The Fish Sniffer: Golden Trout-2014 Southern Sierras

Every year I go backpacking with my high school buddies. This year we went just south of Mt. Whitney. It begins at the Horseshoe Meadow parking lot at an elevation of 10,000 feet.We were above 10k feet for most of the trip. We hiked for 8 days and there were some very hard days in there. On day 2 I was ready to call it quits. We had hiked a approx 8 miles up over a very steep pass (Cotton Wood pass). I think the pass was 12k elevation. My hip-plexors were killing me. My pack was way too heavy and I was in over my head. Boy was I glad to make it to camp that night. We got in fairly late and set up our tents. My tent of choice this year is the ultra light orange tent. I brought this tent because its the lightest tent I own and my pack was already way too heavy. My pack was tipping the scale at approx 50 pounds.

Here is a picture of my orange tent on previous trip.

So for some reason I did not pack my big green ponch that doubles as a tarp on this trip. I think I was trying to save weight and I reasoned that we were just going to the Sieras and it never rains in California. Well about 3 am in the morning of day 3 I awoke to thunder, lightning and just buckets of rain coming down. It continued to rain until approx 9 am. My sleeping bag is down and rated to 20 degrees. But when it gets wet it is not very warm. It got wet this morning and I layed in it till about 7 am and then crawled out. For those 4 hours I devised a plan to get myself out of that place. I knew I could not sleep another night in the tent. I figured I could hike all the way out to trail head (11 miles) solo. Then I would drive to town and leave the car in town so when the guys finished they would have the car. I was going to take the bus back home. So when the boys all came out of their tents I broke the news that I would be hiking out that day. They could not believe it. They said "no way". They said they would share their tent with me if need be. Now Gordon and Duke only had a 2 man tent. It was going to be way to tight to sleep in there. But they did not care. We figured by having 3 guys sleeping on top of each other we would get body warmth. They kept saying the sun will come out any minute. Well I finally agreed to hang out for a while and see if the sun would come out.

The sun never came out that day and I slept another night in a wet down bag. Luckily the 3nd night it did not rain. The 3rd day we hit the trail again and the sun finally came out. That afternoon I dried the sleeping bag out by hanging it in the trees/sun.

So this blog is about fishing and long story short we did get into some good fishing on this trip. The fishing on the main trail was just ok. We were catching fish but they were mostly small golden trout. On the 5th day we broke off trail and followed this creek up a canyon. It was hard hiking, up hill into the canyon. We were all tired it was getting towards the end of the day. The Duke(our Navigator) did not really know where the destination lake was. So we meandered around in the canyon and we each took our own route. We were above tree level so we could see each other just fine. I stayed close to the creek. I was looking for fish as I hiked. I came around a bend and the creek got a little wider and deeper in this section and I start spotting some good size fish. Just up ahead the is a gorgeous water fall dropping into the creek. It was picture perfect and what made it even better was there were golden trout trying to jump up the water fall. I stood there and watched at least 8-10 fish leap. A couple of them made it to the first ledge. I decide I must investigate. I go to the top of the waterfall and looked down onto the ledge and there were 6-8 15-16 inch trout just stacked on this ledge. They were laying in there side to side. If you could reach them you could have scooped them off the ledge. But it was at least 12 feet below the top of the waterfall. I decide I better catch up to my buddies. But I was going to come back and fish this creek tomorrow. The next moring I hiked back down to the creek and there were still some fish leaping up the waterfall. I quitly crept up on the creek below the falls and cast into it. Boom! On the second cast I get a hit from a large trout. I was fishing with fairly light gear and you could really feel the power of this fish. I ended up catching approx 15 fish that morning. The smallest was proabably 12 inches and I kept these 2 in the pic for breakfast. They were some of the best fish I have ever cooked up. I cooked them for at least 15 minutes on the pan with a lid covering them in tons of olive oil.