Editor’s note: Seth Norman is taking time off from his column, “The Master of Meander.” Until he returns, we’re treating you to work that, like Seth’s, gets beneath the surface of our sport — or that reminds us of what we fly fishers have in our state, as is the case with this piece by Michael Checchio that appeared in Fly Rod & Reel in 2003.
Dear Dean:
In your letter you asked if I could give you some idea where a spring-creek junkie like yourself should go fishing on his first visit to California. Truth is California has very few genuine spring creeks. Certainly not nearly the number of chalk streams that you have back home in Pennsylvania’s limestone country. This probably has something to do with our lack of significant limestone bedrock.
But we are capable of supplying the fly angler with at least a few chalk-stream idylls. No doubt you’ve heard of the three spring creeks I’m going to talk about here as they are rather famous. I recommend that you not pass up the opportunity to fish one or two of them when you come out to visit me next year.
Many California fly fishermen consider Fall River in the volcano country around Mount Shasta to be the finest spring creek in the state, some say in the entire West. I think that’s taking things a bit too far, but you can be the judge. The only way to fish the Fall is by boat, usually in a pram with an electric motor. Fall River is too deep to wade and anyway is bordered almost exclusively by private property. You won’t be given permission to trespass no matter how politely you ask the ranchers. The Fall’s gradient is so easy that its surface barely holds a wrinkle and its currents hardly seem to move at all. The river is deep and remarkably transparent and its bottom grows with lush, bright waterweeds. The creek rises from among a few cottonwoods at Thousand Springs and winds its way idly through the flat and open ranchland of the Fall River Valley. You drift by twelve miles of open countryside, past Beefmaster cattle and weathered barns, with Mount Shasta and Mount Lassen always in view.
Anglers fish Fall River by casting downstream from their prams, allowing their flies to drift drag-free toward rising rainbow trout (and a few browns) that average 19 to 20 inches. The best time to be on the Fall is during the Hexagenia hatch of early summer. These inch-and-a-half long mayflies come to the surface at dusk and bring every trout in the river up with them. The Hex hatch continues long into the evening. In the late afternoon, fly fishermen waiting for the evening hatch work Hexagenia nymphs under the surface until the rings of feeding trout start appearing on the surface. Spring fishing begins with Baetis, Pale Morning Duns, and evening caddis hatches. In mid-summer there are good Trico spinner falls that continue into autumn, when Baetis activity picks up again.
But you never much cared for fishing from a boat, did you, Dean? Wading is more your style, as you say you have an acute vascular need to feel the current against your legs. In that case, I recommend that you visit Hat Creek, which runs close by the Fall River. Hat Creek is California’s answer to the Firehole and Letort Spring Run.
The trophy trout section of Hat Creek is near the small mountain resort of Burney. The lower creek is fed by the rich spring-water of Rising River — in fact lower Hat Creek is really the lower half of Rising River. Upstream, Hat Creek is a rather narrow and ordinary freestone stream tumbling down from the volcanic highlands of Lassen National Park. Downstream it becomes the best-known piece of trout water in California, a wide and luscious spring creek totally transformed by the inflow of the Rising River. Rising River’s cold springs are hidden under limestone and volcanic rock and its high concentration of bound carbon dioxide and dissolved limestone and marl gives lower Hat Creek its rich alkalinity and spring-creek features. And just to remind you, Dean, that this is California and not Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, be advised that Clint Eastwood owns a ranch on the Rising River, a spread once owned by Bing Crosby.
You get to the trophy trout section of Hat Creek by driving down a steep utility road to a dirt parking lot near the Hat Number 2 powerhouse. The first thing you notice are a dozen electrical power lines strung above the creek buzzing like hornets attacking the dream of trout fishing. For about three hundred yards where it pours out of the powerhouse, Hat Creek rushes downstream in a swift stony riffle. This riffle is almost always full of fly anglers fishing under the power lines. A large number of trout, mostly rainbows, are concentrated in this riffle. Fly fishermen who feel uncomfortable fishing in the more challenging flat water downstream are more at home in this riffle, where the turbulence of the water tends to hide faulty presentations and less than perfect casts.
Downstream from the riffle, Hat Creek begins to flatten out and take on a classic spring-creek appearance. The current relaxes and the surface of the water becomes very smooth and glassine. The pools are like windowpane, the water is utterly transparent, and the light sandy bottom shows up well, especially on a bright day. The water idles through a meadow pasture for about a mile, as fenced-in cattle graze on nearby hillsides and blackbirds flit in and out of tule reeds along the banks. Incense cedars border the fringes of the meadow. Gradually the banks rise up into canyon sides but the water retains its weedy, spring-creek features for about another mile. The Highway 299 bridge spans the middle of the canyon section, and below the bridge is about a mile and a half of water with freestone features extending all the way down to where Hat Creek empties into Lake Britton.
In those stretches along the meadow, the water depth averages around five feet, and with few places to wade, good casting spots are at a premium. In summer, ranch irrigation can draw the creek down a bit, making it easier to wade. The alkalinity of the creek encourages an abundance of mayfly life. This results in an average of two thousand rainbow and brown trout for every mile of slow meadow water (which you might want to know is much lower than a couple of decades ago, as the creek has been suffering from excess sedimentation). The riffle section below the powerhouse holds even more fish. All the trout are wild, there are no hatchery fish in the trophy trout section, and a barrier dam keeps trash species from Lake Britton out of the creek.
