Remembering Alpers Ranch

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The Owens River flowed through Alpers Ranch, offering the opportunity to fish meadow water.

When I first heard about Tim Alpers’s Owens River Ranch, I called to inquire about making a reservation. Alice Alpers (Tim’s mom) answered the phone. She described in great detail the legendary float-tube pond full of trophy-sized rainbows, the river and its wild rainbows and browns, and the nine rental cabins spaced out along the riverbank. It all sounded wonderful, but the bad news was all the cabins were booked for the entire season.

It took my wife and me years to get a reservation, and by then, Alice had passed away, but once we did, we kept that same time slot every October.

Alpers Ranch was located at the upper-most end of Long Valley, about twenty-six miles upstream from Crowley Lake. Just up from the ranch, much of the Owens River emanates from Big Springs, and it also receives water diverted from the Mono Basin via a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power pipe (this water eventually flows into the LA Aqueduct).

When I stepped into the ranch office for the first time, it was like stepping back into the nineteenth century. As I opened the heavy wooden door, a clanking cowbell announced our presence. The room was dark, and the ceiling was low. Tim’s wife, Pam, a statuesque woman with raven-black hair, emerged from a back room. She pulled out an oversized calendar labeled “Cabin #9” with the days marked off with big Xs. Old school. I liked that. “Would you like the same time slot next year?” she asked. “Absolutely.”

“And the key?” I asked. “We don’t use keys here,” she said.

“Rustic” described the cabin, built nearly a century ago. A good wood stove served well as a heater, and for a hundred-year-old cabin, the shower’s water pressure was remarkable, maybe due to the ample water source — about a third of the Owens River’s clean, clear spring water was diverted and flowed through the ranch.

That first night I slept fitfully, dreaming of the next day’s opportunities, occasionally awakened by the sound of mice scurrying inside the walls. The cabin’s back porch, just steps from the upper Owens, overlooked a big meadow where the river flowed, in true spring creek fashion, in lazy, arcing oxbows. At dawn, after my first cup of coffee, I grabbed my rod and tied on a Chernobyl Ant. As the first rays of sunlight hit the river, mist rose from the water. Just behind the cabin, the river took a 180-degree bend, forming a deep flow in an undercut bank, guarded by an overhanging willow — a lair for a big fish, I thought. On my first good drift, a big, hook-jawed brown grabbed the fly and pulled it under, the fish’s golden flanks flashing underwater with the rising sun.

Every morning I’d go through the same ritual, but I never got the fish to rise again — that is, until the next year, when I fooled him again on the very first cast. And so it went, year after year.

By the end of the week, numerous flies of mine dangled like spiders from the overhanging willow, a testament to both my persistence and lack of casting accuracy. There are many dream streams and miracle miles, but the Alpers section of the Owens truly is in a class by itself. For a couple river miles, the river snakes through a broad meadow, reminiscent of Hot Creek Ranch, but without all the weeds and with more fish — wild fish, too, rainbows and browns. It’s perfect for sight fishing.

Ranching, Basketball, and Fish Farming

A homesteader built a cabin at the Owens headwaters in 1860. His son, Andrew Thompson, sold the 210acre property to Tim Alpers’s grandfather, Fred, in 1906 for $2,500. Fred turned the property into a working cattle ranch and private fishing resort in the 1920s.

After Fred passed away in 1946, his son Bill bought out his brothers and sisters to own the ranch. Affectionately known as the “fly-fishing cowboy,” Bill ran the ranch with his wife Alice until his death in 1979.

Back in the 1970s, Tim Alpers’s passion was basketball. He practiced at a makeshift hoop that his dad had set up for him at the ranch and developed a high-percentage jump shot. He went on to play basketball at the University of Nevada, Reno. Then the game took him to Oklahoma, where he was assistant men’s basketball coach at the University of Tulsa from 1975 to 1979. Tim ended his basketball career and returned to the eastern Sierra for good with Pam in 1979 to help his ailing father.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Tim’s interest in aquaculture began when he studied fisheries biology during his college years at Humboldt State and the University of Nevada, Reno. Tim and his father began raising trout for their ranch guests in 1971.They created Alpers Creek, a two-mile diversion of the Owens that they stocked with triploid trout. The fish, being sterile, grow larger than nonsterile trout because they don’t expend energy spawning.

