Beneath the Surface: Redbands

trout trout
CALIFORNIA HAS ELEVEN NATIVE SPECIES AND SUBSPECIES OF TROUT. SHOWN ABOVE ARE TWO SUBSPECIES OF RAINBOW TROUT CAUGHT BY THE AUTHOR: WARNER LAKES REDBAND (LEFT) AND GOOSE LAKE REDBAND (RIGHT).

A couple years ago, I was traveling with a journalist friend who was seeing the West for the first time, after ten years of working as a war photographer in Africa. We stopped in Utah and had a big dinner in a place where several taciturn Mormon ranchers were present. They seemed, in a friendly way, baffled as to how this young, tattooed woman from Brooklyn could have spent her first decade of adulthood wearing body armor and moving in and out of livefire zones. She had an easy answer. “It’s all logistics,” she said. “I don’t have to have the best equipment or contacts. I just have to know how to get myself on the transport flight and make sure I have the supplies to do my thing. The rest comes naturally.” The ranchers understood immediately. Their line of work involved quite a bit of logistics, too.

I’m not a war reporter, but I have always taken a logistics-first approach to my fishing. Anyone who’s had the bad luck of fishing with me when I’m not using a tenkara rod knows that I’m an inexcusably clumsy rod-and-reel caster. I almost never carry more than three or four fly patterns at a time. I don’t have tons of patience.

If I’m alone, I often prefer to move on rather than recast to the same spot. I like to cover a lot of ground, and I know that a wiser angler would take fish from a lot of the water that I race past.

But I catch a lot of fish. Sometimes I think that this is because I’m getting pretty good, under it all. Then I hit the Madison or the Beaverkill and am reminded of all my shortcomings and of the fact that any idiot could catch fish in most of the places where I go. That’s because one of my favorite parts of fishing involves looking at maps, working on the truck, calling ahead about road and trail conditions, and ordering yet another piece of equipment to add to my gear bags. My girlfriend likes to say that I don’t actually fish so much as I “rummage,” always looking for gear and maps and inquiring about spots and dragging her down back roads and up lonely canyons, using up most of the day exploring, when a normal person would probably have had a fly on the water for hours. But my girlfriend also likes to be taken to places where she can catch a nineteen-inch cutthroat without having to cast or wade more than ten feet. That was how she caught her first-ever trout, high in the mountains of Idaho, and it all looked pretty simple to her once she was in the water. But it took a lot of rummaging and planning to get us there.

Happily for me, California has a prize for people who enjoy this kind of fishing — the California Heritage Trout Challenge, which offers a certificate, a poster, and lifelong glory for anyone who can catch and document six out of the eleven native trout species or subspecies that live in our inland waters. It’s one of at least six similar challenges offered by various states to raise awareness of rare and threatened native species, to say nothing of the grand eighteen-species challenge offered by the Western Native Trout Initiative.

The Wyoming Cutt Slam is probably the most famous of these. But anyone who fishes enough in California knows that there is something special about the Heritage Trout Challenge. No other state can match the diversity of species and the breadth of geography and life zones you’ll encounter or the levels of intricate planning required to hunt them all down. Someone who planned it well and was maybe a little bit maniacal could complete the Wyoming Cutt Slam in a single twenty-four-hour span. Trust me, I know for a fact that it’s possible. But I’ve tried puzzling it out, and I really can’t see how anyone could finish the Heritage Trout Challenge in much under a week, and even that would be such a slog that I can’t imagine it would be much fun or that it would feel very rewarding at the end. The great joy of the challenge is that it’s hardly a fishing challenge at all, but a continual series of planning decisions, forcing you to learn the curious and diverse life history of, say, the coastal cutthroat, to stop at fly shops and ask about stream conditions, to research where the fish are genetically pure enough to count for the challenge, and to think about the accidents of hydrology and geology that caused the speciation that gives us so many different sorts of bejeweled little mountain trout. Which, in turn, are the same processes that give us so many life zones and that make California one of the most botanically diverse places on the planet.

Which, in turn, is what makes California feel so much like a world apart. People who fish in this state talk a lot about the Heritage Trout Challenge — you’ll overhear people in a fly shop saying excitedly that they’re on their fourth species, and you’ll hear friends wistfully say they want to take a summer and really go for it this year. But it’s not because it’s a fishing challenge, per se, and no one who completes it will end up learning much of anything about casting or fly selection or any of the sorts of skills that we so often associate with the process of learning to be a better fly fisher. Anyone can catch these fish, once they’ve done the planning and have gotten themselves to where the fish live. But it’s an unparalleled education in the nature and geography of California, and it’s how I learned to feel at home here.