The fishing is best immediately after the trout opener in late April right through the end of June. Insect activity winds down in the heat of summer, but picks up again in autumn. Golden stoneflies and salmon flies mate over the riffle section starting in late spring and there will be good caddis swarms there in the evening. Throughout the day, beginning around late April, especially if the weather is warm, Pale Morning Duns, BlueWinged Olives, caddis, and little yellow stoneflies will be coming off the stream. Green Drakes hatch on windy overcast days, especially when there is some drizzle. In summer when it gets very hot, the fishing slows down, and daily Trico spinner falls provide much of the action. After Labor Day, the Blue-Winged Olives return, and as the days turns crisp, the orange October caddis turn on.
Dean, I hardly have to tell you how to fish a spring creek. In the meadow water, the trout position themselves in feeding lanes close by undulating weed beds. When spooked, they hide under the weeds and lay low for a while. Fly anglers cast long, either upstream or down, and use long light leaders. Anglers who twitch their flies a little to make them act more like living insects tend to get more strikes than those who dead-drift. Waterweeds are common, growing almost all the way up to the surface, so you may have to hold your rod high to keep a hooked trout out of the plants. The complex insect hatches can be a puzzle even to dry-fly experts like yourself. There are moments on Hat Creek when trout will be inhaling caddis flies while others are sipping a few falling mayfly spinners and yet even more are concentrating on something emerging just under the surface. Figuring it all out is the name of the game here.
Another spring creek you will want to fish — and one not to be confused with Hat Creek — is Hot Creek, a flat ribbon twisting through a stark western meadow on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada. This is a desert spring creek in the heart of sagebrush country.
Nine rustic cabins sit on a bare grassy meadow with the huge granite peaks of the Sierras at their backs. These are the housekeeping cabins of Hot Creek Ranch. I know you’ve heard of Hot Creek Ranch, Dean, every fly fisher has. The ranch has several miles of private meadow fishing where there is nary a tree, bush, or bank obstruction to snag a backcast. The ranch controls access to the only trout water in America that is restricted to dryfly fishing. Wading is forbidden on the ranch water, too, in order to protect the aquatic plants. The creek is rooted with dense braids of aquatic vegetation and has eleven thousand trout in every twisting mile. (Yes, eleven thousand trout, this is not a typographical error.) Anglers walk the banks of the stream casting to rising fish as if they were Englishmen in the days of Frederic Halford.
Hot Creek winds out of the private ranch meadow toward a canyon of lava outcroppings. For the first quarter-mile where the public water begins, the creek very much resembles the pasture upstream with its twists and oxbows and meadow meanders. And then Hot Creek enters a gentle walk-in canyon, all the while retaining much of its spring-creek grandeur. Both the dry-fly and no-wading rules are suspended in this stretch, but the public water is restricted to flies or lures with barbless hooks. The clean water gushes rather swiftly over cobble and pea-size gravel, its many waterweeds braiding the currents. After the creek flows for slightly less than a mile in the canyon, the fishing abruptly ends at a hot sulfur spring that warms the water and gives Hot Creek its name. The hot spring is a natural thermal barrier that prevents brown trout from escaping downstream into the Owens River and Lake Crowley, and prevents Owens rainbows from swimming upstream into Hot Creek. The thermals and hot springs in this area might put you a little in mind of the Firehole.
The public water on Hot Creek is almost always crowded. In fact the canyon stretch is the most heavily fished single mile of trout water in California. Hot Creek is equidistant from both San Francisco and Los Angeles, but it attracts mostly southern Californians, mainly because the rivers that lie in the sagebrush basins east of the Sierra Nevada mountains offer the best trout fishing nearest the City of Angels. Although Hot Creek is almost always crowded, it is an experience not to be missed. And if you want to escape the crowds there is always the fee fishing on Hot Creek Ranch.
Hot Creek’s canyon is reached by a dirt trunk road just off Highway 395, and fly fishermen walk down into the canyon from two small and unobtrusive parking areas. The fishing in the canyon is pretty much identical to what you find on the private ranch water, only you’re more likely to see anglers fishing with nymphs and emergers than dry flies. (Here’s the secret of Hot Creek Ranch, Dean: the fly fishermen cheat. When trout aren’t rising, fishermen allow their dry flies to drag and sink so they can be fished like nymphs. It works, too.)
In addition to putting up with the crowds, you’re also going to have to fight the wind that pretty much blows all the time out here. Although you can wade the public water, it isn’t necessary as there isn’t a place on the creek where you can’t cast across to the other side with a mere flick of the wrist. The best fishing is in late May and June before the waterweeds begin to choke the creek. The stream is full of small caddis and mayflies that start hatching around 9 in the morning and continue rising all day. The most popular flies on this stream are probably caddis and Blue-Winged olives. Experts insist that exact imitation is the key to success on Hot Creek. But I’ve found that an Elk Hair Caddis or an Adams will pretty much cover most situations. The trick is to pick a fly that is as small as the naturals. Use long, fine tippets on this stream because a heavier leader will cause your fly to drag in the mixed currents and the trout will ignore it. Remember, Dean, these trout have seen thousands of anglers and hundreds of fly patterns. They know more than you do.
There you have it, Dean. These are California’s three major spring creeks. At least our public waters. I’ll leave it up to you to judge how they stack up to your limestone streams. I’ve fished in Pennsylvania, and in the Rocky Mountains, too, and like anybody else I have my preferences. But I don’t see much point in making comparisons or reaching for analogies. The Firehole is the Firehole, and Hat Creek is Hat Creek. Each is a unique fishing experience.
So come out and see me, Dean, and take in a little fishing while you’re here. And don’t forget to look up from time to time at our scenery. The peaks of the Sierra Nevada will take your breath away. The views of Mount Shasta and Mount Lassen floating in the distance will make you feel like you’re fishing in a Hokusai painting. The trout are waiting.
Your good friend,
Mike
