High Sierra Trout
McCloud
Last weekend Gary, Ryan, Matt and I fished the McCloud River in Northern California for the opener. Matt and I left Reno at midnight on Friday and drove through the night to get to the river. We got to the campsite a little after 4 am and woke up Gary and Ryan. We planned to fish The Nature Conservancy stretch, TNC allows 10 rods per day on this stretch. Five spots are reserved and five are for walk-ups. In order to be sure we got the walk-up tags we started the hike into the preserve at 5. To our surprise we found 6 dudes already waiting at the preserve boundary when we arrived. Three of them had reservations, meaning there were two walk-up tags left. Matt and I took the tags and Gary and Ryan opted to fish the public water upstream from the preserve. Matt and I waited until the sun came up over the hills before hiking down into the preserve to our first spot. I hooked a decent fish early on that jumped once and shook the hook. Meanwhile, Gary and Ryan had begun fishing upstream and Gary had already landed what was probably the first fish of the year on the McCloud (pictured below).
Nice fish Gary!
A little while later I landed my first fish on a hotwire Prince nymph (pictured below).
Pretty rainbow
The McCloud River is world famous for its hard-fighting, beautifully colored native rainbows. It used to have the southernmost population of Dolly Vardens, but they have been presumed to be extinct for a couple of decades now. Matt landed his first McCloud River trout, and it was a beauty (pictured below). He was surprised at how hard it fought.
Matt’s first McCloud trout
By 9 am Matt and I had landed about 10 fish up to 16”, with a few more hooked and lost. At about 10 we ran into a couple of the guys from the crew we had met earlier, and they had only caught one fish. These guys had all guided together in Alaska, but that wasn’t helping them get many fish on the McCloud. We turned around and fished our way back up river to find Gary and Ryan, they ended up getting on the preserve because the two other reservations didn’t show and the tags were made available at 10. They had caught some nice fish too, on Prince and stonefly nymphs.
We headed back to camp for some lunch and rest, Matt and I had not slept and Gary and Ryan only slept for a few hours, so we were all pretty tired. Ryan cooked up a feast of bacon, eggs and potatoes and we washed it all down with Trout Slayer Ale. We discovered this beer from the Big Sky Brewing Co. on a trip through Montana a few years ago, and it is the best fishing beer ever.
Matt and Ryan passed out for the afternoon while Gary and I went fishing. We each got a few small ones, but the river was pretty crowded. I ended up upstream at the Ah-Di-Nah campground where there is some great water. I was hoping for a rise, there were lots of bugs in the air, but nothing came to the surface. Matt took off Sunday morning and the rest of us fished the water downstream from our campsite. We got a late start so we were fishing behind another angler, which didn’t work out well for us. After an hour of not catching any fish we decided to pack up and head to some less crowded water. We ended up fishing Burney Creek downstream from Burney Falls (pictured below).
Burney Falls
We had the whole creek to ourselves, but the fishing was pretty slow. We each got a fish or two and Gary hooked a beast that ran downstream before shaking the hook. Burney Creek is a beautiful stream, and it was fun to fish some new water. We quit at 4 and I headed back to Reno. Gary and Ryan drove to Redding to watch the Sharks game, then camped on the Trinity River. They fished the Trinity Monday morning in the fly only water, but the river was flowing really high and they only caught small steelhead smolts. They decided to head up to Dunsmuir (my home town) to fish the Upper Sacramento River, which was also running high. They each got a couple of nice ones and lost a few pigs before calling it quits and heading back to San Francisco.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
