I am lucky to have fly fished all over the United States and in many places around the world, and during those travels I have met many fly fishers. The conversation typically goes the same way every time. When I tell them I’m from California, they tell me, “The wild California golden trout is on my bucket list.” To which I always reply, “Catching lots of little golden trout is quite simple. They rise to anything. Catching a big golden is not. They are very rare. And they live in places that take some hiking to get to.”
There are many places in California, mostly in the Golden Trout Wilderness, where goldens from four to six inches in length are abundant. You can actually drive to within feet of some of these places, but I still have not found a place in our state where it’s easy to get to the big goldens.
I doubt that such a place exists, and I like that. You have to work to find big golden trout — you have to earn them. Let’s be clear, though. By “big,” I’m not talking the equivalent of those 32-inch browns in the Yellowstone River near Livingston, Montana. A big golden trout is 14 to 18 inches long. A golden trout over 18 inches is an absolute Troutzilla and would be truly exceptional.
The Cottonwood Lakes are one of those special places where the big goldens live. There are six of these lakes, which lie above 11,000 feet in the southeastern Sierra on the border of the John Muir Wilderness and the Golden Trout Wilderness. When my buddy Warren Lew from the San Diego Fly Fishers contacted me to join him for a three-night backpacking trip there, I jumped at the chance. I had heard of the lakes, but I had never been there before.
Warren is a retired optometrist 63 years young and totally fit. He’s older than I am by 8 years, and he still hikes and fishes circles around me. And he is an expert golden trout fly fisher. I have learned a lot about backpacking and fly fishing the high lakes of the Sierra from him over the last few years.
So in July of this year, with over 45 pounds on my back, I headed with Warren out on the Cottonwood Lakes Trail, hoping to find a primitive campsite on Cottonwood Lake Number Three. Warren told me that as he remembered it, it was an easy hike of about four miles to the lake. I found it to be a frequently grueling uphill hike, and I was gasping because of the altitude and the distance, which my GPS said was exactly 6.2 miles. I kept telling myself as I huffed and puffed, “You have to earn the big goldens.”
On the way, about two miles into the hike, we fished Cottonwood Creek in a meadow that parallels the trail. For about 45 minutes, we both caught a num-
ber of little goldens on dries before deciding we should press on. The meadow was so beautiful and the creek access was so close, we just couldn’t resist.
When we did finally get to Cottonwood Lake Number Three, after gaining over 1,000 feet of elevation and passing a lot of snow in the process, the beauty was overwhelming. And there still was a lot of snow on the west side of the lake — so much snow that the entire west side was unfishable. Warren suggested we set up our tents before fishing. He’s wise like that. And it’s a good thing we did, because we fished the inlet from the creek whose source is Cottonwood Lake Number Four and did really well for hours. With our polarized sunglasses, we could see the goldens stacked up, waiting for food to trickle down the creek so they could pick it off. Those big goldens were not rising, but we induced rises with an occasional good drift.
We fished until the combination of fatigue and hunger took over. I followed Warren back to camp with a smile on my face. That was only the first day, and it was just a couple hours of fishing, but we already had caught a number of big goldens. And I knew the next day was going to be big day. We were hiking another 500 feet of elevation to Lakes Four, Five, and Six.
The next morning I woke, made coffee, and nailed a couple risers in the lake. We carbo-loaded on backpacking food and headed out for the climb. Within 20 minutes, we were at the outlet from Lake Four — beautiful water, a significant flow you could almost call a river. And we caught a lot of big goldens there.
Thanks to Warren, I had figured out the prescription for successfully fishing the Cottonwood Lakes. In the early mornings and evenings, you cast to risers. Midday, you target all the moving water between the lakes and their inlets and outlets. That probably is a good prescription for most of the higher-altitude lakes in the Sierra.
