If ever there were a piece of fly-fishing water with the power to drive anglers mad, that would be the flat water of Northern California’s Hat Creek. Those who have conquered Montana’s Henrys Fork or vanquished Idaho’s Silver Creek are routinely humbled on Hat, brought to their knees by wild trout famous for being more selective, more frustratingly whimsical, than perhaps any other trout. While this reputation keeps some anglers away, it has the opposite effect on others intent upon summiting the Mount Everest of spring creeks.
From the Powerhouse 2 riffle down to Lake Britton, just east of Burney, this legendary fishery, the scant three miles of Hat’s spring-creek water, was “created” in a grand experiment in wild-trout management by a local Trout Unlimited chapter that eventually spun off to form California Trout. All the hatchery trout and rough fish were removed, and a barrier (a dam) was built above Lake Britton to keep unwanted fish species out. The stream was then reseeded with native Hat Creek rainbow trout and with browns from the Trinity River drainage, and the fish population exploded. It didn’t take long for Hat Creek to become a famous fly-fishing destination. But nothing stays the same forever.
Once fairly deep and carpeted with rich aquatic vegetation, Hat was hit hard when a ruptured lava tube upstream dumped many tons of volcanic sediment into the stream in the 1980s and 1990s. Weed beds were buried, and fish habitat, especially big-fish habitat, was all but eliminated. But again, nothing stays the same for very long. Hat Creek management is in some very good hands these days, and things seem to be looking up.
The first purpose of this article is to share the strategies of two flat-water experts, Tom April of Clearwater Lodge and Andrew Harris of Confluence Outfitters, who have cracked the code on today’s Hat Creek. They have each been fishing and guiding on Hat for decades, and when I asked, they responded with plenty of advice for those who want to challenge this famous fishery. The second purpose is to describe conditions on Hat Creek as they exist today and to see what its future may hold. To find out more about this, I asked what Michael Dege, senior wild trout biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and Andrew Braugh of California Trout have to say.
Fishing Tips from Tom April
“The biggest thing for either dry-fly fishing or nymphing is making a downstream presentation. The traditional up-and-across presentation just doesn’t cut it. If you know how to set the drift up with a downstream presentation, in which the fish sees the fly first, that is probably the biggest producer of fish.
“I start with a 9-foot leader, tapered down to 6X, and I usually add 2 to 3 feet of 6X tippet to that. Earlier in the season you can get away with an 11-foot total length. Toward the end of the season, you’re going to have to go longer. You want to keep your flyline away from the fish.
“If you want to nymph with an indicator, that’s fine. Again, you just need a long enough leader to get the fly line away from the strike indicator. Everything under the indicator should be the same diameter (like 6X), because it’s going to sink a lot better. I usually set up a two-fly rig with a pretty small (size 6 or 8) split shot. I go with traditional flies without beads. I fish a lot of traditional Pheasant Tail Nymphs on Hat, the Sawyer style, with pheasant instead of peacock herl and no legs.
“There’s a beaded fly called Hogan’s S&M Nymph that works well, but tied with a glass bead, so it doesn’t add a lot of weight. I usually fish size 18s at the largest. In early summer, the closer you fish to the riffles, you might be able to fish bigger flies, because there are some Green Drakes hatching. I’ll still fish an indicator and dead drift caddis pupa imitations or a small Bird’s Nest. I really work the swing at the end of the drift when the fly comes up to the surface.
“You also can swing traditional soft-hackle flies, which works really well — flies such as a soft-hackle Pheasant Tail or an Orange and Gray. Make down-and-across presentations.
“I also fish a lot of unweighted leeches on a slime line. You have to pick your spots, but if you can find areas where the water is a little deeper along the bank, set yourself up so you’re standing in the shallower water and swing the fly through the deeper water. Small leech patterns such as the Monroe Leech are great. Woolly Buggers push too much water unless they’re pretty sparse.
“Good places to fish include the first and second bends below the Powerhouse 2 riffle. Carbon Flats has always been a good choice for dry flies, but I don’t like driving in on the dusty road. If I were going to be bringing people to try to hookfish on dries, that’s where I’d go in the evening. I like fishing around Teal Island (also called Wood Duck Island) with a nymphing rig or a small leech pattern. Also consider the section that comes around the corner from Carbon.
[Note: “Carbon” is the nickname for the middle section of Hat, about halfway between the Powerhouse 2 riffle and the Highway 299 bridge. There used to be a town — Carbon — and a bridge there, but both are long gone. You get to Carbon by driving east from Burney on Highway 299. Immediately past the bridge over the Pit River, hang a right on the dirt road. Open and close the gate there and continue on. When you get to the Y in the road, stay to the right. It dead-ends at Carbon.]
“I use yarn for my indicators. Thingamabobbers and Corkies splash too much. The yarn kind of settles on the water. You can create your own colors, such as blue and white, and it’s not as intrusive for the fish. I like small yarn indicators. I throw a little Mucilin on them. Maybe I’m just old school!”
