A fish mount hangs on the wall of my home, at the landing halfway up the stairs to the upstairs bedroom. It’s a plastic replica of a gorgeous rainbow trout from Little Virginia Lake. Usually, as I walk past it, I don’t pay it any mind. Once in a while, I notice it and remember the day, long ago, when we caught it.
It was just a few months after I married my wife, Yvonne. We’d formed a conjugal fishing team at the very start of our angling learning curve. I was keen on the intricacies of knots and leaders, while she developed a knack for fly tying, taking vicarious pleasure when I caught a fish on a fly she’d tied. I netted her fish, and she netted mine.
I was fishing from shore when I hooked this rainbow. The fish made a strong run toward the center of the lake, but I was careful not to apply too much pressure, since I was using an ultralight tippet. Once I played the fish in close enough, Yvonne stood ready with the net, but the leader snagged on a log. She waded out, waist deep, without waders in the frigid water. Just as she got to the fish, the tippet snapped, and the fish was momentarily free, but it was disoriented. Yvonne made a great upward sweep of the net, then held it up in celebration with the fish in it. So she was really the one who caught that fish. It was the largest trout we’d ever caught.
I have a photo from that day — both of us smiling, genuine smiles of joy and youthful optimism, with our road together laid out in one wide smooth lane, paved with dreams, leading who knew where.
The Virginia Lakes Basin features some of the best and most accessible stillwater fly fishing in the eastern Sierra, with a backdrop of spectacular alpine scenery. To the north rises the crumbling granite pyramid of Dunderberg Peak (12,374 feet), and to the south, massive Black Mountain (11,794 feet). Nestled between the great peaks, in the Virginia Lakes canyon, in the space of about ten square miles, are a total of 10 alpine lakes, all above 9,500 feet. Three of these are roadside: Trumbull, Little Virginia, and Big Virginia. The other seven are backcountry jewels accessible via short hikes from the trailhead that begins at Big Virginia Lake.
The Virginia Lakes Resort
From Conway Summit on Highway 395, just south of the Bridgeport Valley, it’s just a six-mile drive up Virginia Lakes Road to the Virginia Lakes Resort, which consists of a lodge with a small store and cafe, along with 19 cabins nestled among whitebark pines near the shore of Little Virginia Lake at an elevation of 9,727 feet.
Walter and Anita Foster established the Virginia Lakes Resort in 1923, but that first year was rough. The road up to the lakes from Highway 395 required hard work to establish and maintain. Fallen trees had to be cleared, boulders blasted with dynamite, then the blast holes filled in. As work on the cabins began, Walter buried an axe deep into his leg. Virginia Creek, at the inlet to Little Virginia Lake, coursed red with Walter’s blood that day, but the icy water may have saved his life, stifling the bleeding long enough for Anita to bandage the wound and drive him to Bridgeport, where the town’s only doctor (who couldn’t locate his nurse), performed a challenging surgery to save Walter’s leg, repairing several severed arteries and a severed tendon. Walter was out of commission for about a month before he was well enough to travel back up to the resort. Despite the setbacks, two cabins were built that first season.
Anita Foster, in her book I Caught a Fisherman, reveals her initial trepidation about the undertaking: “Perhaps if I had known just what I was letting myself in for, it might have taken a lot of persuasion. The first few years were really tough ones, but we were both young and Walter, at least, was so full of enthusiasm I guess enough of it rubbed off on me to overcome any reluctance I might have had in embarking on an undertaking so far removed from what I had previously known.”
Anita wrote that “once we were in it to our ‘babes in the woods’ necks, there was no turning back. The beauty and the majesty of the high country really got under my skin. And there was the romance and thrill of pioneering — the zest and joy of creating something.” Eventually, the Fosters built the lodge and more cabins. Customers fell in love with the resort, the great fishing, and the spectacular high country. Lasting friendships were made with a variety of people from all walks of life.
After nearly three decades of running the resort, Walter and Anita began to feel their age, and the physical work began to take its toll. The Forest Service imposed increasingly crippling regulations, which Anita took a little offense to. “After all,” she wrote,
the Forest Service had not created Virginia Lakes Resort, nor had they built the road to make it possible — six miles of back-breaking and at times heart-breaking toil plus considerable money. Insofar as we knew, we were the only ones ever to force a way into a chosen area by practically hand-digging our own road. Virginia Lakes Resort was the work of our hands and hearts, brought into reality through years of unremitting toil and faith. A dream made real. And now, they were telling us what we could or could not do with it.
