Dinkey Lakes Wilderness
Submitted by Matt Young
August, 2005
The weekend was amazing. I'm pretty out of shape and have horrible
endurance, so packing several miles doesn't come without some discomfort
and complaining. In fact, I kind of loathe hiking in general. Luckily, I
went into this trip with one frame of mind and nothing could weaken my
steeled resolve to reach my goal: Island Lake and its pure Volcano Creek
Goldens.
After much
wheezing by yours truly, we arrived at the first Dinkey Lake about an hour
or two after twelve. A few exploratory casts yielded enough brook trout to
light the flame under my fire for wild trout and set up camp near the lake
for the night. We caught about twenty brookies ranging from seven to ten
inches between bites of truly loathsome chicken-flavored rice mix from
Wal-Mart, and I was pleasantly surprised when I pulled out a small golden
midway into the afternoon. Dinkey 1 had the most diverse fishery of the
Dinkey Lakes according to Ralph Cutter’s Sierra Trout Guide, but the
Volcano Creek Golden was supposed to be confined to the high slopes and
relative isolation of Island Lake, two thousand feet higher.
The rest of the
afternoon and evening was spent watching the crisp, fluffy clouds sail
overhead from my perch on the edge of the lake, inhaling the clean
mountain air and dancing my beloved elk-hair caddis across the calm,
glassy surface of the water. The last trout I caught that evening was a
ten-inch beauty with the brilliant dark-crimson belly and flaming orange
flanks of a spawning adult male. Sadly it was late in the evening, and I
could barely see the ripple of the water as I gently released the brookie
back into the lake. It was time to head back to camp and prepare for big
day of hiking and fishing tomorrow.
After a
few fruitless casts into the rising sun, the next morning we packed up and
hiked to Dinkey 2. The lake was beautiful but fishless, so we looked at
our topo map and saw that Rock Lake was only about ten minutes away. A
quick hike around the edge of the lake afforded us a glimpse of blue
through the trees. We walked around the lake and started casting from the
east shore; almost immediately brookies started to hit.
We caught a couple nice trout and soaked in the sun from atop one of the
many boulders around the lake, then decided to head back and pick up our
packs so we could climb the last five hundred or so feet to Island Lake.
This lake was the crown jewel, the main attraction, the apple of my eye,
the fishery without equal. Island Lake is the closest golden trout water
in my area at a two-hour drive and a four-hour hike, and when we got up
there a youth group from Southern California had commandeered one side of
the lake, yelling, skinny dipping, cavorting and laughing. I groaned when
I realized that thirty urban teenagers had made the same hike that I, a
seasoned fisherman and trailblazer, had complained about so relentlessly
the entire way up the mountain. Then to add insult to injury, none of the
people we met at the lake had any idea that the trout they were fishing so
carelessly for were the California state fish, arguably the most beautiful
and rarest fish in the world. It kind of gave me a reality check, to say
the least. Anyway, the youth group left on Saturday morning, and after
that I had some of the most productive, and quiet, fishing days I've had
in my life.
I caught my first golden four years ago in the tiny tributary feeding
Island Lake, and I returned to the exact same pool when I returned to
Island Lake. What the goldens lack in size they make up for in brilliance,
and the stream fish were even more vividly colored than their
lake-dwelling counterparts. After half an hour of gentle offerings, a
small golden rose to the caddis imitation and I had officially caught my
first Island Lake golden of the trip.
While most
brook trout will rise to almost anything that moves, these goldens were a
bit more wary and required at least half-decent placement and crude
representations of their natural diet. We used mostly caddis imitations to
match the decent hatches Friday and Saturday evening, and egg-sucking
leeches during the day to lure trout from the bottom. The hooked trout
fought gamely for such small fish; one eleven-incher jumped literally two
feet in the air after he took my fly. We released all of the trout we
caught that weekend, snapping pictures instead to try to capture the
essence of exquisite beauty that is the golden trout.
