Beneath the Surface: Report from Castella

One of the benefits of living along the upper Sacramento River. One of the benefits of living along the upper Sacramento River.
One of the benefits of living along the upper Sacramento River.

A few months ago, I moved from Los Angeles to Castella, California, a tiny canyon hamlet right on the upper Sacramento River. I came here to work on a book about the region of Northern California and Southern Oregon often called the State of Jefferson. For the moment, I was focusing my reporting on some difficult news that was coming out of the county that I’d moved to: a very bitter recall election that had pitted several moderate members of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors against a militia-backed effort to recall them. This had made politics in Redding — the county seat of Shasta County — into a very volatile mix. Fights were breaking out, and death threats were flying around. It was an uncommonly tense time in the area during a period when the pandemic and politics had already made most Americans pretty stressed indeed.

And here is an uncomfortable fact about the moment I’d moved up here: some of the political turmoil and conflict in the far northern part of Northern California has been driven by the fact that lots of people relocated to this region during the pandemic, mostly, like me, from the Bay Area or Los Angeles. And many of these people, like me, were drawn here in part because we love to fly fish. This migration has driven up rents to unimaginable levels: it’s now more expensive to rent an apartment in Mt. Shasta than it is to rent in my old neighborhood in Los Angeles. A lot of people fret about liberal newcomers changing the culture here. A number of these people do more than fret — the main right-wing militia group in the North State is very politically influential and growing by the day. But there is also another concern here, one shared by people across the political spectrum, the concern that the sort of carefree, rural life that depends at least in part on being able to rent a cheap cabin and do your thing out in the backwoods is disappearing.

But this is also California’s great fishing region, and part of the culture and economy of the region has always been inviting people up to fish. It’s one of the world’s great fishing regions. As I write this now, I can hear the upper Sac rushing outside the door of the tiny little stone house I’m renting. I can drive to fish for steelhead on the Scott or the Klamath within a couple hours. In 45 minutes, I can be on the McCloud. And none of this is to mention any of the myriad creeks and tributaries I’ve discovered in the past few months, waters you’ll never hear about in guidebooks and that rarely get fished much, but that are still the kind of thing that would make fly fishers who live in the Bay Area or Los Angeles groan with longing.

So I’ve been thinking about something that I know many people who fly f ish think about, but that doesn’t get discussed too much in the glossy outdoor-sports media. We talk a lot about what it means to be responsible visitors to a natural area, and we talk a lot about the fly fisher’s role in watershed conservation, but I think we find it a little uncomfortable to think about how we affect and change human landscapes or whether we have any responsibility to think about how we can conserve local cultures and ways of life. At least, I know this is true for me. And right now, in Shasta County, California, this is a very pressing issue.

But first, the fishing. I still haven’t quite processed the fact that I can just roll out of bed, haul on my waders, and be fishing over pools that haven’t seen a cast in months. And I can be almost certain, since the weather is still cold, that I’ll have miles of water to myself. I had always dreamed of being able to do something like this. There’s a part of me that’s still shocked that my neighbors don’t take advantage of it more. A lot of them could be throwing steeple casts for gorgeous fish off their back decks, and it seems unbelievable to me that they aren’t. But they’re used to being able to fish the river whenever they want, and so they think I’m a little crazy for fishing every day.


Castella is an interesting little town, though calling it a “town” might be overselling it. It is a few miles south of Dunsmuir, and I think it’s likely that many people reading this will know it the way I came to know it: from driving on Interstate 5, looking longingly over the guardrail of the highway and trying to pick what spots in the deep canyon of the upper Sac would be accessible to fish. I can still remember the first time I drove through the North State, just a year or so into my fishing habit, logging all the upper Sacramento exits along I-5. I didn’t know then that many people who’d actually been fishing in California for a while already knew these exits by heart — Delta, Pollard Flat, Sweetbriar, Soda Creek. Each has its own character, and each has its own great times of year to fish. Each has its own particular difficulties of access, some because of the terrain, some because of the busy Union Pacific main line that runs along the west bank of this whole stretch of river, and all because of the omnipresent blackberry brambles that choke every patch of sunny ground. Each also has its own little local culture.