They finally sold the resort in 1954, 30 years after that first tough summer, to a “Mr. and Mrs. Cooper.” Twenty years later, in 1974, the current owners, Carolyn and John Webb, purchased the resort, reportedly for $80,000. Carolyn and John now have the distinction of holding the longest tenure as owners and managers, 49 years, upholding the traditions started long ago by the Fosters.
Walking into the Virginia Lakes Resort’s lodge, the sense of its history is overwhelming. In the dimly lit corners hang big brown trout fish mounts from the old days. The smell of pies and hamburgers and French fries wafts out from the café’s kitchen. Carolyn maintains a nifty little fly selection tucked into the corner of the lodge store, featuring many patterns she’s tied. If you luck out and find her there, she’s always willing to give you tips on patterns and what works best at which lake — valuable advice, since she’s fished the Virginia Lakes Basin for nearly five decades.
The Roadside Lakes
The Virginia Lakes Basin features three stunningly beautiful roadside lakes: Big Virginia, Little Virginia, and Trumbull. These three lakes were first stocked in 1898 via pack mule with milk cans full of fish from Bridgeport area creeks. Back in the 1920s, the trout averaged 9 to 14 inches at Trumbull and Big Virginia, but Little Virginia was full of smaller, skinnier fish with outsized heads. Walter Foster hatched a plan to fatten up Little Virginia’s trout. He made a trip to Hot Creek, collected some of Hot Creek’s aquatic vegetation, roots and all, loaded with scuds and nymphs, then transported them in buckets and transplanted them into Little Virginia. He hoped the aquatic vegetation would take and provide habitat for the scuds and nymphs to multiply and serve as a food source, as they did at Hot Creek, to nourish Little Virginia’s stunted fish. In a few years, the trout began to fatten up, and eventually, Walter would catch his biggest trout — an eight-pound Loch Leven brown, from Little Virginia on a dry fly. Today, in the clear water, you’ll see lavish weed beds that carpet the lake bottom.
These days, during the season, all three lakes receive frequent (usually weekly) stocking of small rainbows from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, along with periodic stocking of trophy-sized rainbows in the 3-to10-pound range, with enough big fish that everyone has a reasonable shot at catching one, adding layers of anticipation and excitement.
Although the official fishing season is from the last Saturday in April through November 15, the road to Virginia Lakes typically isn’t cleared of snow and open to automobile traffic until late May and can get closed by snowfall as early as September. After the record snowfall during the 2022–2023 winter, the Virginia Lakes Resort didn’t open until mid-July, and ice was still floating in Big Virginia lake.
All three lakes also contain populations of wild brook and brown trout. Some of the browns reach trophy size (up to 15 pounds) by feasting on the smaller wild fish and planted rainbows, although they are not easily duped into biting a fly.
Just across the parking lot from the Virginia Lakes Resort is Yvonne’s favorite lake — 10-acre Little Virginia, a shallow lake perfect for float tubing, with a user-friendly launch just steps from your car. No gas-powered boats are allowed (nor are they allowed on any of the lakes in the basin), but rowboats are available to rent. The deepest section of the lake, in the southwest corner, is about fifteen feet deep, but can be problematic to fish from a float tube, since it’s usually well guarded by shore anglers who don’t fancy you drifting too close to their honey hole, and you’ll know it when a lure is chucked in your direction.
I once asked Yvonne, “Would you rather catch 50 little fish or one really big fish in a day?” She didn’t hesitate to answer: “Fifty fish!” Me, I’d rather catch that one big fish.
I’ve had more catch-and-release 50fish days at Little Virginia than any other lake I’ve fished. The ravenous little wild trout are easily fooled on dry f lies and small nymphs, and the CDFW rainbows, stocked hungry, are easily caught. I’ve been there on several occasions when just as I thought the action couldn’t get any better — better than a hookup or strike on every cast — the hatchery truck shows up and dumps even more rainbows in the lake, which bite straight out of the truck’s tank.
My never-fail pattern for the stockers here is a size 12 olive/green Woolly Bugger with a gold bead head fished on a clear intermediate line, stripped with rapid two-inch pulls over the top of the weed beds. In the deeper, southwest corner of the lake, counting down as the fly sinks deep, then waiting till you get a strike is equally effective. Then just repeat the countdown and retrieve at that specific number.