Fishing Tips from Andrew Harris
“The first thing is, if you’re dry-fly fishing, don’t bother blind fishing. Wait to fish to a trout that is rising. No matter how good a caster you are, don’t try to land your fly in the fish’s lane. Instead, use the skate-and-drop technique. Fishing downstream, cast beyond the fish, but still above it. Skate your fly into the fish’s lane by lifting your rod, then feed line downstream. If you don’t do that, you’re an idiot! (You can put that in the article.) I just want to hit clients on the side of the head when they don’t do that after I tell them to. If we’re talking about dry-fly fishing, it’s skate-and-drop or nothing. Don’t bother fishing any other way.
“When nymphing, I’ve had luck with a little half-inch size Corkie strike indicator. I would use all 6X below your strike indicator, and you want to have a small weight, like a size 6 split shot. Add a nymph or two and space everything out to about 10 inches apart. Fish deep enough to have it just above the bottom or above the tops of the weeds. “I like to fish Brassies or nonbeaded Pheasant Tail Nymphs. Those would probably be my go-to flies for the flat water, size 16 to 18. For dries, it really just depends on what’s happening. You’ve got to match the hatch.
“If you’re fishing the Trico spinner fall in the morning, use 7X. Don’t screw around. You don’t want to get refusals because your tippet is too big. That way, you know that’s not the issue when you’re not catching fish. The morning spinner fall is really reliable during the summer, but the timing depends on how hot it is. If it’s a blazing-hot day, it might be a 45-minute affair and might be over by 9:30. If it’s a mild day, it could start at 9:30 and go until noon.
“I like going down below the Hat Creek Park on river right (facing downstream), down a few bends below the park. I also like fishing around the bridge at Hat Creek Park. If you go up on river right, you can fish around the bridge. Carbon is probably my favorite area. If you go up a couple of bends toward the powerhouse from Carbon, all on river right, there are some good areas, and you can sometimes spot rising fish.”
Michael Dege, Region 1 Wild Trout Biologist with the CDFW
“I decided to bring back electroshocking on Hat Creek to better assess fish numbers. We had been doing direct observation (snorkel surveys, counting fish underwater). One fault I noticed was that direct observation was missing a lot of brown trout. We all believed we were not seeing the brown trout we should be seeing in Hat Creek.
“We’re still seeing upwards of 3,000 (six inches or greater) fish per mile in Hat, which isn’t bad. We were looking at over 5,000 fish per mile in the early 1980s. We’re down, but it’s actually not bad for a trout stream in California. Hat Creek has a big reputation to live up to.
“We got about 9 percent brown trout with the boat electrofishing, and the rest were rainbows. One or two brook trout also came in. Brown trout numbers are down slightly using comparison data from the 1960s and 1970s, but it’s nothing like the 1970s and 1980s, when Hat Creek was making a name for itself.”
One of those Hat Creek browns discovered by electrofishing was over 30 inches long and weighed 17 pounds. It’s likely still in there.
Andrew Braugh, Regional Manager for California Trout
“The CDFW now does electroshocking every other year. The short message isn’t as bad as everybody thinks. There are actually quite a few fish in Hat Creek.
“The habitat has changed. In the last 20 years, you’ve got all the sediment that’s in there, which has naturally messed up the aquatic plants, the food web cycles, the bugs, and everything. There have been a couple of sediment studies done, but we’re definitely seeing the tail end of that sediment slug just above the Carbon reach. You can see that it’s moving through Wood Duck Island now. There is still a ton of sediment down there, but toward the upper end of the reach, you are starting to see the end of it and some aquatic growth coming back.
“If you’re going to invest a million dollars in restoration, you want to know that it’s starting to recover. We [CalTrout] have raised about that much for restoration over the last five years. We have a bunch of different funding sources.
“We have restored the trail from the Powerhouse 2 riffle almost all the way down to Highway 299. If you’ve been out there in the last five years, you’ll notice that the trail is eroding pretty badly into the river right there at Wood Duck Island. We’ll be shoring that up and putting in terraces and revegetating it. We’re also putting in over five thousand native plants. We have about two thousand plants in the ground already.
“We also want to put in some instream habitat. If you look downstream of Highway 299 or even just above 299, you’ll see a bunch of trees. A lot of those large conifers will eventually come down and fall across the river. It’s no coincidence that if you stare at those downed trees for awhile, there are fish working all around them. Sediment builds up in front of them and scours out behind. That creates the habitat complexity we’re looking for. We thought, ‘Hey, if it works down there and is natural, maybe we can replicate that up around the Carbon reach.’
“We’re going to try. We’re going to put in three structures. We’ll get the timber right from the site. PG&E’s timber unit will bring them down and build engineered log structures right below where the historic Carbon bridge use to be. We’re pretty excited about doing it, and we’re going to try to do it this fall.