I first heard about the challenge a few months after I moved back to California, as an Ohioan who had lived here for a couple years and had fallen in love with it without ever really settling in. I soon had to move back to New York for work, then had moved to New Mexico to finish a book, and had finally now made it back. It’s a long story, but I wasn’t exactly in what you would call a great place in my life. I was drinking more than a lot, unsure of what to do with myself now that my book was out — and especially now that it wasn’t selling well — and I didn’t know many people. I wanted to be in California because I had always been enamored of the state’s landscape and plant life, but mostly the people I knew here were fellow refugees from the brutal contractions of print publishing, who were being hired in Hollywood as fast as they were being laid off by magazines in New York. So I’d come to LA, because that was where everyone was moving, but I realized that I didn’t really want to work in film — I wanted to write about nature. And that wasn’t exactly a booming market.

One day, with nothing better to do, I was wandering along the archery range in Lower Arroyo Park in Pasadena, and I happened upon a presentation at the Pasadena Casting Club on the Heritage Trout Challenge by Frank Burr from Oasis Fly Fishing. I was entranced. I’d never even heard of half the species he was talking about, and I was shocked to think that even before then, I had never had a reason to go north of Redding. I’d never even been to the PCC clubhouse, but I was suddenly borrowing a pen and paper and scribbling notes, and that same week, I headed up to the southern Sierra, where I caught my first Kern River rainbow, part of a series of trips during which I got all of the golden trout subspecies of the Kern Country, which deserve an essay all their own. But it was the three redband species up in volcano country that really drew me.

We should be honest about something. Most of the trout on the Heritage Challenge list aren’t really separate species, the way oaks and pines are separate species. They aren’t even separate species the way California live oaks and Eastern red oaks are separate species. Golden trout, rainbows, and redbands are all subspecies of Oncorhynchus mykiss, and they will freely hybridize with each other if given the chance. But they became and remain distinct because of landscape features that caused them to separate and develop unique adaptations and characteristics for their particular fluvial geographies.

Most anglers know that the golden trout is a high-country fish. Redbands, though, are diverse, and even just in California, we have distinct types, wholly cut off from each other. There’s the McCloud redband, which the state views as having a native range up above the middle falls on the river, a barrier that has separated it from their resident rainbow and anadromous steelhead cousins on the lower river. And then there are the redbands of the Great Basin, which live in sealed systems draining into shallow lakes up in the remote ranching regions of northeastern California and southeastern Oregon.

I loved contemplating this kind of thing and imagining myself seeking out the handful of slender tributaries where these trout still live. But to be honest, I found myself a little daunted by the presentation I had seen.

I was often in what might be charitably called a bad mood with myself, and I was a little worried that if I tried to make a trip up there and didn’t manage to find the fish, I might take it a little hard, especially because I could tell even then that the trick would involve planning and organization more than being a great fly fisher. I could handle it if I wasn’t catching fish because the fishing was tough, but being a good journalist involves being able to stay on top of plans and being organized and getting yourself to where you’re supposed to be, and I was at the point then where when I failed at that sort of thing, it had begun to make me wonder whether I was really cut out for the profession.


But that year was also the grim, hot, fire season of 2018. I write a lot about fire and forestry, and so when the horrible Carr Fire swept into Redding, I began to talk with a magazine in London about doing a piece about the new reality of wildfire in California. This got me thinking a dark thought. I knew that in the Arroyo Seco near my house in LA, a whole fish population had been wiped out by the Station Fire and the catastrophic flood that had followed, in 2009. I thought about the small creeks where these redbands made their stands and worried that the same thing might happen there. I figured that if I waited too long, I might never get a chance to go for some of these species. So I got my maps and my gear, and I loaded up.

I spent a week in Redding, working on my story, seeing some very dark things. This was before the Camp Fire had swept into Paradise, but it was already one of the worst fire seasons on record. The temperatures in the hills and at the incident command post down in Anderson were brutal, and like anyone who cares about California trout, I found myself wondering how any coldwater species would be able to survive in the hotter and more marginal waters they’d soon be facing.

road
ON THE ROAD TO REDBAND COUNTRY.