The trophy-sized stocked rainbows are caught routinely (I usually catch at least one on every session), but only very rarely is a big wild brown fooled, like the nine-pound hook-jawed brown caught and released by fly fisher Ron Norris from a float tube in October of 2006.
When she gets time off, Carolyn prefers to fish backcountry waters, “But when I’m working,” she says, “I fish Little Virginia in the early morning or from dusk until 10 minutes after the bats hit the water, chasing their meals.” She prefers to fish from a small rowboat (remember, gas-powered motors are not allowed on Little Virginia), working the west side of the lake at the inlet, “casting on either side of the inlet about fifteen to twenty yards out, relocating the fly along the entire inlet seam that runs in a lazy ‘S’ out across the lake, so as not to spook the cruisers.”
Carolyn fishes Little Virginia almost exclusively with dry flies, usually with her favorite “Virginia Lakes Style” X-Caddis pattern, a fly she developed to mimic an adult caddisfly more realistically. “Normally, caddis patterns should follow the coloration of the naturals,” says Carolyn. “According to Craig Mathews and John Juracek,” the fly’s creators, “the typical X-Caddis pattern represents a crippled caddis, an adult that has not successfully emerged from the pupal case. My pattern uses different thread color and body material. When the fly gets wet, the red thread shows through the peacock herl and appears as hemoglobin. I also change the color of the Antron shuck to a bright lime on occasion. After continued refusals, I make minor adjustments with nail clippers by shortening the shuck to a nub and cutting a center section of the deer hair on top of the body, leaving only about six to eight hairs on each side, making it my ‘Naked Caddis.’”
The big downside to Little Virginia is that it can get very crowded on weekends and holidays. Shore anglers ring the lake, which can become so congested with float tubers that it resembles a giant bowl full of cheerios. So it’s best to avoid holidays and fish weekdays, if you want a less-crowded experience.
Just up the road from Little Virginia, 27-acre Big Virginia, by contrast, feels vast and uncrowded. Like Little Virginia, Big Virginia has a convenient boat and float tube launch area just steps from your car. From the parking lot, just right of the boat put-in, kick out just far enough to avoid the shore anglers, and you’ll see the hues change as a shelf drops off into deeper, darker water. Working the drop-off with an intermediate or sinking line toward the small inlet to the north can be very productive. The water temperature is often in the 40s, so when I’m float tubing in breathable waders, I wear Capilene socks and pants underneath.
Big Virginia is the deepest (110 feet) of the lakes in this alpine valley, known to harbor big browns that rise up from the depths to attack planted rainbows or small brookies. “The big browns are usually caught when the weather is the absolute worst: windy, raining, snowing,” says Carolyn. Several years ago, a fly fisher caught and released three 9-pound browns in a single magical day. In 2015, a fly fisher caught and released a 14-pound brown on a fly Carolyn handed to him.
When I asked her for advice on how I might fool one of Big Virginia’s browns, she said, “I’d take out a green canoe and drift along parallel to the drop-off on the western shoreline with a full sinking line fished with a streamer about 12 to 15 feet down.”
Just down the road from Little Virginia is 12-acre Trumbull Lake, the only lake in the basin with a US Forest Service campground, which offers 30 campsites.
Float tubing these roadside lakes is convenient and popular. Due to heavy stocking, the Virginia Lakes roadside trio produces some of the best stillwater action in the entire eastern Sierra. By avoiding the crowds, Yvonne and I have had many magical days there. I can picture it now: floating in the middle of the lake, slowly drifting in the breeze, tilting my head back to take in the majestic alpine scenery, under a high-country sky so blue it seems almost black, the serenity interrupted by a tug on my line.
While it’s fun to catch lots of fish and big fish, the gorgeous scenery of the Virginia Lakes makes it all worthwhile, even if you’re getting skunked. Anita Foster wrote: “Your real fisherman doesn’t measure his happiness by the numbers of fish taken. He just loves to fish and to be out in any of the beautiful settings nature has provided. He derives as much pleasure and deep-down gratification from the surroundings attending his sport as from the sport itself. Granted that a full creel gladdens his heart, he still counts no day spent piscatorially on lake or stream as lost.”
