I had resolved not to fish for trout this summer. This isn’t to say that I think anyone else should have decided to do the same thing, but most fly fishers that I know have been wrestling a bit with the same internal conflicts I was when I decided this: in a year of such tremendous heat, pitifully low water, and absolutely unprecedented fishing pressure, I’ve found it hard to justify hitting some of the waters that make up my summer circuit, from the Kern here in California up to Rock Creek in Montana, and even in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where drought is less of an issue, but where I can’t really imagine casting with the crowds to stressed out and banged-up trout that have schooled up under dams and in pools below falls in a desperate attempt to find cool and oxygenated water. None of it seemed like it would be much fun.
This is what got me on a mountain bike. In April, my girlfriend and I fished our way back from a trip to Taos, which brought us from the Rio Grande Gorge to the Arkansas headwaters in Colorado and then to the Flaming Gorge before we headed back to California. Even that early in the year, all these waters were getting fished pretty hard — all of them being well-known Western fisheries that have become magnets for new fly fishers during the pandemic-era boom in outdoor sports. I was mostly fishing waters new to me on this trip, which meant that bit by bit, I had to find spots that suited my style of fishing. We were traveling fast, which meant I often got only a day or a day and a half on a given river. And I found that I, like many people who fly fish, often lacked the discipline to hike away from the crowds, to scout effectively and to explore and learn a river the way I always tell myself I should before I just start plunking in a nymph rig, hoping for the best and having decent, but humdrum days of hurried fishing. Then I got to Truckee.
I often try to approach my fishing more like a spot-and-stalk hunter than in the more straightforward cast-and-wade mode of covering water. I find that it’s an approach that’s especially well suited to targeting bigger fish, just like how a bighorn sheep hunter may end up passing up dozens of ewes and younger rams while she looks for the bedding spot of the one big ram she’s hoping for. On the Truckee, a river I had never fished before, I forced myself to push forward to look for the best spots rather than spend time on marginal water. Here is what happened to me: I got taken to my backing twice by fish that came off, and also lost a third fish, likewise large. Each of these fish was holding in a specific type of water that I was seeking, and I had to cover a lot of ground to find it.
This section of the river happened to be paralleled by a bike path. As I headed back to the truck, frustrated at having hooked and lost three nice fish, I realized that a mountain bike would have allowed me to cover the water quickly, skipping over sections I wasn’t really interested in so I could focus on the spots where I thought I was most likely to catch the big fish I was hunting that day. And it would have quickly brought me far from the lot where I’d parked, to parts of the river where fish were less pressured and facing less stress from other fly fishers.
A few days later, my girlfriend and I dropped in to meet the publisher of this magazine, and he gave us a tip about a small stream where we could fish without too many people around and where she might find some less wary fish than on the Truckee. But the hike to the stream was a few miles down a gated Forest Service road, and by the time we hit the water, she was tired, and our puppy was bored and making trouble. We barely got to fish before we started trudging back to the truck. As we walked, a man on a mountain bike pulled up to say hello to the dog. I noticed a rod tube sticking out of his backpack and asked if he’d been fishing. “Not much,” he said. “Just stayed long enough to catch ten before I had to go. I’m supposed to be at the store getting stuff for a barbecue later.” He told me that he bike-fished all over the Sierra and that he used the bike as something like a compromise between fishing well-known and heavily pressured waters and backpacking in to highly remote areas.
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of this earlier, and I didn’t even wait to get home before I bought a mountain bike I won an auction on eBay and picked it up in Santa Rosa before we headed back to Los Angeles.
Mountain biking is new to me, so everything I have to say about it is from the perspective of someone who’s just now discovering the sport. I was interested in mountain biking for trout mostly for reasons of environmental ethics, which seems funny as I type it, because until this season, I mostly despised mountain bikers and would silently curse as they bombed by me, blaring music and dinging their bells, on the canyon trails of Southern California. I found it absurd and frankly a little offensive how various mountain bike advocacy groups fought so vigorously to allow mountain biking in federally designated wilderness areas, because this seemed to me to violate the whole idea behind a wilderness experience — slow-paced interaction with nature in a space where nature and visiting travelers are supposed to be able to live free from the imposition of wheeled machines and the accoutrements of our tech-dominated society.
But here is my experience so far and a bit of an argument for why a bike might be worth considering for fishers of all backgrounds, even if they aren’t as hesitant about fishing our more popular rivers as I am these days.