But you can’t be too gloomy when you have a fishing trip waiting for you, and finally I put away my phone and my notebooks and headed up past Mount Shasta to the McCloud. I camped on the main stem of the river that night. The guys at the Ted Fay Fly Shop in Dunsmuir had told me that for a redband to be pure enough to count for the challenge, I had to fish tributaries or high up on the main river, above a small dam just off Highway 89. I found that dam, went to rig up, and snapped the tip of my tenkara rod as I was extending it. This was bad for my morale and worse for my fishing, because it meant I actually had to cast a rod-and-reel setup and because the only spare rod I had was a fifty-five-dollar limp and floppy fiberglass rod I’d bought on a whim and that I’d left sitting in a crate of auto repair tools. By the time I’d even remembered I had that spare, it was getting dark, and I grumpily headed off to make camp.

I met an old forester named Chris at the small campsite where I’d set up, just south of the river, and we were just sitting down to a whiskey by the fire when three big CalFire trucks rolled up, sirens blaring. We had fire permits, and we’d both checked with the US Forest Service to make sure it was legal to make a ground fire, but the fire captains hadn’t known that. They cursed us for being idiots and threatened to call the sheriff before they realized we were right, and they apologized and had a grape juice and a breather. They were tired and edgy, they said. They’d never imagined a fire season like the one they were having, and they had no idea, then, that it was only going to get worse. They took off into the night, apologizing again for disturbing us.

Chris, it turned out, knew exactly where to find a McCloud redband, even if he wasn’t much of a fisherman himself. It turned out, too, that he was neighbors back in Oklahoma with Dave Whitlock, the great fly tyer and fishing author. I said that was really cool.

“It’s not that cool,” Chris said. “He thinks he’s a big shot.”

“Well, he is a big shot,” I said.

“To you he is,” Chris said. “To me he’s just a guy.” He was crotchety, but a good pal, and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. Chris was doing a survey up near Trout Creek Campground, twenty miles through timberland north of the highway from the town of McCloud. He pointed me the way, and the next morning, I was off with my glass rod to check out Trout Creek, which to my disappointment, at that point in the summer, was a thin and pretty beaten-down stream. Campers had crushed a lot of the vegetation along what at one point had obviously been prime habitat, and in other spots, tree and shrub life had been cut straight up to the bank, such that bends were collapsing into muddy pits where no trout could survive. I hiked up and found to my shock that a few campers were chainsawing whole live trees for firewood and to clear out a spot for their trailer. If they hadn’t had guns on their hips, I might have really got into it with them, but I had to leave it.

It occurred to me that this was a creek that could really use a few more concerned fly fishers to give it some attention. And that, after all, is a big part of what the Heritage Trout Challenge is all about. But it was obvious in spots that some careful restoration work had been done. I took my first McCloud redband in a waist-deep pool by a gravel road where the bank had been shorn up with rock and healthy riparian cover made it so that I had to make a pinpoint bow cast to get a drift under the willows. I was shocked to see an eleven-inch trout come out of that tiny stream and crush my size 10 Stimulator, and I was pretty disappointed to drop my phone while I was trying to get a picture of him. I let him go so as not to beat him up too badly while I looked through the rocks for it. But from there I hit a groove, and soon I’d caught a dozen or so, even if none were nearly as big as that first one. I now had four species.


The next day, I took off down Highway 89 toward Alturas. The smoke was thick again, and the sheer number of fires started to feel unbelievable. I was caught in two highway shutdowns, and at one point, I saw a Forest Service crew a few hundred yards off the road working to put out a small fire that had just started. I watched them for a bit and then saw them run for their trucks as the wind turned and things started to get dicey. I went for my own truck as the fire approached me, and I couldn’t get the damn thing started. The wind was really going now. I popped the hood and realized that my battery contacts were loose. I headed on toward Modoc country.

Goose Lake is one of the many wide lakes of the Great Basin where water that has no outlet to a major river, much less to the ocean, pools in shallow wetlands that are major homes for migrating waterfowl and all sorts of lacustrine life, from tiny shrimp to redband trout. I assume Goose Lake is as beautiful as the others I’ve seen like it, but I can’t say for sure, because even though Highway 395 parallels it closely, the smoke was so thick that I could barely see gas stations off to the side of the road. I got not the faintest glimpse of the lake itself.

I kept north and pulled up to a Forest Service road heading toward Lassen Creek, the main redoubt of the Goose Lake redband. I hate to reveal a great spot and have it get overrun, but I think the area we’re talking about is remote enough that I’m safe in saying that Lassen Creek Campground is a Class A destination for anyone who likes small-stream fishing. The site is popular with obsidian miners, and a crew of them obviously just recently had been chased out by the smoke, leaving big piles of beautiful, fist-size hunks of black glass.

