly imitations. In addition, the best day I’ve ever had fishing for Kern River rainbows was swinging an ugly, large, home-tied old-school wet fly, size 10. The takes were so hard and fast that I lost the first three fish that hit those flies, but they kept coming. The Forks of the Kern trailhead serves as an entry for all the golden trout country, and you can follow the river up for a day or for months, depending on your time and inclination.
The Little Kern
The Little Kern can be fished from the Forks of the Kern trailhead, just like the main stem, and you can start pushing upstream to look for the second golden trout subspecies, the Little Kern golden trout, right from there, but I would highly discourage anyone from trying this. There is no good trail that follows the Little Kern there, and working your way up can be brutal. This river, unlike the main stem, is tightly cloaked in alders, which makes casting a pain. And the fishing on the main stem of the river in this area can be so amazingly good that I always regret trying out the Little Kern and wish I’d have stayed on the big river.
But that’s not to say that the Little Kern can’t offer amazing fishing. The Little Kern golden trout grew into a separate subspecies from the Kern River rainbow after being cut off from the main-stem population by a series of falls. They can resemble goldens, but they’re duskier, and some of the populations that are more hybridized with rainbows can at times look vividly violet, a color I’d never seen on a trout before. There is a lot of fun to be had in exploring the Little Kern basin and seeking out these fish, partly because you never quite know what they’ll look like. There are some populations of Little Kern goldens that the CDFW considers “pure” in all the tributaries to the Little Kern, but the Little Kern goldens and Kern River rainbows have always interbred in the lower portions of the Little Kern, below the place where mountain uplift created a falls that blocked the Kern River rainbows from migrating upstream, but allowed some Little Kern goldens to wash down. And even farther up, it’s hard to say exactly whether any fish you catch is really 100 percent genetically free of rainbow or stocker genetics. But these days, the CDFW has made an aggressive push to protect the subspecies in its native river, and for the purposes of the Heritage Trout Challenge, they consider any fish caught above the forks that looks like a Little Kern golden to be a little Kern golden.
I like to head into the Little Kern basin from the Jerkey Meadow trailhead in the Sequoia National Forest. This isn’t too far from the Forks of the Kern trailhead, but it’s heading into higher country and down toward a smaller river, so it feels slightly more remote. It’s still the southern Sierra, and it still offers an option for remote mountain fishing earlier and later in the season than anyone would consider for most of the classic high-country golden trout waters. As with any kind of backcountry exploration in these mountains, it’s never really safe to assume that a snowstorm isn’t a danger, but this area offers a chance to get a real alpine feel while still offering nights that are plenty warm enough for comfortable sleeping out under the stars. And it’s a place where fish still have a long-enough feeding season to put on some size and get bigger than most high-mountain trout. The trail from Jerkey Meadow joins the river at a bridge just south of Fish Creek, a small tributary. Or you can maze your way up toward Clicks Creek, Alpine Creek, and Soda Spring Creek, all of which are tiny, but have pure populations of Little Kern goldens. But I personally love to fish the Little Kern itself near Fish Creek. It’s a small river, easy to cast across, but not so small that you have to be especially catlike in your approach, because much of it runs through fairly solid granite notches and slots that allow for easy walking and casting. There are lots of fish, and they’re often surprisingly large. But it’s not like some high-mountain streams, where you can assume that every likely spot holds a fish, at least in my experience. If you’re getting no hits with good drifts and approaching reasonably stealthily, it may be better to move on and try a new pocket or pool, rather than stick around and change flies. These fish will generally take any well-presented pattern, and I’ve had a few doubles here, but keep in mind that this water is often very cold and that some of these pools can be quite deep, so it may take some experimentation or even a water thermometer to figure out whether it makes sense to focus on dry-and-dropper fishing, as I usually do, or to try going deeper.
The trail network in the upper Little Kern basin is very extensive, making it easy to explore the area. The only flies you need is a box of general attractors. These days, I use only Parachute Hare’s Ears and Humpys, size 10, dropping small nymphs off them, though I usually snap off my nymph if I see that the fish will take the dry. A 3-weight or a Tenkara rod is perfect for this river. The canyon can be fairly physical to navigate, but there’s relatively little brush, and anyone who can make the 4.7mile hike down to the stream will be able to fish it.
The South Fork of the Kern
The third and most easily recognizable subspecies of golden trout are the ones that historically inhabited the east side of the Kern River drainage. These are sometimes known as Volcano Creek goldens, after the creek nine miles above the Kern’s confluence with the Little Kern, where they still live and where they were protected by falls from up-migration from Kern River rainbows. It’s now known as Golden Trout Creek. I have never actually fished this creek, partly because it’s inaccessible without a very long hike. However, the Volcano Creek trout have a close cousin in goldens that evolved in the South Fork of the Kern, one of the few places where a true golden trout of any subspecies can be caught in its native stream without a long hike first.
But you do need a truck. The road to Monache Meadows, where I caught my first golden trout at the high reaches of the South Fork of the Kern, is a very popular back-road excursion for weekenders and off-roaders. I discovered this road not because I was looking for fishing excursions, but because I’d just put a lift kit on my Toyota 4Runner and was perusing a book of California off-road drives. They mentioned that there was fishing at the end of this one, and when one day I happened to be talking to Guy Jeans in his shop in Kernville, I asked him if the trip was worth doing. He asked if I was chasing goldens, and I said that I hadn’t really been planning on it, but that if the chance was there, I might as well. “Well, if you’re doing the Heritage Trout Challenge,” he said, “it’s only up there and in Golden Trout Creek that they technically count as native. So it’s worth a trip.”