Castella used to be a resort town, before I-5 busted up its quiet foothill feel. Now it’s an odd jumble of homes, some of which are very large and have an obvious rustic elegance, but much of it is a bit ramshackle. I have at least two neighbors who have been using blue tarps for doors, even through the winter. There is one place of business: Amiratti’s gas station, convenience, and liquor store, which still has an old tavern room attached to it, though no one has used it in years. You see the local characters there: the gruff, red-haired clerk who reads romance novels and tells the gossip of the day, the homeless guy with a big pit bull who pretends to be a stuck hitchhiker when he asks motorists on their way to Portland or Sacramento for change, the well-off landlords who drive big Land Rovers and rent out houses to anglers on Airbnb. But it’s at the entry point to Castle Crags State Park, and from pretty much anywhere in Castella, you can look up and see Mount Shasta to the north and the bare rock spires of the Castle Crags to the west, which means that it may have some of the finest scenery in the entire world.

The fishing, I regret to say, has not been great. It’s been cold for most of the time I’ve been up here, so mostly, people have been fishing big rubberleg stonefly patterns, pushing them deep down into runs and pockets. Thick Baetis hatches will come off on warm afternoons, which is very exciting to see, but so far I haven’t been able to produce a single strike on the surface. I am still catching fish every day, and I would highly recommend that people who are used to fishing the upper Sac in the summer, when it can get unbelievably hot at these relatively low elevations, when the river gets jammed in popular spots, and when the rates at motels and cabins can be absolutely usurious, try it out in winter, because until I moved up here, I had never really understood how lucky we are in Northern California. Pretty much every single one of the famous rivers fishes year-round here.

What I do most days is stumble out of bed, make coffee, and then head with my miniature Australian shepherd puppy over to the pool across the road from my house, where Castle Creek dumps into the Sac. It’s theoretically private access to get there, but no one cares if you use it. So some mornings I feel sort of bad when I see a Subaru with Oregon plates or a license plate frame from a dealership in Southern California parked there as a traveling fly fisher scans the area longingly, looking for a spot to throw in. I always tell them to go ahead and fish it. This is the benefit of being a (semi) local.

This pool gets absolutely hammered by bait anglers and local teenagers, and so I have had to confront a question of stewardship I’d never had to think about before I moved to a place across the road from on one of the world’s great trout streams. It seems like it would be irresponsible of me to bang up fish over and over in what is now my home water, so after the first couple days of fishing this area, when I caught a pair of absolutely gorgeous 18-inch rainbows, I started cutting the hook point off my flies, testing to see if I was getting takes and could get a fish to run around a bit with my fly, but not actually trying to haul them in. This is much, much, less fun to do nymphing than it is to do with a dry fly, when you actually get the thrill of seeing a surface take, but it’s better than nothing.


When I really want to fish hard, though, I head up to the Castle Crags State Park picnic area, on the left bank of the river, just off the exit. I walk with my puppy up along the railroad tracks — he’s learning to hear a train whistle and knows that when one is coming, he has to run off into the blackberries to hide. And while I am always hesitant to hotspot an area, I do highly recommend that people who want to fish this area in the winter try what I do, because every single day, I see fly fishers pull into Castella, look for access, and give up. But while this picnic area is technically closed during the winter, the prohibition only really applies to camping and using the parking lots, which are usually piled with snow during the winter anyway. There’s a two-mile stretch of trail that locals use to run their dogs and hike that offers, in winter, what I think might be the best f ly-fishing experience you can have on the upper Sac: a well-carved and convenient hiking trail in a setting totally cut off from the sounds and sights of the interstate that parallels the river so closely in much of the rest of its course.

I hike that with the dog, and usually I fish all the way up to the storied access at Soda Creek, a couple miles upriver from where I’m living. Which brings me back to the point of this piece, because there’s a minor local upheaval happening where Soda Creek flows into the upper Sac. Often when I fish there, I end up chatting a bit with transient workers who smoke pot or do drugs under the bridge and make money by clearing brush and fixing up properties for a big landlord in the area. He’s getting ready for summer, when he hopes to rent out a couple properties he owns as short-term rentals to fly fishers who will come up to fish that stretch of the river.

These workers are all cool — I often let them use my phone to call their friends for rides after the work is done or bum an illicit cigarette from them as they hang out and drink beer by the bridge. They will head off to Redding or Mt. Shasta, or sometimes they’ll collect money and wait to hop a freight train right there at the siding at Soda Creek. I used to ride freight trains when I was younger, so I always have fun seeing that.

But there is a problem here, and everyone who lives around the Castella area knows about it. Pretty much anyone who owns property in this area is taking advantage of the crazy housing prices to rent out vacation properties, many of which get happily rented by fly fishers who are used to paying the high prices in the Bay Area or Los Angeles. My landlord actually joked to me when I signed my lease — $1500 a month, the same price that I paid in LA — that “you’re putting a hillbilly out of a home when you take this place,” as he put it. “I know it seems expensive, but it’s actually nothing like what the people who turned over their stuff to Airbnb are charging.”