After his father died, Tim continued with the fish-farming operation and soon found a new opportunity. Resort owners on the June Lake Loop offered to purchase Alpers trout to supplement Department of Fish and Game plants. The DFG was suffering from budget cuts and hatchery production woes. In the mid-1980s, the DFG produced about 2.3 million fish a year for Inyo and Mono Counties, but these fish were pathetically small, averaging just a third of a pound each. Resorts, marina operators, and recreational fishers pressured the DFG for larger fish, and they obliged. By 1990, the average size of stocked rainbows rose to a half pound each, but the DFG could produce only 1.5 million of these larger fish each year.

In 1985, John Frederickson, owner of the June Lake Marina, purchased hundreds of Alpers trout. Word got out, and that year, Frederickson’s business was booming. Soon, all the local marina operators wanted Alpers “trophy” trout, as did Mono County and the City of Mammoth Lakes. Before long, Alpers couldn’t meet the growing demand — after all, it took three years to grow a five-pound trout.

Tim had an advantage over the DFG, though: the purest of spring water, flowing directly into his ranch property at a consistent 58-degree temperature, year-round. And he had natural, not concrete-lined ponds and rearing canals. With his special trout chow, these fish grew to enormous proportions, full-finned and gorgeous, then were transported via his 450-gallon tanker truck (with a TROUT4U license plate) and stocked throughout eastern Sierra waters.

By the mid-1990s, Tim was stocking an average of thirty-five thousand trout per year. His trophy trout became so ubiquitous that virtually every big eastern Sierra rainbow was referred to as an “Alpers.” It so piqued the DFG that they began attaching metal “DFG” tags to all the “trophy-size” trout they occasionally planted. However, these big DFG trout were brood stock — weary, old, spawned-out, half-dead fish with ugly scars and ruined fins from scraping up against the concrete walls of their rearing ponds. And they had no fight — catching them was like reeling in a log.

The Alpers trout were a Coleman strain, a cross between a rainbow trout and the rainbow’s stronger brother, the steelhead. Alpers rainbows were renowned not only for their tremendous fight, but also for their excellent taste.

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The author admires a nice-sized rainbow hooked at the Alpers Ranch pond in the eastern Sierra.

Alpers Pond

Tim built a three-acre pond on his ranch property and stocked it with only his biggest and most prized rainbows. There were no little fish swimming around in there, so when you hooked up, you knew you were into a sizeable fish. For $75, you could float tube the pond (barbless, catch-and-release fly fishing only) for three hours, and if you knew what you were doing, you had an excellent chance of landing a 10-pound rainbow. Tim limited the pond to three anglers at a time, and most of the time, my wife and I had the pond all to ourselves.

Alpers Pond was magical — those who have fished it know what I’m talking about. Pam Alpers showed me a picture of the biggest rainbow caught at the pond, a fish with a snout like a dolphin. It weighed 19 pounds.

Rigging up at the picnic table beside the pond on a calm day, I’d be distracted by the various rise forms all over the pond and the thick backs of rolling rainbows. My heart would be thumping in anticipation.

I once asked Tim what the best dry fly was for the pond. “Callibaetis,” he said. “Gray wing, gray hackle. Like us.” Perhaps because they resembled Callibaetis nymphs, beadhead Hare’s Ears were deadly on the pond, especially when stripped in quick, staccato bursts. And the takes were incredibly jolting, the kind that nearly ripped the rod right out of your hands. To say the fishing there was exciting is an understatement.

As the pond matured, the weed beds became more pronounced, and the fish got even bigger and more powerful. After all the big-fish hype, many anglers were disappointed with their pond session, unable to bring the trout to hand. Fishing dry flies on thin tippets, they were broken off as the lunker fish plunged down into the weeds.

