“To everything there is a season,” sayeth the Book of Ecclesiastes, a line Pete Seeger borrowed for his song “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” which The Byrds covered for a chart topper in 1965, and so it is with fly fishers. Spring is the season for being optimistic, a time for indulging in fantasies. This year, I tell myself, I’ll fix the hitch in my casting and never miss a rising trout again. Every river will greet me with browns and rainbows of surpassing size. But spring is also the season for cleaning house, by which I mean putting our tackle in order before the opener.
I don’t relish the task. I’m not as disciplined as I ought to be when it comes to caring for my gear. My best rod, an expensive graphite I bought while briefly debt-free, will be neatly stored in its tube, but I’ll have to clean my reels, having neglected to rinse out the sand and grit before I put them away. My fishing vest has a tendency to wander. It might be in the garden shed or the upstairs closet, and the floatant I expect to be in it won’t be. I’d rather not think about my fly box. It’ll look as if a tsunami whipped through it. Once upon a time, the flies were carefully arranged, but on the stream I failed to properly replace them, so I’ll have to sort out the jumble.
I have a friend in Sacramento who’s the exact opposite. His garage resembles a military supply depot. He can lay his hands on anything in a minute and be ready for a week-long trip in half an hour. I envy him, I really do. On the river he fishes the same way, methodical and reliable, rarely varying his approach or his tactics, and he hooks lots of trout. Once, on the upper Sac, I urged him to try a section of the river he always skips, and he recoiled as if I’d suggested he jump off a cliff. “But it might surprise you,” I insisted. To which he replied, “I don’t like surprises.”
That’s where we agree to disagree. True, I pay a price for being a little sloppy, but I’m also not so set in my ways.
Though I love our blue-ribbon streams, I’m equally excited when I stumble on a new river or creek by chance. I recall traveling around Siskiyou County some years ago to gather material for a book, talking with ranchers and farmers in that remote part of the country. At the bar of a Basque restaurant, I chatted with a cattle baron who wore a big Stetson and looked a bit like J.R. Ewing, although J.R. dealt in oil (and mayhem), not beef. He advised me to make a side trip to the Little Shasta River and to order the lamb shoulder for dinner, and he was right on both counts.
In no hurry to head home, where I’d be welcomed by a blank computer screen and an e-mail from my editor asking why I hadn’t yet delivered a manuscript, I took his advice and drove to Montague. From there I continued on to the 4,700-acre Shasta Valley Wildlife Area, a gorgeous, juniper-studded property that had once been a ranch. The refuge provides knockout views of Mount Shasta and two lakes open to fishing, Bass and Trout. Birds and animals of all types were on the move. I saw geese, a bald eagle, plenty of hawks, and a weird critter I later identified, with the help of a guide book, as a yellow-bellied marmot.
The Little Shasta proved to be idyllic, as small as its name implies and stocked with hatchery rainbows. The trout rose eagerly to the basic go-to dries I used — an Adams and an Elk Hair Caddis. I heard a few Coho salmon show up at times, migrants from the Shasta River, a tributary of the Klamath. The Shasta has a good run of fall Chinook, I was told, and some winter steelhead, but the coho are threatened. Cal Trout and other groups are working with the local ranchers to improve the habitat and change that.
From the road I caught glimpses of the river. It’s almost all on private property, so I would’ve needed a rancher pal to fish it. At a glance I’d never figure it to hold any salmon. Spring-fed, it isn’t wide or deep and resembles a typical meadow stream. The annual rainfall is hardly impressive, and it’s hundreds of miles from the coast. The fact that any salmon at all manage to reach it testifies to the durability of the species.
If the fishing on the Little Shasta was ordinary, the experience of being there was not. I would detour again in a heartbeat to spend time in that spectacular landscape. How many chances will I get to see a yellow-bellied marmot? (The answer? So far just that one.) I’ve never judged the worth of a trip by the number or size of the trout I catch. Wandering should be its own reward. Once while fishing the Feather River near Chester, I took a side road and fetched up in Warner Valley. I hadn’t intended to soak in the hot springs at Drakesbad, but that’s where I ended up. I also picked up some nice little browns in Hot Springs Creek.
To be fair to my Sacramento friend, I’ve had a few bum trips. Not every surprise has a silver lining. One summer I decided to head for the Middle Fork of the Tuolumne after reading an article about it in a fly-fishing magazine (not this one). The writer described the river, in the foothills of the Stanislaus National Forest, as a “bit difficult to reach,” but the trout were reputed to be mostly wild and the anglers scarce. That sounded good to me, so I made the long drive through the Central Valley and followed a Forest Service map to the dirt road leading to the stream. The only time I’d fished the Tuolumne was in Yosemite, where it’s a meandering brook in a gorgeous alpine setting. The Middle Fork was a different story, located at the bottom of a deep canyon. From up above, I could barely see the river. It was just a glittery sliver of blue in the midst of all that rock. The road down was full of potholes and as hard as cement. If I’d been in an SUV I’d have risked it, but my old Toyota was likely to blow a tire or bust an axle, so I turned around and checked into a motel, cussing the writer and his misguided assessment, “a bit difficult to reach.”
I felt miserable, of course, for being so cautious. I deserved to be stuck in Modesto eating Chinese takeout with a plastic fork. Why didn’t I choose to fish a stream I knew well? I could’ve been on Hat Creek for the evening rise. And why was it called Hat Creek? To amuse myself, I consulted my laptop and found the answer — because the original surveyor lost his hat there. Having nothing better to do, I began looking up other rivers. John Fremont, the explorer and California senator, named the Fall River after seeing the falls at its terminus in 1848. The Yuba got its name from a Maidu village on its banks. William Downie, a Scottish prospector, lent his name to the Downie River and Downieville, which was first known as the The Forks.
And so on. To be honest, this little game didn’t exactly salvage the trip. Along with a few bottles of strong IPA, it just helped me make it through the night. But I don’t want to discourage anyone from venturing off the beaten track. Fishing and gambling have lots in common. Like the blackjack player who only recalls his (or her) hot streaks, anglers tend to forget the times we’ve been skunked. That’s as it should be. If you dwell on your failures, they’ll accumulate. Then again there’s Schopenhauer, who believed life is pain and suffering. But he never wet a line. I don’t know about The Byrds.
For the record, I’ve been rewarded far more often than punished when I set off to wander. I discovered three of my favorite creeks that way, all holding wild trout — Lavezzola Creek while fishing the North Yuba, Nelson Creek while on the Middle Fork Feather, and Caples Creek while staying at a cabin in Kirkwood. I revisit them when I can, but the real thrill comes from the exploring. California still has plenty of surprises for any fly fisher willing to roll the dice, and I hope to encounter a couple when the season opens. If I’m lucky, I’ll have found my vest by then.
