We were hiking downhill for once. Rarely in California’s High Sierra is a trail actually level. But this is part of the charm of it, after all. New vistas leap from the map, and I’m traipsing along through a world-class living postcard. George Revel, Che Garcia, and I were on a couple of weeks’ excursion chasing a perhaps mythical backcountry trout.
Next to our trail, Golden Trout Creek exits a meandering meadow, turns into a slight ravine, and gains momentum, gurgling and cascading into a bustling little freestone stream.
Open groves of ponderosa and Jeffery pine dominate a landscape more akin to Northern California’s Cascade Range than the typical granite underfoot throughout most of the southern High Sierra. The scent of the air is rich and welcoming —the odor of conifer I was born in. However far I wander, in a world of wonderful forest scents, I never seem to miss this one till I breathe it anew. Crisp, olfactory air is incense to the soul. The sound of a bustling stream likewise.
To our left, a raw volcanic ridge of clunky, ragged lava flow called The Malpaise parallels our trail. A type of rapidly cooled basalt flow known as A’a, the chocolate brown ridge divides us from Volcano Creek Meadows, out of sight and beyond the lava ridge, maybe a hundred feet high or more. I can’t see over it and only know what lies behind by deduction.
The day before, we had wandered through that meadow. Fed by small snowmelt streams called stringers, splashing through tiny woodland rivulets, the water vanishes into the ground at the meadow’s edge. Dusty stream bed snakes north, dry as an old bone, across a meadow of bunch grass withered tan by drought. What had happened to the spectacular and diminutive Volcano Creek golden trout, isolated here for so long by the Malpaise? Scant winter snow in the high country takes its toll. You start thinking of Mary Austin’s provocative and classic Land of Little Rain, penned just east of us over a hundred years ago.
Boots crunching the withered earth along the eastern edge of the meadow, we chanced upon a spring where a short length of ‘leap across’ stream wandered beneath an island of green and vibrant meadow grass. A scant stones-throw in length, here, at least we chanced on water.
Suddenly, beneath our feet were Volcano Creek golden trout. They darted about crazily from our thumping approach and bull-dogged beneath the bank. Even when the creek is flowing, it disappears beneath the lava flow, isolating the trout in the meadow for millennium. These circumstances of volcanic activity are not dissimilar to the landscape of McCloud redband trout. They were unimaginably still hanging on here in this tiny ribbon of flowing water. I’ve been here a number of times before, and in drought as well, each trip a head-scratching reminder of how curious it is to see a trout so far from any connecting stream.
Back over the ridge, our trail diverges from Golden Trout Creek. It plunges unseen down a raucous gorge, dumps over a ribbon of falls, and finally joins the Kern River inside Sequoia National Park. We cross a small meadow where cattle have been grazing and step across another spring forming a steeply cascading creek of icy water. We cross it over a natural bridge of peculiar tuff lava flow arches, where water dashes beneath us 10 feet or so below. One of the few stream passages like this I’ve seen anywhere. Popo Agie comes to mind, where it does something like this on the eastern flank of the Wind River Range.
Dropping our packs above the bridge, we dig out our fishing paraphernalia. The creek is maybe a mile long, before joining Golden Trout Creek above the falls. We trudge along its banks, spooking a coffee-colored sow bear and her cub. They gallop casually, annoyed upstream and out of sight around a bend. Aside from our bruin friends, we are completely alone here. We haven’t seen another Sape in days. The stream is teeming with goldens, which look like the Volcano Creek fish, quite distinct from the Golden Trout Creek population next door. We land a few on tiny mayfly patterns beneath gossamer tippets before turning our attention to filming them underwater. It turns out to be not so easy; they have a strong reluctance for interaction with the humans. Who knew?
Perfectly symmetrical, these diminutive trout look as though they belong on some tropical reef off the coast of Meso America, not tucked away at the base of a lava flow in some forgotten backwater of the Sierra Nevada. Back on the trail, a deep gash yawns beneath us at right angles, miles in length, dividing the Great Western Divide from the slightly higher eastern escarpment of the range where Mount Langley juts to over 14,000 feet just out of sight to the north. Between these two parallel north-south aligned ribs of alpine peaks, the Kern River, 2,500 feet beneath us and far out of sight, flows south.