I’m not sure how this happened, but there are several guides to backcountry roads in California that list the Monache Meadows road as “Easy,” suitable for stock pickups and SUVs without four-wheel drive. This is misleading. It’s nothing that an experienced driver with a four-wheel-drive pickup couldn’t easily handle, but it also would be a silly road to tackle without four-wheel drive, and even then, it’s probably not a road for a driver who doesn’t have some knowledge of technical driving or four-wheeling. I’ve seen lots of people stuck and embarrassed on this road, not because their rig couldn’t handle the terrain, but because they were inexperienced and shaken up by having to navigate it in a rush of weekend campers. They ended up making a mistake — getting high-centered or rolling their Jeep.
But for anyone who’s comfortable and has the vehicle, the Monache Meadows road is one of the most rewarding roads in California. It’s difficult enough to be fun, beautiful, and has a payoff: the road joins the South Fork of the Kern in a sweeping meadow section that’s full of wildflowers and where it’s already fishable, although dirt-bikers and off-roaders like this section, so it can be a bit annoying to fish. The trout in this section are browns and golden-rainbow hybrids, but it’s possible to find some that exhibit classic golden colorations. It can be accessed from the Blackrock Visitor Center off Sherman Pass Road, which is a good place to call and check to see if the road is open. Usually by June it’s passable, though you may encounter mud.
The signage along the 19.5-mile drive is pretty clear, including a side road leading to a swale of high-mountain dunes, which are beautiful and well worth exploring. Then the road snakes past the meadow to a wooded camp area down along the river, which is small and very clear, and during my visits teeming with trout, both browns and goldens. After a river crossing that leads to a few more campsites along the river, the road ends at a dam where browns and goldens can be taken on pretty much any well-presented dry fly.
Anyone fishing this area also always has the option to fish up through the camp area or down through the meadow section, but the really fun and rugged fishing comes above the dam, a hike that requires following the river up and over a rocky hill past a marshy section of wetlands backed up behind the small dam. Above this point, goldens start to predominate. I was told once that the dam was there to preserve the purity of the golden genetics above it, but I don’t know if that’s true. But the fishing can be very, very, fun. I had my first hundred-fish day on this section, including one streak where I caught a fish on seven consecutive casts. I was benefiting from the fact that the river was still pretty high, which helped keep the fish from being as spooky as they sometimes can be.
When the water is lower, however, usually by July, the fishing anywhere on the higher reaches of the South Fork can be incredibly frustrating. The fish are amazingly well attuned to disturbances, and you will sometimes see them fleeing from tiptoed steps dozens of yards from the bank. But anytime you can find a way to cast across broken water, whether wading up and casting from a small falls pool into one ahead or by casting across the head of a pool and drifting f lies down the far seam, you’ll have a chance to catch fish, since at this high elevation, their feeding season is very short, and they’ll take any fly on offer. You will want a rod you can cast delicately. After a while on this river, you get the hang of being stealthy. I never change flies there and just carry a bit of natural soap to wash my fly when it gets slimed. I move a few quiet steps, cast, release a fish, move a few steps, and cast again. There are brown trout even high up past the dam, but they are usually undernourished and slightly strange looking, with the oversized heads and long, tapered bodies that browns develop in low-nutrient and cold ecosystems. But the goldens are usually fat and vivacious, very much in their comfort zone in this kind of harsh environment.
Occasionally I take and cook a brown trout I catch in these waters. This is partly because I’m backpacking, and the fish can be a welcome camp food option, and it’s partly because the browns compete with the goldens. I caught one very large brown several miles above the forks once, which surprised me. It was the first brown I’d seen on the main stem of the Kern, and my friend later chastised me for letting it go, on the theory that it would have made us a nice dinner and that brown trout are an invasive species in this drainage, the only drainage in the world where goldens are natives.
Charles McDermand, however, didn’t seem to care much about what was native to where. He seemed to enjoy catching the fish he called “German” brown trout almost as much as he liked catching goldens. As I said, the golden trout was itself an invasive species across much of the high Sierra he traversed. Of course, back then, so few people were fishing these lakes and streams that he could tramp his way across the backcountry, feeding himself on fat trout fried in bacon, until he was totally sick of the taste of fish, which happened after a while. But there is still a reason why he chose to focus his travelogue on the golden trout. It is the fish of the Sierra Nevada, and to think about catching one is almost by definition also to think about the big mountains and the cold nights of the high country that they inhabit. They have a visceral geographic association that just isn’t true of the more widely distributed rainbows and browns we catch so often.
McDermand’s path out of the high country was down the main Kern Canyon, past Volcano Creek, heading toward the forks, which meant that in essence, he was reversing the path that goldens had taken in their human-assisted migration across the Sierra Nevada. Years later, in 1952, a much older McDermand had seen his legend grow to the point that Life magazine sent a photographer up this same Kern Canyon to watch McDermand play and catch Kern rainbows — “A fish found only in this famous stream,” as the magazine put it. Even the neophyte reporter for the magazine could see that there was something unique about this fish, a difference of character, despite the fact that it can look so much like its rainbow trout cousins. “Although it seldom breaks water like the spectacular rainbow,” the reporter wrote, “the golden puts up a longer and more determined fight. Pulling in his trout,” he went on, “McDermand felt that he was having a fisherman’s dream in Kodachrome.”