The Backcountry Lakes
Where the road ends at Big Virginia Lake (9,843 feet elevation), a string of alpine jewels are accessible via short hikes on good trails. These small lakes and tarns hold wild brookies, browns, and rainbows that make up for their diminutive size with their scrappiness and vibrant colors.
These backcountry lakes were originally fishless, as were all the Virginia lakes, until stocked by Walter Foster in 1926, with cutthroat fingerlings from a Department of Fish and Game hatchery at Fern Creek on the June Lake Loop. Walter and a friend made several back-breaking hikes up to the lakes, lugging 70-pound backpacks containing the tiny trout in 25-gallon milk cans. Their effort paid off, and several years later, the lakes were producing five-pound cutthroats.
After World War II, the DFG acquired a surplus Air Force bomber, converted it into an aerial fish-stocking truck, and began seeding the high-country lakes throughout the Sierra from the air. In 1949, a relentless aerial bombardment ensued, a stocking campaign that would go unchecked for 52 years, dropping millions of trout fingerlings by air. By the mid-1950s, as many as 2.5 million fingerlings were planted every year into Inyo and Mono County backcountry lakes, mainly rainbow and brown trout, but also brook trout, cutthroats, and over one hundred thousand golden trout.
Subsequent studies, however, found that over 70 percent of lakes that had been repeatedly stocked actually held self-sustaining populations of trout. The DFG was making things worse with repeated stocking — overpopulating many of the lakes with stunted, starving fish and diluting the wild gene pool by introducing f ish that were less adept at survival and reproduction. The stocked trout were also wiping out yellow-legged frog populations (trout like to eat tadpoles). The DFG revised its approach: backcountry lakes with suitable spawning habitat needed to be stocked only once, after which the department would let nature take its course.
Just south of Big Virginia Lake is Red Lake, reached by taking a short side trail that leads south from the parking lot. A hike of less than a quarter of a mile leads over a ridge to reach this beautiful, secluded, nine-acre gem, nestled in a rocky glacial cirque. The lake’s inlet and outlet are good spots to target the lake’s population of wild brook and rainbow trout.
From the Big Virginia Lake parking lot, the main trail heads west into the Hoover Wilderness, giving you access to six more beautiful high-country lakes in less than two miles of hiking from the trailhead.
About fifteen minutes and half a mile up the trail is 11-acre Blue Lake (elevation 9,886 feet). During the summer, if it’s not too windy, dry-fly action in the early evening can be phenomenal at the southeast corner using Griffith Gnats or Mosquito patterns in size 16 or 18. Blue offers excellent fishing for small brookies, browns, and rainbows up to 12 inches. The northwest side of the lake, at the inlet, is also a prime spot.
Just up the trail from Blue Lake, a strenuous spur trail leads north up to 10,573-foot-elevation Moat Lake. On my 90-year-old mother’s bedroom wall hangs a photograph of a big golden trout from Moat, a picture given to her by John Webb back in the 1980s. Up until about 1998, Moat Lake was famous for its healthy population of goldens, but now it’s been colonized by brook trout.
The steep, strenuous trail from Blue Lake to Moat Lake takes about threequarters of an hour to climb 800 feet, but you’ll be rewarded for your effort with a spectacular view of Little Virginia, Big Virginia, and Blue Lake far below.
A little farther up the main trail from Blue Lake, you’ll come across an old miner’s cabin, an artifact from the Gold Rush days, when prospectors searched far and wide, trying to strike it rich. The eastern Sierra’s gold rush began in 1857, not far from the Virginia Lakes, when miners struck gold down in the Bridgeport Valley, where Dog Creek merges into the lower reaches of Virginia Creek. Digging and panning, they eventually uncovered the largest gold nugget ever found in the eastern Sierra. Here they established the eastern Sierra’s first mining outpost, a little shantytown called Dog Town. A few years later, as the gold nuggets became scarce, word spread of a new gold strike at the “Mono Diggings” between Conway Summit and Mono Lake, a new boomtown sprang up, called Monoville, and Dog Town quickly became a ghost town. Other miners headed west to the headwaters of Dog Creek, building cabins at the base of Dunderberg Peak, where gold veins protruded from the bedrock for easy pickings.
Long before the miners, the Northern Paiute people lived here, evidenced in discarded obsidian chips along the banks of the East Walker River, where they made arrowheads and tools, and in shallow metate ground into conical depressions on granite boulders in the high country valleys, where they spent their summers hunting, foraging, and gathering.