I kept a wet rag over my face to keep off the smoke and caught my first Goose Lake redband barefoot, standing within sight of my tent. The next day, the smoke cleared, and I spent the morning fishing up past the series of pools and tiny falls that had been built on the stream as it ran past the campground, watching in wonder as the ground shimmered black wherever the sun broke through the tall canopy of healthy pines. There were so many pebble-sized obsidian flecks on the ground, and the trees were so richly red, that the landscape seemed to uncannily mirror the markings of the black-spotted trout, which have a purplish tint to them and are a bit darker than the other local redbands.

I was on a roll now, I thought. I headed up and around the base of the Warner Mountains, turning toward the north-facing slopes that drain into the Warner Lakes Basin of southeastern Oregon. The Warner Lakes redband lives mostly in Oregon, but for the purposes of the challenge, of course, you have to catch your fish in California. This means that you have to get up to where a few small creeks begin — at 7,200 feet, up where the elevation and the northward aspect of the drainages mean that there’s a very narrow snowless window to try to fish for them.


The roads were pretty good until I crested the hill and turned down to the exposed face, when they turned muddy, and I had to switch on the four-wheel drive. I set out to fish the inauspiciously named Dismal Creek, which begins as a meadow swamp and runs just a mile to the Oregon border, which is marked by a worn barbed-wire fence. At that point in the summer, the creek was barely moving and no wider than my shoulders. I couldn’t get within sight if it without spooking every fish for fifty yards. I’d been told that most people who try for the Warner Lakes redband get theirs in Dismal Creek, but I couldn’t raise a fish to save my life — or to save the expedition. I was stumped. I had to file my story about the Carr Fire, and I needed to be online the next day to talk to my editor. So this day was my only chance, and I had squandered most of it trying Dismal Creek over and over.

Finally I took out my maps again and realized that there were two more creeks that rose just a bit to the east of Dismal Creek and also ran through a few miles of California before crossing into Oregon. I headed that way and found a narrow thread of water that eventually became Twelve-mile Creek, which plunged precipitously into a canyon that gave a funneled view of the valley many miles below. And I could see that it was full of fish.

But I couldn’t fish for them, because it was so thoroughly overrun with ranging cattle that it looked like a collection of mud wallows, and every time I approached, I would spook a few cows and cause them to thunder down the stream, crashing through streamside vegetation and beating up the streambed even more. Finally I bushwhacked through thick chaparral to the top of the ridge and followed this up above the herd, which it turned out was covering at least a mile or so of prime stream, doing no good for the fish in the process. I was exhausted by the time I stumbled back into the tree cover that took over as I dropped in elevation.

I started trying to fish through a low, dense canopy of the kind that badly needed thinning if it wasn’t going to end up another catastrophic burn someday. I could barely move, much less get close enough to the stream to cast, without spooking everything in it. I was literally crawling when I heard the telltale sound of a small waterfall, a siren call for anyone who fishes narrow streams and knows how even a tiny bit of broken water can give a rare chance to muffle the impact of your footfalls. I bellied my way through the undergrowth and found a miniature plunge pool about the size of my bathtub, foaming under a three-foot fall. I tied on a red Humpy, changing flies for good luck, and a gorgeous redband leapt for it before it even hit the water. I missed it, of course.

It was now almost dark. I was a bit despondent. I didn’t think there would be any chance to wait for the pool to settle before I tried again, and I couldn’t imagine that there would be much chance to fish higher up, with all those cows stamping and crashing through the worn-down little stream. I didn’t even want to try, provoking them into doing worse damage than they already had. I’d been one hook set away from finishing the challenge.

In absolute dumb frustration, I whipped the glass rod, casting at nothing, halfway thinking I might break the damn thing. But that noodle of a fiberglass rod bent almost double and gently turned over a few feet of line into a sort-of cast that landed back into the broken water under the falls. It wasn’t a very good drift, but it didn’t need to be. I watched in amazement as the chili-red king of the little pool shouldered past two smaller trout and turned back to take the Humpy. This time I didn’t miss, and this time I made very sure not to drop my phone when I got his picture.

I’ve now caught all the species covered by the challenge, most of them many times over. But I’ve never bothered to send in proof and to claim my certificate. I got to explore the Carson and Walker drainages for Lahontans, Humboldt for coastal cutts, and a long list of other places I might have taken years to get around to visiting otherwise. It felt more like I’d passed a test on the geography of California than that I’d beaten a fishing challenge. It made me feel suddenly very much at home in my new state as I drove back past Shasta and down to LA. I’ve called myself a Californian ever since.