When we got back late to camp after a successfully day of catching and releasing big goldens, tired and hungry, we were met by the mosquitoes. After this winter, there was a lot of standing water in the Sierra, and therefore, there were clouds of mosquitoes. We were chased into our tents for relief. Along with the hike to the lakes, dealing with these bloodsuckers is another way you earn the big goldens of the Cottonwood Lakes.
When you’re backpacking, something always goes wrong. Sometimes they are small disasters, such as like forgetting something. Other times they cause real stress. You have to adapt and overcome these things. In the morning, in front of his tent, Warren turned his ankle, and it swelled. I didn’t see the accident. I was probably casting at risers. Warren was calm. When he broke the news to me, he was more worried about me than about himself. On the outside, I was calm. On the inside, I was freaking out, anticipating having to send an SOS text on my Garmin InReach satellite tracker.
Our plan for the day was to hike two to three more miles and another 1,000-plus feet of elevation to Long Lake, fish it, then hike all the way to High Lake, more miles and more altitude on the Old Army Trail. That plan was out. Clearly, Warren needed to reduce that swelling. He said, “I’ll be fine. You are going to have to go to High Lake by yourself.” I offered to hang around, but he insisted. “There are big goldens up there,” he said.
So off I went, a bit worried, because I was going solo without one of my backpacking mentors. I hiked a couple miles and got distracted by one of the many tributaries of Cottonwood Creek, but ultimately found Long Lake. In the outlet, I saw a few small goldens, but could not get them to rise. I did not see any rises the entire length of the lake, because it was now late morning, and the hatch was over. That’s typical of the lakes in this area. I hiked the entire length of Long Lake on the shoreline looking for rises, and in the inlet I saw some and caught a decent-sized golden. The inlet, though, was more like 750 feet of small waterfalls that I assumed were coming from High Lake above. There wasn’t a very long stretch of fishable creek.
I looked up and could see hikers about 500 feet above, so I bushwhacked and scrambled up the scree to find that trail. Once on the trail, huffing and puffing, I was partly worried about Warren and partly excited about earning more big goldens for the effort. That’s when I saw it: the trail included a 200-yard stretch across a large snowbank that looked like a glacier. But I had come all that way and could see footprints from the many hikers who had preceded me, so I sucked it up and crossed the snowfield diagonally up the mountain to where the trail appeared on the other side.
Once on top, the trail went right by the outlet of High Lake. I was above 12,500 feet and staring at 50-plus big goldens doing their thing at the outlet. I found a rock to stand on and cast at goldens for hours, catching and releasing fish after fish, all by myself, laughing to no one, alone in the mountains. But all fun must come to an end. I agreed I’d meet Warren by 4:00 p.m., and I had a long hike back — mostly downhill, though.
I found Warren fishing, and he told me his ankle would be fine. Melted snow in high-Sierra lakes does a good job of reducing swelling. He also found enough tape in our med kit to stabilize the ankle. The fishing at High Lake and been great, but the highlight of the trip actually was running into 12-year-old Aaron Eagleton and his dad, Kevin, on my way back to camp. I ran into them at the outlet of Lake Number Three: one cheap rod and two total beginners. We chatted for a bit, and then I said to Aaron, “How’d ya like to learn how to cast with an $800 fly rod?” His eyes lit up. His dad almost fainted, saying, “Be careful.”
After a 10-minute casting lesson, Aaron was getting the feel, so I let him fish at the creek with my rod. Amazingly, he was doing well. With my polarized lenses, I could see a few goldens feeding. They were hitting emerging midges in the film, and targeting them required an extremely difficult cast to a five-foot window of water 30 feet away, across the stream and three different current speeds in a crosswind. I pointed out the fish and told him where to aim. I was doing the teaching thing, talking while he cast. I kept encouraging him and telling him not to worry about losing the fly. The perfect drift after a perfect cast was only about a second or two, so he was missing the target a lot, but, every fifteenth cast or so, he hit it. The kid made a couple good casts and missed a couple takes on small goldens, then got a sizeable fish to rise and broke him off on the set. Finally it happened: he made the cast of the century, got a perfect three-foot drift, and a beefy 14-inch golden shot out of nowhere. I screamed, “Set!!!” He did, and between his screaming and yelling “Woo!!!” and laughing and me coaching him — “Rod tip high!” “Steer him out of the brush!” — and me high-fiving Aaron’s dad, after what seemed like 20 minutes (which means it was just 5), 12-year-old Aaron landed a fish that a fly fisher can live a lifetime without catching: a big, wild golden trout. He was beaming. Back in civilization, I got a text from his dad that said he has not stopped talking about it.
