The fishing forum has been a bit slow, so I thought I’d share a fishing report from my last trip in the Trinity Alps.
My 11 year old son and I had two goals on our most recent trip. One was to summit Thompson Peak, and the other was to catch a golden trout. From what I was able to research, there were at least two places in the Trinity Alps where golden trout were planted many years ago, both of which are fairly inaccessible and require a bit of bushwhacking and scrambling to get to. We hiked up Canyon Creek to the upper lake, and set up camp. We had a couple of hours to fish the lake, but I was only able to get one fish in the net. A nice 11 inch brookie that I caught in the inlet on a killer bugger with my 3 wt fly rod. Sorry, no pictures of that one.
The next day, we bushwhacked and scrambled our way to the top of Thompson Peak. We followed the creek on the way up, constantly scanning for trout, but it wasn’t until we were well above the waterfalls, and over a mile from the lake that we finally found them. Being in a hurry, we stashed our fishing gear, and headed up to the summit, which was no small feat. Neither of us has ever caught a golden trout, so that was all we talked about on the way down. Which pool were we going to try first, what tactics to use, what flies to try, etc. We finally got back down to “the place” and set up the fly rod. My son had brought my Tenkara rod, but unfortunately, he had left the spool with the line back in camp, so we would have to take turns with my fly rod. There are a lot of bushes and trees that hang over the creek in that area, so we decided to start with a #18 black ant dry. That may have been the best decision we made all day. Casting from the top of a large boulder, my son had his first cast in the water for about 5 seconds when we saw a flash of orange and white, a splash, and with a quick, short hook set, the fish was on. It was late in the day, but we made the most of the time we had. 6 beautiful fish in 30 minutes and we both felt completely recharged from our rather strenuous day. We spent the entire walk down telling each other how cool that was, and how grateful we felt to have had those 30 minutes of bliss to break up the 8 hours of pain and suffering that were involved getting up to and down from the summit.
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