I figured I should take advantage of this window of good weather we’ve been having lately, so on Friday night we headed east for one last fall trip. After targeting fall-spawners last weekend searching for trophy browns, we decided to change tacts and go after spring-spawning goldens and cutthroats this time around. I’d always subscribed to the theory that spring is the best time of year to fish for goldens, but I figured that we might run into some quality goldens anyway and big cutthroats wouldn’t be a bad consolation prize.
Everyone who’s visited this lake is intimately familiar with this stretch of switchbacks. It shows up as a single straight line on the map, and probably accounts for the large part of the discrepancy between how long the hike is on paper and how long it feels on your back.
This late in the season, we expected to run into some snow and so we weren’t surprised to navigate a large snowdrift on our final ascent up to the lake.
Fish were actively cruising around the shallows as soon as we arrived, but they were surprisingly selective. Most of my fly rod presentations were summarily ignored, and I didn’t receive a single strike on a variety of lures and retrieve depths. I changed out flies five times before finally finding a beadhead pheasant tail that appeared appetizing enough.
Later in the day the action suddenly picked up. For no apparent reason, it was as if a switch had been flipped and suddenly fish began rising in much greater numbers. More importantly, the fish that were rising stopped spurning our offerings. My buddy fooled a big golden on a caddis dry and beamed as he brought the colorful fish to hand.
We continued to fish dry flies to rising fish and were consistently rewarded with feisty, colorful goldens.
The snow-covered slopes rising above us gave the lake a rather austere feel.
As it got darker, I accidentally let my waterlogged dry fly sink beneath the surface and when I picked my line back up I was pleasantly surprised to tighten to a nice cutthroat.
Only after it got too dark to see to set the hook on strikes did we reluctantly stop fishing and set up camp. After a hot dinner of angel hair pasta with pesto and chicken, we crawled into our sleeping bags and dreamed of monster goldens.
I got up early the next morning and headed down to the lake to fish. The surface was perfectly calm, save for a few early risers.
I pulled in a little silver phase golden on the pheasant tail, the only fly that seemed to produce results when fish weren’t fooled by anything else I had to throw at them.
We fished for the next three hours with little luck, but just before we packed up to leave I saw a decent-sized fish feeding on the surface about fifty feet out. I got a lucky cast off and was rewarded with a brightly-hued golden.
We had a tip of monster fish in an obscure little lake so we decided to stop by on the way home and check it out. We spotted a few of them but couldn’t entice them to bite. Maybe next year!
Wanders With Trout 