The first thing to know about mountain biking is that it’s hard. I’m a somewhat serious athlete, and I still find that mountain biking can be a real physical test. Mountain biking also involves a lot of the stuff that I personally find annoying and unpleasant about fly fishing: it’s a gear-based sport, which means that things are always breaking, that you’re always discovering that you need a new thing, a better thing, or that the thing you have is fine, but that it would be way better to have a new and different kind of thing. I already have an infinitely long list of fishing, hunting, backpacking, and four-by-four gear that I want. I’m not really very excited about the idea of adding a whole new hobby’s worth of gear to that list. But I have been working on bikes since I was in high school, and I can do a lot of upgrades and repairs with parts and tools I have lying around already. I still found, though, that I was soon ordering new accessories and wrenches and parts and that my bike spent a fair amount of time in various stages of disassembly.
What I mean by this is that you shouldn’t imagine that you can just buy a bike and then start banging down your usual streamside trails past all the foot-bound suckers as you head to all the best spots. For one thing, you probably won’t be able to navigate those trails well at first, and you might never be able to at all. Rocks and root clusters that you’d barely notice while hiking can look like boulders and redwood logs when you’re barreling toward them on two wheels.
And the bigger question might be why you’d want to bring a bike fishing somewhere you already know you can comfortably access on foot. There is an element of courtesy at work here. Even now that I ride my mountain bike eight miles along a stream every day, I know that I would probably find it infuriating if suddenly great numbers of mountain bikers started populating the footpaths along my favorite rivers. It also changes your own personal experience, not just adding another layer of gear to a sport that’s often overloaded with stuff, but more generally adding a whole new mechanical and slightly disruptive dimension to an experience we so often hope to be peaceful and restorative.
But there is a middle ground. Shortly after I got my bike, I was reading the hunting writer Steven Rinella, who is a caring and judicious proponent of a kind of sportsmanship that treats ecosystems with respect and that views the experience of being in and a part of a natural system as more important than whether you bring home a trophy. “One thing many hunters overlook,” he said, “is a mountain bike. In highly pressured areas, a mountain bike can be useful for getting just a few miles away to places where game has less pressure, and you can hunt without being crowded.” So it seemed like I was onto something.
I began using it to scout for trout along the streams of Southern California, which in many cases were places I often saw mountain bikers and that I figured would be pretty easy rides. I wasn’t actually fishing, but the experience wasn’t too different — I was working with groups of ecologists and fly fishers to monitor stream conditions and to get visual counts of trout populations that were threatened by the heat and drought this year. So I was doing pretty much everything you’d do to fly fish besides casting and netting. And I was a bit shocked at how difficult I found it to navigate the rocks and roots and small ledges that I always passed over unthinkingly when I was on foot. I was also a bit shocked at how often I seemed to be needing to repair something or to fix a flat and even at how often I ended up falling, which is an experience that’s much less pleasant when you’re going fifteen miles an hour than it is when you trip and fall while hiking.
But it took only a few weeks of riding every day before suddenly I was hauling up ledges and over obstacles that once looked impossible to me. The sport is similar to fly fishing in that once you have a feel for the basics, it’s possible to get much better at it very quickly. And it’s similar to fly fishing in that no one is necessarily keeping score. If what you’re doing works for you and gives you a bit of thrill and fulfillment, then you’re doing it right, as long as you’re being respectful to the ecosystem you’re traveling through and to the other people using the trail. My goal with the bike was to get good enough that I could use it to get into places that I’d scouted that were remote, unpressured, and high enough up that I could actually fish.
Other people will have other goals and will certainly approach things differently: I chose to restrict myself to a bike with a single gear, for the same reason that I almost always fish with a tenkara rod and try to avoid changing flies too much. I like the challenge of making simple gear work. Some people who’ve had injuries or might be moving a bit less quickly than they used to could turn to a bike because it lets them cover ground that they otherwise couldn’t on foot, which is a great use of a bike, too, though it involves a slightly different approach than the one I started with.
I had been training for a bike packing trip to a spot I knew that would have been impossible to reach by car and time-consuming to reach by foot. The forest land around the river I wanted to fish was technically open, but the trailhead to access it was ten miles down a road that had been closed after a fire. Having the bike had opened up a vast area that I likely would never have fished otherwise. And in truth, I didn’t really feel that being on a wheeled machine did much to take me out of the backwoods experience. The bike allowed me to hunt fish on the river very efficiently and with a lot of focus. I found that on a bike, it was possible to use binoculars to scout for promising water and then to cover distance quickly to hit that water without troubling myself too much about how long a hike it was. I caught fewer fish than I might otherwise have, but they were bigger, and they were the fish I was looking for, rather than the ones that happened to be convenient. It was less annoying than I thought to carry my gear on my back as I biked, and having to bike-in my camping gear really focused my mind and forced me to bring only the absolute essentials. For a day trip, I could have carried everything I needed and barely even noticed it.
