It’s a brief distance from the trailhead to the lake, nevertheless it’s a bitch of a hike. A straight-up thigh-buster. However at the very least you’re out of the rattling truck and relieved to find no everlasting injury to your “jiggly elements.” The hike, consider it or not, is the simplest a part of getting right here. Regardless of the way you attempt to sugarcoat it, you’re two hours off the pavement and properly into the sticks by the point you make that last uphill push into the “pine” portion of the Pine Forest Vary of northern Nevada. Even once you information your truck during the last of the rocks which have probably pierced many an oil pan over time, and choose a spot to depart the truck within the “car parking zone,” you’re nonetheless within the desert. And also you’re a good distance from something.
Naturally, you search for the path, the place, rumor has it, there lies a series of lakes so filled with spunky trout that the water is only one huge rise ring when the night hatch comes off. However the actual shock is the look again down the mountain from whence you got here. The desert is unassuming once you’re driving via it, dodging wild burro turds and conserving your eye on that inexperienced crotch within the mountains excessive above the place these lakes supposedly sit. There, you assume, it’s cooler, and the greenery proves it. Mountain mahogany, limber pine and aspen received’t develop with out water, they usually certain as hell received’t develop down right here, the place even the sage seems to be depressed and downtrodden.
While you lastly get shut sufficient to get out and stroll, it’s simply not pure to show round and take a look at the highway you simply traveled. However the vista will take your breath away, simply the identical. From up right here, the desert is huge and foreboding. It’s big. Its muted colours of all issues drab and boring combine collectively in a palette so beautiful that you just overlook in regards to the scrawny jackrabbits and the pronghorns that seemed so forlorn you had been tempted to get out of the truck and attempt to feed them by hand.
It’s surreal.
Your gaze is pulled to the horizon—is that California clear within the crystal-clear distance? You assume so.
Then actuality. You didn’t simply bounce your $40,000 rig over all these rocks to admire the view of the desert under. You’re right here to fish, irrespective of how fishless this place feels in your intestine. Trout? Right here? No manner.
However you’re sport. And, hell, you’re right here, proper? After that cheap-ass carnival experience, sans the barf bag, simply stretching some fly line will really feel mighty good, even when there aren’t any fish to focus on. Certainly there can’t be fish. Not right here on this dry, dusty, God-forsaken nook of probably the most God-forsaken state within the union.
So that you begin that hike, and even the burn in your thighs is a welcome respite from the bouncing and the rocking and the mud. After which, all of a sudden, it’s cooler. There’s shade due to some hearty aspens that grasp on stubbornly on this desolate land. It feels good to be out of the solar, out from underneath that so-blue sky. And it smells good. Candy. Cool. It smells like … properly, it certain as hell doesn’t odor just like the desert. The path guides you up a bit greater, and also you punch via the aspen thicket and attain the highest of a bluff. It’s a very good place to relaxation, to reevaluate.
Earlier than you looms the sheer face of a mountain, nude due to its rocky contents. An extended talus moraine skirts the rock and disappears under the tops of some bushes within the distance. There, you assume, lie the lakes. If there are, certainly, lakes. It may very well be a merciless joke, proper? The remainder of the gang, suspiciously sluggish to assemble their packs and collect their gear, may very well be sitting on the tailgate sucking down PBR and laughing their asses off on the fool who simply wandered off into the desert with a fly rod.
Do you flip again? Do you admit your deepest worry, that you just’ve spent two days venturing to this distant place solely to search out it barren and fishless? You push on. It could actually’t be that a lot farther, proper?
The path, mercifully, begins down, and shortly, you’re again among the many quakies, having fun with that recent, coolness that comes over you want a Friday evening drunk. The golden leaves remind you that, irrespective of how sizzling it was once you stopped to take a leak and chase a wild burrow only for kicks down on the desert ground, the calendar has turned over to early October, and it’s full-on fall up right here at altitude.
Minutes later, off within the distance, you see it. Standing water. And never only a puddle or high-elevation cirque. It’s a lake. Wait. It’s two lakes. And what’s that? Is {that a} rise ring? One other?