“The other thing we’re going to do is move the Carbon parking lot. If you drive in on the north side, you can drive right down to the river. The parking lot is ugly, and it’s eroding into the river. People park there and litter and drink beer. Working with the Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Pit River Tribe, the idea is to move that parking lot up the hill and then have a gate up there so you will walk down to the Carbon stretch. We think that’s going to disperse people throughout the reach a little bit better instead of everyone driving to the same spot and fishing in the same spot. People will be forced to move around a little bit more. It’s also going to improve the aesthetics of the whole place. You’ll walk down the hill from up above and come down on the Carbon reach, it’ll feel much more natural and wild, relandscaped and replanted with native vegetation.
“Hat Creek is part of the ancestral lands for one band of the Pit River Tribe called the Ilmawi. The place is incredibly important to them. It has all sorts of cultural significance, and there are a bunch of different sites — village sites and burial sites. We started working with the tribe closely, and we’ve spent a bunch of money and surveyed the whole area and started really getting them involved in what we are trying to do. We came up with a really cool concept that we are developing — tribal workforce training programs.
“We will hire crews of tribal members and pay them a prevailing wage to have them do a lot of the restoration work. We’ve got additional grant funding for a native greenhouse, which will go on their property so they can propagate the plants and take them out to the river. Their crews are installing all those plants and getting paid to do it, and the trail work as well.
“There are adult tribal members getting paid, but there’s also a youth component to it. We have a whole youth initiative in which the younger tribal members can come out (and also at-risk kids in the Burney area) while we oversee. They do a lot of the baseline monitoring for the project. We’ve been incredibly successful, and the tribe’s really into it. The message is that we are re-engaging the Pit River Tribe in the stewardship of their ancestral lands. “There’s a very tumultuous history between PG&E and the tribe and between the tribe and the entire area. This is the beginning of reconciling all of that. There are some big scars. This is an opportunity to start healing those.
“As part of our project, the tribe just got a thousand acres redonated to them. PG&E went bankrupt, and as part of the settlement agreement, they were forced to divest of a bunch of land. Hat Creek is one of those places. As part of the conservation plan, PG&E will give 1,000 acres back to the tribe, and maybe more. PG&E will maintain an easement all along the riparian corridor within a hundred yards of the river. They’ll maintain the water rights and anything that has any impact on their hydropower.
“Part of the work we do is just making sure that everyone’s got a buy-in and everyone’s comfortable with what’s going on. We’ve not taken any shortcuts. That’s why it’s taken so long to build something like this. PG&E is 100 percent supportive, and the Pit River Tribe is supportive for the reasons we just talked about. That doesn’t mean we won’t have issues moving forward and carrying out this whole thing. Right now, everybody’s on board, and everybody’s benefiting from the larger vision. PG&E is pleased, the Stewardship Council is pleased.
“We hope our constituents are really going to appreciate us trying to bring Hat Creek back to its former glory. We’re also thrilled to be working in a place that was one of our founding projects.
“Muskrats are a huge problem, though. Nobody has a viable solution at this point. You’re not getting rid of muskrats — they’re everywhere. Here’s the conclusion we’ve come to: if you restore the riparian areas, and you get the right willow growth going and the right species and diversity of species, you’re going to armor those banks a lot better. Ultimately, the system will be able to protect itself a lot more.
“One of the reasons the muskrats on Hat Creek are so successful is that you have a hundred years of cattle grazing right down to the river. Then you have 25 years of heavy recreational use (fishing), and you have 150 years of historic land use in that area. The combination of all those things made those muskrat populations highly successful.
“The tribe will be trapping them for the first time as part of this program. They will be getting paid to trap, which I think is a great thing. We’ll try to keep that muskrat population down. I don’t think you can get rid of them entirely, but you can armor those banks and help restore the riparian structure. That’s going to help the most. I don’t think the muskrats are a huge source of sediment. They’re definitely destroying bank structure and affecting the system that way. They are not the root source of sediment. We’re planting willows right in those muskrat holes, and they’re taking off. I think the system can start to repair itself if we do it right.”
Why the Fuss?
So why all this fuss over three measly miles of water? The answer is complex and connected to who we are as California anglers versus who we would like to be. The Wild Trout section of Hat Creek began as a noble experiment that demonstrated to the world that anglers didn’t need an ongoing, costly fix of hatchery fish. The approach was groundbreaking at the time: to fix the environment, protect it from further harm, and let nature take its course. What happened there is now part of California and conservation history. But beyond the shrine to wild-trout management that it has become, Hat has come to symbolize more than that. It tells us something about ourselves that we need to know.
Hat Creek is a reminder of what can be accomplished by dedicated, like-minded individuals willing to stay the course. Struggling to maintain the environment against sediment slugs, muskrats, poachers, grazing, and timber harvesting has proven to be an ongoing and sometimes difficult proposition, much like fishing the flat water. But if we quit trying, we lose something deeply personal — a connection to the environment and to each other that’s difficult to name. The word “honor” comes pretty close. And one more thing. Simply put, Hat Creek represents the sort of challenge that all fly anglers should aspire to. As a spring creek it can be difficult and frustrating to fish, but there’s no feeling quite like hooking a trout here after getting everything right — the cast, the drift, the fly. It epitomizes what we seek.