The trouble is that I’m not sure it was easier to explore that stream on a bike than it would have been on foot. Even in places where it’s technically legal to use a mountain bike on trails that are primarily used by hikers, those trails can be very unpredictable and difficult to navigate. Walking a bike is unpleasant, especially up rocky ledges, and thinking about a bike when you want to be thinking about fishing is even more unpleasant. I was able to scout and cover a lot of water with the bike, but I never got into the rhythm and flow that I enjoy so much about fishing for trout. That said, I would never have covered the nine miles of river that I did that day if I hadn’t had a bike, and it was somewhere around the eighth mile that I caught a nice eighteen-inch brown with a snarling little kype and gorgeous spots that was the only big trout I caught this summer. And I was so far from pavement that I could be pretty sure no one else had caught that fish this season, if ever.
Since then, I’ve made a big effort to talk to other people who mountain bike to fly fish. It turns out that the practice isn’t quite as rare as I supposed, especially in Northern California, the place where mountain biking began. Many people seemed to share the feeling I’d gotten about the practice: it’s often best to use the bike to get to the river and then to stash it and hike. This is an approach that can help both people who might struggle with mobility issues and people who just want to get away from the crowds and stressed-out fish that surround popular turnouts and parking lots. You can use a mountain bike (and in some cases even a simple hybrid or commuter bike) to travel gated or logging roads that would be impossible to travel by car and that you’d never want to slog down on foot. In my experience, even many roads that would be sketchy to navigate with a four-wheel-drive vehicle are a breeze when you travel them on a mountain bike, and after I looked back in my logs and memory, I was astonished at how often in my fishing life I’ve been stymied by a long hike, a gate, or a washedout road from hiking the three or four miles between me and the river I wanted to access.
With a bit of forethought, people of all ages and biking abilities can use a knobby-tired bike to cover those distances. One suggestion I frequently heard is to pull out a gazetteer or use something like Onyx Maps to look for access points. But I also heard a suggestion that you should just mentally revisit waters you’ve fished before and think about whether access roads and streamside trails would be opened up by having a bike as an option. This got me thinking about the gate on the road that parallels the Deschutes River near Maupin, Oregon. I’ve fished the Deschutes half a dozen times, but I’ve never gotten more than a mile above that gate, because by the time I reach it, I’ve already been fishing from my truck for a while on the part of the road that’s open, and have usually become tired and bogged down by fishing marginal water that holds more whitefish than trout. The next time I’m up that way, I’m going to bring the bike, and I’ll push as far upriver as I can go. Experienced bike fishers also suggest knowing your limits: wheeling a bike up and down a trail you can’t handle is much less fun than hiking and will certainly ruin a fishing day. And overloading on gear, especially when you’re loading the gear onto the bike itself, can make it sluggish and take a lot of the fun out of the experience.
That all said, a small bike multitool and a kit for changing a flat will cover 95 percent of the pressing mechanical issues you’re likely to face. For people who are new to working on bikes, it would probably be worth practicing how to repair a broken chain and swap out an inner tube a few times before you set off too far from your vehicle. Both can be learned from YouTube or a friend and are pretty easy once you’ve done them a couple times. It’s amazing how well fly-fishing and mountain-bike gear can be combined into a high-quality waist pack without it feeling like much of an encumbrance. I don’t like carrying gear on bike racks, but this would certainly be a good option if you want to haul in bulky stuff such as waders and boots — just bungee them to a rear rack and don’t forget that it’ll affect your balance a bit as you’re navigating rocks and turns.
But I use a 10-liter Filson waist pack that I also use for shorter trips when I’m doing my watershed conservation work. For longer trips, I use a 5-liter Patagonia chest pack on my front and a 13-liter Mountainsmith lumbar pack on my waist. In the go-light setup, I can keep my fly-fishing stuff, along with an ultralight jacket, bike tools, and some water in the midsized pack and use the pack’s straps to carry a rod tube. With the two-pack setup, I can keep my smaller fly-fishing gear in the chest pack and use the Mountainsmith pack to carry food, water, extra layers, tools, and even a set of waders using an external bungee-pouch system that the bag comes with. When it’s strapped down tight, you can carry a whole overnight trip’s worth of gear on your body while still feeling pretty nimble and unencumbered on the bike.
And feeling light and comfortable on a bike is probably even more important than it is when hiking. Riding over obstacles in a trail requires a feel for momentum and occasional sharp uses of force. Riding uphill requires you to maintain momentum and a steady application of force, which makes it much more disruptive — and even demoralizing — to stop an uphill bike climb than it is to pause on an uphill hike. A few people told me that they always try to arrange bike-fishing trips so they’re heading upstream at the start of the day, so they can roll comfortably downstream — and downhill — at the end of a long day of fishing.