A little farther up the trail from the miner’s cabin is 10-acre Cooney Lake (10,246 feet elevation), where the rainbows and brookies run slightly larger than Blue Lake. Cooney is deep and clear, its western shoreline guarded by granite cliffs that plunge straight into the water. The northwest corner at the inlet is usually the most productive spot.
Just a quarter of a mile farther up the trail from Cooney Lake are the three Frog Lakes (10,372 feet elevation). They’re shallow and marshy, with soft bottoms. The largest is about five acres in size, the other two consisting of tiny tarns only about an acre each. Connected by streams, all three lakes are teaming with a self-sustaining population of tiny wild brook trout. The Frog Lakes are about a mile and a half from the trailhead.
Packing in a lightweight float tube, pump, waders, and fins to these backcountry lakes can be extremely advantageous, especially at Cooney, allowing you to fish deeper water and drop-offs more effectively, and giving you access to the entire lake, including inaccessible shoreline areas. As I’ve gotten older, I think more about the weight of the things I carry in on my back. The lightest float tube I’ve found weighs 3.4 pounds. I roll up my float tube like a burrito, drape it in a U-shape configuration across the top of my pack, then cinch it tight to the sides of the pack.
With such a short feeding season, these high-country trout are ravenous and opportunistic. They consistently congregate where there’s moving water — the inlets and outlets. With calm conditions, dry-fly fishing can produce nonstop action. Good patterns include the Parachute Adams and just about any size 16 or 18 caddis or Callibaetis pattern. Ralph Cutter’s Perfect Ant is a great choice for a terrestrial. A killer combo is a dry fly with a Zebra Midge on a dropper.
When the wind blows, creating surface chop, small nymphs (size 18 to 14), such as the Hare’s Ear, Prince, or Pheasant Tail Nymph work well fished on a slow-sinking intermediate or a full sinking line. My favorite nymph for these lakes is Denny Rickard’s Callibaetis Nymph, size 14, stripped in short, quick, staccato bursts.
Stripping or trolling streamers such as beadhead Woolly Buggers, size 10 or 12, in black, olive, or rust on an intermediate line always seems to work for these voracious trout, as do the standard oldschool eastern Sierra streamers such as an olive Matuka or a Hornberg, size 8 to 10.
As I said, Carolyn Webb’s favorite dry fly for these alpine lakes is the X-Caddis. “The X-Caddis fished over a Prince Nymph can be deadly,” she adds. To go subsurface, she recommends a full sinking line and a 9-to-12-foot leader fished with two flies, a streamer with a Prince Nymph as the point fly.
These lakes are popular destinations for hikers and anglers. If you visit, I urge you to practice leave-no-trace ethics. My wife has a habit of picking up all the trash she finds at every fishing spot she visits. At one combat fishing zone on the bank of Alaska’s Kenai River, she once picked up seven pounds (I weighed it) of discarded line, sinkers, and flies in a single day. When she’s picking up trash, I’ve seen an interesting phenomenon occur: other people begin picking up trash themselves, and sometimes, strangely, bringing it to her as if she’s the chief trash collector. It’s a good feeling to leave a fishing spot cleaner than you found it.
To preserve these pristine waters, Carolyn urges fly fishers to refrain from using fluorocarbon tippets, even though it’s possibly more effective in the ultraclear water, and instead use nylon monofilament, since fluorocarbon takes forever to break down. “The more fish you might catch cannot outweigh the detriment of discarded f luorocarbon material,” she says. I carry a small rubber receptacle pinned to my vest for discarded pieces of line and tippet.
God’s Country
When I was young, every August, my mom and dad crammed the family station wagon to the brim with me, my three brothers, and all our food and camping and f ishing gear, then drove up to the eastern Sierra for two weeks of summer vacation. After Highway 395 climbed north out of the dry, dusty Owens Valley to where the pine forests began, my mother would always turn to us and say “Kids, this is God’s country.”
The high Sierra grew on me, as John Muir once wrote, “ like sunshine into trees.” I would go on to spend a good portion of my life climbing granite cliffs and fishing lakes and streams in the eastern Sierra. Countless other people have enjoyed the recreational opportunities of the Virginia Lakes Basin, as well, since Anita and Walter Foster’s dream of building a resort became reality, creating lifelong memories passed down through generations. If the eastern Sierra is God’s Country, then the Virginia Lakes Basin is a stillwater angler’s paradise.