By the time we left the Cottonwood Lakes, I had caught close to 150 golden trout over four days. More than 25 of those goldens were 14 to 18 inches. But I earned them. It was very physical. Experts may call that a moderate hiking trail, but no hike above 10,000 feet with 45 pounds on your back is moderate to me. And if you are like me and fish every moment of daylight each day at altitude, that is very physical, as well. I lost five pounds. And every minute of it was worth it.
If You Go. . .
The Cottonwood Lakes trailhead is in the Horseshoe Meadows area and easily accessed from the town of Lone Pine on Horseshoe Meadows Road. There’s one traffic light in Lone Pine, and it is at the intersection of Highway 395 and Whitney Portal Road. From that light, head west up Whitney Portal Road. After three miles, there will be a large, clearly marked sign that guides you left (south) on Horseshoe Meadows Road. Go another 20 miles up the mountain to the Cottonwood Lakes trailhead. There are other ways to intersect Horseshoe Meadows road, but doing it from Whitney Portal Road is the easiest. The Horseshoe Meadows area and the Cottonwood Lakes trailhead are well-marked and well-maintained. There is plenty of parking, with hundreds of spots, because it is used by a lot of day hikers.
There are numerous forks and tributaries of Cottonwood Creek in and around the area of the trailhead, and they all support hundreds, if not thousands of four-to-six-inch goldens. So if you don’t want to make the big hike, you could fish all day within a mile of your car. If you can cast dries 20 to 30 feet into the four-foot window of a small creek, you can catch and release many little golden trout.
If you go straight on Whitney Portal Road, instead of making the left on Horseshoe Meadow Road, you will end up at the Mount Whitney trailhead, where every day during the summer large numbers of very fit people climb the highest mountain in the contiguous United States, Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet, bypassing a lot of great fishable water on the way.
You can find a nifty map of Horseshoe Meadows area trails at https://shoeMeadows.pdf.
One of the important things I learned from Warren is acclimating before you make a big backpacking hike at altitude. The Cottonwood Lakes trailhead is above 10,000 feet. There is a backpackers campground right there at the trailhead. It has 13 sites, each with a picnic table and fire ring, that cost $6.00 per night, with a maximum of one night. Campfires are legal in the backpacking campground, but not elsewhere in this part of the wilderness. For more details, go to https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/inyo/recarea/?recid=20692.
Obtaining a wilderness permit for the Cottonwood lakes can be done online at the Inyo National Forest wilderness permits page at http://www.fs.usda.gov/goto/Inyo/Passes. The area is popular for hiking, so getting permits online at the last minute can be tricky, because you are competing with lots of people for a limited number of wilderness permits.
However, you can get wilderness permits for the area quite easily and often at the last minute in person at the Eastern Sierra Interagency Visitor Center, two miles south of Lone Pine at the intersection of Highway 395 and Highway 136. You can also get permits in person at the U.S. Forest Service White Mountain Ranger Station at 798 North Main Street, Bishop, CA 93514. Wilderness permits for next-day entry are available at 11:00 a.m. the day before on a first-come, first-served basis.
There are many rules and regulations for the Cottonwood Lakes area. You can read them online, but the most important are the following. All food has to be contained in approved bear canisters. Hanging your food is not good enough in this area. No fires of any kind are allowed. Bear spray is not allowed, because technically, it is a weapon, and weapons are not allowed in the area. All camping must be done at least 100 feet away from the water.
— Mike Huckaby