Your step quickens and your ideas change from dire and hopeless to one thing resembling optimism. However you’re not there but. At this elevation, the supply of that rise may very well be a six-inch brookie for all you realize. I imply, an hour in the past, you had been coughing up highway mud and hydrating with low cost beer. No sense getting your expectations up, proper?
However it was an increase ring. You’re certain of it.
The path leads right into a draw and the lake disappears, hidden from view by the intense leaves of the aspens that filter the daylight and go away you strolling via a forest rife with shade so deep and intense that you just wrestle to give you an outline for the hue.
Your heartbeat quickens. Are the lakes actually there, off within the distance? Or was the imaginative and prescient from atop the bluff a desert-induced mirage that’s making the most of your fishy senses? The path continues via the bushes as if it’d by no means emerge, teasing you with the promise of lengthy casts throughout inexperienced water to rising fish. It was a mirage. Proper?
The bushes skinny out a bit after which your nostril catches that acquainted scent… that barely pungent tang of water standing underneath daylight. Possibly, simply perhaps …
You step via the brink of the bushes and the horizon opens earlier than you. The gentle sound of water licking rock awakens a primal urge deep in your soul and also you gaze off over a deep, inexperienced lake that actually glistens within the afternoon sunshine. You hear a gulp. Then one other. A head the scale of Granny Smith apple emerges from the lake, mouth open to ensnare some unseen bug caught within the floor movie. Gulp.
You drop your pack the place you stand, and also you fumble round clumsily on your rod tube. It takes what looks as if an eternity to slide 4 easy items of graphite collectively, and you are feeling a palsy come over you as you connect the reel and start threading a loop of fly line via the guides. One other gulp. You fumble the road and the shakes set in with a vengeance.
Right here, excessive atop the stark Nevada desert, you end up in a nervous funk, apprehensive that, for some motive, that hatch that’s bringing these gulping fish to the highest of this cool, inexperienced lake may finish earlier than you can also make that first solid. Your gaze is torn between guaranteeing you string line via each information in your rod and looking ahead to the following behemoth to floor on this lake, very like a humpback whale may breach within the north Pacific.
Line threaded, now your shaky fingers should discover the dexterity to tie a fly to your tippet. First issues first, although. You take a look at the glassy floor of this lake, hoping to search out the insect that’s spurring such careless takes among the many lake’s large trout. Via polarized lenses your eyes catch a big, grey mayfly struggling within the floor movie not a dozen toes from shore. Then it disappears in a swirl of enamel and mottled, golden-green scales.
Tiger trout. A laboratory creation, a twisted combine between a brook trout and a brown trout … a sterile, unnatural “salmo on salvo” mixture that has curried favor amongst fisheries managers, each for sport and for ridding waters of so-called “tough fish.” These fish eat they usually do little else.
Glancing round on the excessive rocks surrounding this backcountry lake, you instantly envy the experience the helicopter pilot loved the day he dumped these Frankenfish into the water for the good thing about somebody such as you, who bounced and rumbled over barely satisfactory roads for hours, sucked within the powdery mud churned up by the thick, black tires of the truck and walked one other mile via aspens and uncertainty.
Now, earlier than you, they gulped huge mayflies, taunting you, teasing you, tempting you.
You select a fluffy Parachute Adams for this process, and, trembling fingers and all, you handle to tie it tight to your tippet. You go searching for an inexpensive casting location, one which received’t finish together with your fly snared completely by the clingy branches of a lakeside limber pine.
There, a dozen toes off the financial institution, you see a big, flat rock just some inches underneath the floor. Minutes later, after a half-wade, half swim via the autumn-chilled lake, you’re standing on that rock and also you’re peeling line out of your reel. Your fly, doused with floatant, is pinched between your forefinger and thumb, and also you scan the water, ready for the following rise.
Then, 40 toes out, you spy a nostril. Flipping the fly within the air, you begin a calculated backcast and with a deft, observe stroke, you lay the Adams within the heart of the increasing rise ring. The fly rests evenly on the water. You give it a slight twitch.
Gulp.