The canyon, with its granitic walls, looks something like a mini version of Yosemite Valley or the ragged tooth-like ribs of Kings Canyon. Straight as an arrow, the Kern will finally disappear beyond these intoxicating confines just before the toxic agricultural and oil field landscape of the upper San Joaquin Valley near Bakersfield. The canyon beneath us suggests nothing of the river’s wretched end, only hinted of by the flat brownish-yellow haze barely perceptible far down the canyon Horizon.
Along the river, between canyon walls, we set up camp. Before us, a bustling freestone stream reeking of trout. The classic pattern: boulders, cascades, long runs framed by occasional meadow, walls of granite, Tower Rock soaring nearly 2,000 feet above us.
Earlier in the day, we had been looking down on that peak. We turn our attention to our quarry, the ethereal Kern River rainbow. California Trout’s seminal treatise, State of Salmonids II: Fish in Hot Water describes, “The Kern River rainbow have a high probability of disappearing…in the next 50 years, if not sooner.”
Rumors of this fish here date back over 150 years. During 1867, a large landslide occurred a couple of miles below us, creating Kern and Little Kern Lakes. An early account supporting the loose connection with facts anglers the world over are known for includes: “So abundant were trout in Kern Lake, that it was common to fish with two rods. One would be cast with the right hand, and upon getting a fish of sixteen to eighteen inches in length, a second fish from among the school would take the second line. Then followed sport enough to please the most ennuied fisherman.” (From a 1909 account published by a fellow auspiciously named Ben Fish).
Rumors, always rumors. On the eve of our trip, in the village of Lone Pine, we dropped by for a pre-trip tankard at Jake’s Place. When you tell folks at the local watering hole you are heading out on a fishing junket, by magic, everyone in the room is a fishing expert. Eyes glisten and gleam. Each had fished there in the distant past or knew of some aunt or uncle who had. As well, each had captured enormous Kern River rainbow. While we side-glance these titans of trout in a remote bar, it’s better to be encouraged than disparaged. No matter where you go in the American West, the size of trout is directly proportionate to the amount of alcohol consumed.
“The Kern River rainbow turns out to be closely related to the California golden on one side above the canyon, and the Little Kern golden on the other.”
The fact is, the river has plenty of rainbow trout. And some nice-sized ones at that. However, the Kern River rainbow shares a story not dissimilar to the golden trout we had run across in the higher elevations. In our documentary called “Liquid Gold, Search for the Golden Trout,” I noted that in their original habitat, introduced rainbow trout hybridize with goldens while introduced brown trout eat them. A hatchery near the end of the canyon in Kernville had planted various rainbow and brown trout in the river from as far away as the Sission Hatchery in Mount Shasta.
The Kern River rainbow turns out to be closely related to the California golden on one side above the canyon, and the Little Kern golden on the other. Over a century of hatchery plants hybridizing with the Kern River rainbow, though, suggest the chance of one of these rare trout eating my dry fly is dubious.
Their physical description is painted with somewhat broad strokes, “a slight gold tint, fine irregular spots all over their bodies, and larger fish may have a rosy streak along their sides.” (SOS II) We certainly caught fish that seemed to fit this description, though many looked like any other rainbow trout we might catch along a California freestone stream. Ultimately, the reality will be left to the geneticists to answer the question of whether there is any pure-strain Kern River rainbow left -and what that would look like anyway. Would they be 80% pure? More? Less?
In the geologic past, all three of these trout reached the southern end of the Sierra, through occasionally linking sloughs and channels connecting around the corner from the lower Kern to historic Tulare Lake (which recently re-emerged courtesy of remarkable winter storms), then north through the Fresno sloughs, into the San Joaquin River proper, and ultimately the Pacific Ocean.
If they do still exist, and there is an opportunity to preserve them, efforts must be made. As a colleague said, “Once a species blinks out, it is gone forever.’ To most, as the late Phil Pister, whom I call the ‘Dean of the Golden Trout’ told me one afternoon in Bishop, “Craig, nobody cares if a golden trout is genetically pure, all they want to do is catch a pretty fish.” But hey, if you don’t go, you’ll never know.