There were two tiny streams feeding Island Lake and two streams running
out of it, and of the four only one going in and one coming out had enough
water to sustain a fishery. The next morning we decided to try Fingerbowl
Lake, a brief hike down the mountain that we could hike to and fish and be
able to come back up to Island in time for the evening caddis hatch.
Picture
your average-size Costco. The aptly-named Fingerbowl, the smallest lake on
the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness circuit, is about that size. There are two
things that separate this tiny lake from the others: first, it's deep.
While all the other lakes might have been thirty or fifty feet deep at the
lowest part, Fingerbowl had to be at least a hundred and looked even
deeper because of its relatively small surface area. Second, whereas
almost all of the other lakes had well-established fisheries of small- to
mid-sized trout, Fingerbowl had relative monsters. We thought it was
barren upon first sight, but soon spotted a couple of fourteen- to
fifteen-inch brookies cruising near the shore(bear with me; anything above
twelve inches is big for me, and if you saw the size of this lake and its
crystal-clear water and how sterile and empty and deep it looked, you'd be
impressed too. It's easy to picture large trout in scud-rich lakes or
other such high-nutrient environments, but in a tiny alpine lake
surrounded by rock...well, that's a different story. Who knows, maybe it's
just my overactive imagination playing tricks on me). We saw less than
five fish in an hour at the lake, one which took a half-hearted swipe at
my fly and returned to the depths and another which my dad hooked and lost
in some brush. We're guessing that the big fish ate their competition and
so the fishery of Fingerbowl consists of a few trout of proportionally
immense size.
We skirted the face of the mountain to the creek draining Island Lake,
hoping to fish our way back up to the lake and make the five-hundred foot
increase in elevation seem less. It was tiny water. After fifteen minutes
of climbing up the slope with no fish in sight, the terrain leveled off
slightly and some nice pocket-water yielded a couple of brilliant creek
goldens. Back at the lake, the evening hatch was great and we casted to
risers until we couldn’t see the water anymore.
As we headed back down from Island Lake the next day, trying to beat the
looming thunderclouds to the trailhead, I couldn't resist stopping at the
mouth of the same tiny creek flowing down from Island nearly a thousand
feet below to South Lake that I had found goldens in earlier. My whim paid
off when I tricked a tiny juvenile trout to a fly as big as his head. Its
iridescent silver sheen was amazing, and the lack of spots below the
lateral line led me to believe that it was a very young golden or
golden/rainbow hybrid.
At any rate, the importance of this discovery and the golden in Dinkey 1
is that the goldens from Island, which are supposed to be isolated in that
lake due to impassable creeks, are breaching the creek with its towering
waterfalls into South, and even from South through another creek into
Dinkey 1. This, of course, is all rendered worthless speculation if it
turns out that some fisherman caught some goldens and planted them in
First Dinkey and South Lakes, but I’d like to be optimistic and believe
that the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness is becoming a viable golden trout
fishery.
We passed Swede and Mystery Lakes, but by this time the ominous clouds had
caught up with us and we trudged back to the trailhead soaked in rain.
After we reached the car and started back down towards Shaver, we stopped
at a little creek passing underneath the road (it had stopped raining)
because we saw a couple of good pools as we drove over the creek. I snuck
up behind a tree and casted into the first pool I saw, and my stealth was
rewarded when I pulled out a little trout the likes of which I'd never
seen before. It had red spots with blue rings around them, and the image
of brown trout that I had in my mind of big, brown, and yellow kept me
from recognizing it as a brownie until a little while later when I caught
another one and my dad correctly identified it.
Ironically, on
my biggest Sierra fishing trip of the year I caught brookies, goldens, and
even a couple of browns, but no rainbows, the common trout of every
watershed in the Sierra Nevadas. If you call that juvenile trout I caught
a rainbow x golden hybrid, I managed to bag my first Sierra trout grand
slam in one weekend. Even if it doesn’t count, those four days up in the
Western Sierras were magical and I can’t wait to embark on my next
golden-chasing adventure.
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