My immediate neighbor, a lifelong wildland firefighter who is getting over a divorce and having a bit of a hard time right now, put it more bluntly. “I feel absolutely desperate,” he told me once. “I built my whole life around living up here in the woods, and I tried to do this firefighting thing that would be a good thing for the world. And now I just can’t find anywhere to live. It’s all vacation rentals. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Everyone around here knows what’s happening: very few people in towns such as Castella can afford to continue to live there, because people who have a lot of money and who are looking for a rural life buy and renovate properties, and a lot of those properties have been converted into short-term rentals. It’s an uncomfortable thing to have to face, but the area’s amazing fly-fishing opportunities are one of the reasons why this is happening. I have to face this myself, because my fishing addiction is what led me to rent one of the very few relatively affordable places available in Castella. I’m working on a book of reporting that I think will be valuable and important, but I never would have even thought to begin looking into this area if I hadn’t started visiting it to fly fish. The locals have mostly been very kind to me, but there is no doubt that many of them feel a bit resentful about seeing a guy from LA who came up here with a reporting fellowship and money from well-known Eastern magazines fishing their waters every day at my leisure.

This is an issue that we all know exists throughout California wherever the quality of the fishing attracts fly fishers. Truckee is a well-known example of a town that has been experiencing skyrocketing housing costs and an influx of investors from the Bay Area. Even Kernville, which anyone who’s reading this in Southern California knows as the gateway to the Kern watershed and its fishing opportunities, has become an incredibly expensive place to live. As in Castella, people there follow the money: Why rent a property you own to a local family for an affordable rate, when you can rent to well-off Angelenos who will pay hundreds of dollars a night when they come up to fly fish the Kern?

There’s an important thing to keep in mind for the future of our sport. It pains me to say this, but there are people here in the county where I live who now look at fly fishers as a problem. They see the vehicles and the waders of visitors, and they get angry. And that is a problem for the sport and for anyone who cares about California’s watersheds, because California’s fly fishers are incredibly important voices in the conservation of a myriad of riparian ecosystems that will need us to speak up and fight for them in the coming years, when drought and climate change will threaten them like never before.

I’m 35 years old and didn’t start seriously fishing until I was in my late twenties. During that short time, from the brook trout streams of New Hampshire to the mysterious rainbow trout streams of northern Baja, I have benefited from an absolutely amazing wealth of goodwill from local people who wanted to help me catch fish. They gave me advice and tips and stories about whatever water I was visiting, partly because they loved to help people catch fish, but partly, too, because they thought that people who came to their region to catch fish were bringing benefits, enriching the fly-fishing towns that we all have learned to know and love.

But now I feel lucky that people around where I live think of me as a local, because a lot of people resent what’s happening here, and a lot of people think fly fishers are part of the problem.


The point isn’t that people should stop traveling to incredible places such as Castella to fly fish. There is nothing that would stop me from doing that. But it may be worth it for us fly fishers to think about a broader conservation ethic, one that considers both the health of the watersheds we love and the health of the communities that have always been there to support us, give us fishing tips, and listen to us at the bar when we roll up after a thrilling day and want to tell the world about that gorgeous steelhead we caught.

So here is a thought: the next time you head up to an area where people are struggling to find housing, it may be worth trying to book a hotel room, or even camp, instead of renting that highpriced Airbnb. It may be worth asking around to see if a local guide or someone involved in the sport we love has been struggling, then checking to see if that person is available to work. It may be worth listening at the bar after you’ve finished up your float trip to hear what is going on in the rural communities of people who live on and love these rivers just as much as we do. Because many of the people here in the community where I’m living are really hurting. And these are the same people who offer up access through their property so we can fish the best spots of amazing rivers. Fly fishing, as a sport, depends on thriving rural communities who want us to come and fish their rivers. Those communities, in turn, depend on fly fishers to come and fish their rivers, spend money, and have fun. But we need to apply the conserva-
tion ethics that guide us in our fishing to the communities that welcome us. Talking at the bar and the fly shop, getting tips and telling stories, is a big part of why I love this sport. Right now, at least where I live, there’s resentment and anger and a worry that the community that has sustained fly fishing in this area won’t be able to survive. We think a lot about how to conserve the watersheds we love. Let’s think about how to conserve the communities we love, too.

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