Every fly fisher has a favorite season. Spring’s the ticket for some anglers. I have a pal who can’t wait for the opener. He starts tying flies in February in hopes of catching a holdover trout. He’s a maximalist, and only fish in the trophy category need apply. An elderly friend in Healdsburg, a steelhead buff, used to look so frail every summer I worried he’d croak. But the first big winter storm revived him. He regained his color and lost his arthritis. He loved being on the Russian in the rain and the cold. December was his prime time, but for me, it’s always the autumn. When the first leaves fall, I feel revived myself and head for the mountains.
For my money, autumn’s the best time to fly fish in Northern California. The crowds are gone, and our blue-ribbon streams are liberated again — Hat Creek, for instance. I don’t bother with it in the summer anymore. There are just too many anglers, but it’s a different story in September, October, and November, when you can carve off a section of the creek for yourself. I’ve had wonderful luck in those months during the frequent hatches of Blue-Winged Olives in sizes 16 to 20 and even more fun when the October Caddis come off. The big trout feed aggressively and tend to lose their caution in the riffles. It’s their last good meal for a while, and they go after a caddis as we might a juicy burger — or a quinoa salad with radish sprouts, if you’re a vegan. The high Sierra is spectacular, too. The clarity of the light, the crisp early mornings, the foliage adrift in its yellow and golds — they add up to a vision of the sublime.
The autumn’s so seductive it can be dangerous. You might find it impossible to tear yourself away from a river. That happened to me in Kings Canyon one September. I intended to fish for a week, and I stayed nearly a month. I had a little money in the bank and no pressing duties at home except my writing — an “infinitely postponable task,” to quote Janet Malcolm — so I let myself linger. I’d never visited the park before, and the grandeur knocked me out. From the park entrance at 8,000 feet, the road to Cedar Grove wound along the canyon rim and disclosed breathtaking views of the glaciated terrain. I pitched my tent in the shadow of Grand Sentinel and North Dome, the only camper around. My bear paranoia soon kicked in with visions of being mauled, and I required a stiff whiskey to put me to sleep.
I shouldn’t have worried. A ranger told me later that food was scarce for the bears. Instead of trying to break into my stash of craft beers and imported salami, which I was loathe to share with any creature, they’d scurried down to the foothills to shake the acorns from the trees. That was fine with me. The fewer bears the better — that’s my motto. As for the fishing on the South Fork of the Kings, it was splendid. I seldom saw another angler. I often caught and released fifteen trout in an afternoon, both browns and rainbows, with a brookie or two in the bargain. I fished on the fringe of stunning meadows, where the willows had already turned and the sedges were a russet color, with a few yellow corn lilies scattered about. The landscape couldn’t have been prettier.
If the trip had a drawback, it involved my rations. I’d planned for a week and soon ran short. A steady diet of beer and salami has its limits, as well as a potentially harmful effect on your long-term health — to say nothing of your ever-expanding waistline — but it was an hour’s drive over those unforgiving roads to the nearest store. My only other choice was the Cedar Grove snack bar, a discordant note in any wilderness experience. I ate biscuits and gravy, hot dogs, baked beans, and nary a vegetable except the humble potato — the primordial snack bar fare served with the usual alacrity. It was like dining at an open-air Denny’s. I finally broke and made the long drive to Three Rivers for an honest meal. I doubt the steak was the best I ever ate, but I thought so at the moment.
Chester is another spot I favor in the autumn. It’s an old lumber and cattle town that works ideally as a base camp for the nearby streams. The main drag is a lovely piece of Americana. The wood-frame buildings resemble a set for a Hollywood Western of the 1950s. It’s easy to picture Jimmy Stewart and Lee Marvin converging for a gunfight from its opposite ends, as they did in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. For fly fishers, the North Fork of the Feather is the primary draw. Its headwaters are just southeast of Lassen Peak, and it winds downhill for twenty miles or so until in empties into Lake Almanor. The name was bestowed by a Spanish explorer. The feathers of aquatic birds floated on the lake in great numbers, so Captain Luis Arguello came up with El Rio de Las Plumas in 1817.
The North Fork flows out of Almanor, as well, and that’s the stretch I most often fish. The roads offer easy access. The river sometimes looks deceptively shallow late in the year, but it holds fish. The trout can be sizeable, and the autumn hatches are reasonably predictable. You can count on some Baetis in September, especially on cloudy days, and Mahogany Duns in October. This is pocket water, and you need to work it patiently. The best trout I’ve taken was a twenty-two-inch brown, but I’ve heard there are much larger specimens around.
One place that’s known for lunker browns is the North Fork’s mouth, where it joins the lake. I wandered over to it by chance one afternoon. The lake shimmered in a haze of vapors, and Angus and whiteface cattle grazed in a nearby pasture. Some Canada geese glided through the marshes, and they honked like crazy at my approach, scaring a bunch of frogs, who leaped into the mud at the shoreline to take cover.
It was October, and that’s an opportune time to hook a trophy brown. They’d be spawning, or about to, and on the move. They’re wary feeders and tougher to catch than brookies or rainbows. Some years ago, in a fisheries experiment, browns and rainbows were stocked in equal numbers on the Deschutes River in Oregon. Four rainbows were caught for every brown. In a similar experiment in Maine, the ratio was five to one. Such studies are fine in the abstract, of course, but of no practical use on a stream. No insects were hatching at the North Fork’s mouth, so I waded in and worked a weighted Prince Nymph down deep, but the big browns showed no interest, alas.
I was touted once about the fishing on the Hamilton Branch of the upper North Fork of the Feather. I took the bait and drove halfway around Lake Almanor to find it. The terrain was daunting. I’d climb over one rock, only to see another just ahead. Ugly clumps of grass grew between the rocks. I could’ve been in the infantry. There were lots of overhanging branches to snag my line and foul a cast. The Hamilton Branch was way too much work for what I caught, which is to say nothing, but I recouped by stopping outside Chester on my way back. Here was the old familiar pocket water, and I quickly hooked several small rainbows on a Hemingway Caddis and built up my confidence again.
It was Samuel Johnson who remarked, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” An angler could say the same for the North Fork of the Feather, but for those who insist on some variety, Chester has plenty of options. Yellow Creek in Humbug Valley is close by. I’ve caught browns in the meadow section and rainbows in the canyon, but it’s tough fishing. It demands a lightweight rod and the stealth of a cat burglar to keep from spooking the fish. Warner Creek can be good in the autumn if it isn’t a low-water year, although the trout are nothing to brag about. Stillwater fans will discover any number of alluring little lakes to explore. Wherever you land, you’ll be treated to the high Sierra in all its autumn glory. Fly fishing doesn’t get any better than that.