I even started using the bike for fishing trips closer to home. I can ride it down to the LA River, and I’ve found that it’s great to have a tough mountain bike to tool around inside the actual concrete river channel — sometimes I even ride across the river — using binoculars and polarized glasses to scout for big carp tailing in the shallow waters. Again, it’s an approach much like spot-and-stalk hunting. But out of some kind of personal obstinacy, I always refuse to bring a lock, even on these urban forays. My feeling is that I got the bike so I could use it to get away from the usual spots. I still don’t love the idea of mountain bikes thudding along trails where other fishers go to find solace and to be in nature. So by not bringing a lock, I figure I’m forcing myself to abide by that spirit and to seek out places where I can turn my back to the bike and trust that nobody is likely to steal it while I’m got all my attention on sight fishing or aching to see movement on a strike indicator. I’m making things harder on myself than I need to, but that’s part of the point: I’m forcing myself to see new things and think about the waters I’ve always explored on foot in a new way. I’m fishing less and choosing the waters I do fish more carefully. It wasn’t so long ago that I despised mountain bikers and had no qualms about doing as much catch-and-release fly-fishing as I felt like. But these are dire times for trout in California, and we’re all going to end up having to do some rethinking in the hot days to come.
Additional Thoughts on Biking to Fish
Back in the 1980s, when I was in my midthirties and living in San Francisco, I took a borrowed mountain bike to Henry W. Coe State Park, which is situated in the Diablo Range just east of Morgan Hill. I had heard that at least one of the park’s streams held trout and that there were lakes and ponds with bass and panfish. Motor vehicles weren’t allowed within the park, though, so getting to the streams and all but one or two of the still waters would entail long hikes. A mountain bike seemed like the perfect alternative to reach the park’s fish more quickly. Well, the first lesson I learned on that trip was to look at a topo map before placing my feet on the pedals. The terrain of Henry Coe drops and rises steeply. The bike was great for traveling downhill, but once I reached bottom, the gradient was such that I had to push it uphill to proceed farther or to go back. Those parts of the trip became something of a death march.
The pond fishing was good, though, and the bike indeed broadened my range far beyond what hiking would have allowed that day. Despite the effort this particular excursion entailed, I was sold on the bike’s utility for reaching fishable waters when motor vehicle access is unavailable.
Thirty-five years later, I’m still sometimes cycling to fish. As I get older, however, the rides become more difficult, so I’m now considering buying an e-bike — a bicycle that has a small, battery-powered motor to assist with pedaling. E-bikes come in three classifications, which is important to know, because governmental agencies sometimes treat each of these classes differently. Class 1 e-bikes, for example, are the least powerful, and because this can lessen conflicts with hikers and equestrians, they tend to have the broadest approval for use on trails. The catch is that if you buy an e-bike (or convert a bike by adding a battery and a motor), you’ll need to determine whether your class is legal on the trail or road that you plan on riding. Some trails, such as the Pacific Crest Trail, don’t allow bikes, period. Bikes also aren’t allowed in wilderness areas.
As James Pogue noted in the adjacent article, you don’t necessarily need a mountain bike to reach fishable waters. I’ll add that if you’re using a paved road or trail, your basic ride-around-town bike will likely work fine. But I’ve flattened enough tires on city streets to prefer the knobby tires of a mountain bike on whatever surface I’m riding, and a mountain bike also is more versatile than other types of bicycles. Pushing a bike uphill takes effort, so wearing a pack with your gear in it, as James Pogue does, can make the task easier by minimizing weight on the bike. I store my tackle in a fanny pack or small backpack, but because I like to ride with my body unencumbered, I bungee the pack to a rack and then will remove it and wear it when an uphill push is needed. The biggest difficulty is figuring out where to put the rod, which for obvious reasons you should carry in its tube. A multipiece rod that fits into a short tube definitely makes transporting it easier, as do Velcro straps if you want to bind the tube to the bike’s frame. There are lots of ideas for how to outfit a fishing bike online. Keep in mind that each piece of gear you bring will add weight and thus effort when peddling. One of your goals should be to carry as little as possible.
You will also need at least one water bottle, a tire repair kit that includes a spare tube, and a hand-operated tire pump. Bike shops sell all of these items.
Some final notes on bicycling safety. During that first ride at Henry Coe, I descended one road so quickly that I nearly took out a group of elderly birdwatchers as I rounded a corner. On another ride, I was again going too quickly and hit an unseen rut, sending me over the handlebars. So take your time and watch where you’re going; you’re on a fishing trip, not the Tour de Trout. You should also wear a bike helmet (I’m very glad I was wearing one when I’ve gone tumbling). Carry a map if you’re riding unfamiliar roads or trails that have intersections, which, if taken, can get you lost. Keep in mind, too, that cell phones are often useless in the backcountry. One of my friends uses a subscription-based satellite communications service (SPOT Messenger) that allows him to call for help wherever he is. It’s a smart idea.
— Richard Anderson