I switched to 9-pound fluorocarbon tippet and learned to pull hard and fast, not letting the big ’bows get the upper hand. A black leech pattern twitched slowly through the lanes in the weed beds in the deep end of the pond worked time and time again.

Between the fishing in the river and the fishing in the pond, a stay at the ranch had a dreamlike quality. As I got older, I realized that time itself was my most important possession and that time on the ranch was precious. I called it “Alpers Time,” when time slipped by so quickly, like sand draining from an hourglass at an accelerated pace, that it seemed like I was living in another dimension.

Big Yellow Taxi

In “Big Yellow Taxi,” Joni Mitchell sang, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” That fate has threatened the eastern Sierra, including its status as an angling paradise.

The beauty and opportunities for outdoor recreation have brought increasing numbers of people to the region — to the Mammoth Lakes region in particular — and in turn, developers have seen opportunities there to erect condos and second homes for skiers, hikers, anglers, and others who want to enjoy what the mountains have to offer. However, once pristine land is sold to developers, part of the natural world is gone forever. No one ever looked out at a beautiful spring creek winding through a meadow and said, “Once this was all condos!”

The story of the famous Arcularius Ranch, just downstream from Alpers Owens River Ranch, is a monitory tale in this regard. Like Alpers Ranch, it was also passed down through three generations, with a similar tradition of cattle ranching and fly fishing. John Arcularius, who ran Arcularius Ranch in the early 1970s, didn’t fish, but had the vision to institute a catch-and-release, barbless flies only regulation for ranch guests, as Tim Alpers later would. John Arcularius declared this uppermost stretch of the Owens River “the best fly fishing in the Eastern Sierra for wild trout.” That proclamation certainly would have rung true in the old days — in 1940, his dad caught and killed a 15-pound, hook-jawed brown on the ranch water. Its descendants still populate that stretch.

But in 1978, the Arcularius family sold 350 acres that they owned on the outskirts of the town of Mammoth Lakes to developers. The land was quickly developed into the Snowcreek Resort, which now consists of a couple hundred condos and a nine-hole golf course. Then, in the early 1990s, John had major development plans for Arcularius Ranch. It originally had been developed with just 15 cabins and a fishing lodge. His new proposal included 35 more cabins, 30 “second homes’” 4 “luxury homes,” and a small restaurant and pub. Fortunately, in 1998, one of the wealthiest families in America, the Gottwald family, bought Arcularius Ranch, and John’s plans never reached fruition.

Tim Alpers had vehemently urged John Arcularius to scale down his plans, and in 2007, with the rigors of fish farming and running the ranch taking a physical toll and the cabins in need of an overhaul, when he decided to sell his ranch, the Alpers family decided not to sell to commercial developers, even though they could have gotten significantly more money. Instead they sold it to the Gottwald family, who’d proven to be good stewards of the Arcularius Ranch, with an agreement that the Alpers parcel would remain largely undeveloped.

The unmaintained pond slowly has been overtaken by weeds. And in 2011, the DFG completed a restoration project to “restore Alpers meadow, a prior trout-rearing facility, to a more natural condition” by “replacing existing raceways with a new, naturally functioning stream, to improve fisheries habitat in the existing Alpers Creek channel.”

Conway Ranch

But the story of Alpers trout doesn’t end with the sale of Alpers Ranch. After the sale of the ranch, Tim had his eye on another parcel of land known as Conway Ranch. Located just north of Mono Lake and just south of Highway 395’s Conway Grade, the 825-acre parcel had all the ingredients for a fish-rearing facility. A big land-development deal for the property went sour in 1996, and Mono County had purchased the land the following year through the Trust for Public Land Fund. In 2006, the Inland Aquaculture Group (IAG) was formed with three members: Tim Alpers, June Lake/ Crowley Marina concessionaire John Fredrickson, and Orange County businessman Steve Brown. In a unique land deal, the IAG leased the Conway Ranch property from Mono County in return for ten thousand pounds per year of trophy Alpers trout to be stocked in Mono County waters.

Tim began rearing a new strain of rainbow trout, the Hofer strain (a hearty German strain more resistant to whirling disease), stocking his most prized fish in his new pond, the two-acre Conway Pond. The Conway Pond rivaled the storied Alpers Pond, albeit on a smaller scale, with the bonus of the addition of big brown trout and a stunning view of the eastern Sierra escarpment.

When I sampled Conway Pond for the first time, I launched my float tube with lofty expectations. As my nymph sank slowly below the surface, I looked up at the scenery. The precipitous escarpment of the high Sierra rose dramatically to the west, wreathed in dark cumulus. Lightning flickered among the highest peaks, and thunder echoed down the valleys.

My reverie was interrupted by an electrifying jolt on the line, then a heavy pull from one of the Hofer-strain rainbows. I’ve caught rainbows from California to Alaska — Crowley Kamloops rainbows to Kenai River natives, Eagle Lake strain fish to Lahontan cutthroats — and I can honestly say without a doubt that Alpers Hofer strain ’bows were the hardest-fighting of the bunch.

It was at Conway Pond in 2013 that my wife, Yvonne, caught what I believe might be the biggest Alpers rainbow ever caught. She was fishing a size 14 Callibaetis nymph tied to a 7-pound tippet. When she hooked up, I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary until I saw the fish peeling line off her reel and the serious look on her face. If it had been me, I probably would have yelled, “Big fish! BIG fish!” but she didn’t say anything. It wasn’t until I netted it that I realized how truly big it was — the largest rainbow I’ve ever held. When I weighed the fish in the net, it bottomed out my 15-pound Boga Grip scale, so I measured it: 35 inches long with a 23-inch girth. By the standard calculation (length times girth squared divided by 800) her fish weighed 23 pounds!

You may have noticed that I’ve been using the past tense to describe the fishing at Conway Pond. Sadly, the pond and fish-rearing facility closed in 2016 due to lack of water and as a result of land-use permit issues with Mono County and the state, ending the Alpers legacy. Tim and Pam retired and moved to Reno, Nevada.

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Talking tackle with Tim Alpers, right.

End of an Era

Back in 2007, on our last day at Alpers Ranch, we float-tubed Alpers Pond on a fine October morning. For the last three hours of our vacation, in what must have been a record of sorts, Yvonne caught and released 23 hard-charging Alpers rainbows, all between 3 and 10 pounds. I’d never seen anything like it. As we drove out past the ranch gate, we gave each other a high five, buzzing with excitement as we turned south on US 395 for the long drive home, which went by much faster than usual — just like “Alpers Time.”

Two months later, Yvonne opened a Christmas card from the Alpers with a letter inside. A solo tear ran down her cheek as she read it. I thought someone had died. “They’re closing Alpers Ranch,” she said. If a love affair must end, maybe it’s best you never see it coming and the last time was the best time, with no sad good-byes.

For now, the old ranch property remains open space, albeit private property. The Owens River headwaters flow clean and clear, winding through the big meadow in lazy oxbows, a refuge for wild rainbows and browns and migratory spawning cutthroats from Crowley Lake. Looking back at our time on the ranch, what I remember most, more than all the fish, was the vibe of the place — the vintage cabins, the tranquility of the river meadow, but most of all, the connection it held to the past, to a wild West of limitless possibilities.

I try to imagine the land through Tim’s grandfather’s eyes. As a German immigrant, Fred Alpers headed out west to California as a teenager to forge a life for himself and live the American dream. What hardships did he endure? What grit and determination, what sweat and toil, did it take for him to build the ranch and become a cattle rancher, with three 20-mule teams to haul goods throughout the region?

“I’m very lucky that I had a grandfather that knew how to pick property,” Tim Alpers once said.

At this heavenly place, Fred Alpers found a dream stream with a miracle spring, flowing at a magical one thousand gallons a minute at 58 degrees, year-round. Two generations later, the pure spring water nourished thousands of rainbow trout, planted throughout the eastern Sierra, creating thousands of memories of the big one that didn’t get away.

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