Secret Golden Trout Lake 8/20
2021 marks 35 years since I first discovered Secret Golden Trout Lake in the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains. I did not visit every year but when I did The Breakwall Crew and I always caught many of good size, for golden standards. My biggest was 1 pound 7 ounces back in 1997. Now, the thrill is gone.
I hadn’t backpacked here since summer 2018. Then, the lake level rose a good bit and was chock full of 10- and 12-inch fish. This trip, as I walked up to the log jam at what used to be the outlet creek, I saw the lake level was at the lowest point I had ever seen and for the first time ever the inlet creek was completely dry.
Another something I never saw up here before at 11,000 feet are ducks. There were ten of them muddling in the muck near the back shallows. At one point I heard them get riled up and when I glanced over, I witnessed a peregrine falcon dive bombing the raft. That was fun.
The first evening I cast a small jointed Rapala in brook trout colors and caught a bunch and had many other hits until after dark but they were all four inches and released. I never saw such small trout here.
Two mornings later I knew what I could expect – a total suckfest – but what the heck, I hiked all the way up here. Might as well see if anything larger is hanging out deeper in the lake.
There isn’t deeper anymore. A 1/16 egg sinker took a count of two to hit bottom. While that was holding down the usual Gulp! dough bait, I tossed out the smallest Kastmaster in my arsenal and that only took a count of nine. Nothing hit the dough wad, or if they did, they were too small to detect. On the lure I caught one every other cast for two hours but again all were four inches. As the light of dawn gained, I could see hundreds surfacing during the morning rise, which is a good sign, but…
We would need at least five normal Sierra winter snowpacks in a row to save this one particular lake. The dilemma is, if this coming winter is normal or higher, the lake is so low it could freeze solid and kill all the fish. If it will be another below normal winter, the tarn will completely dry up and kill all the fish. If all the fish disappear and it takes six years to refill, the Cal DFW would need to fly in a plane load of fingerling goldens and they would take another five years to grow out to catchable size. I am scheduled to be dead by then or at least backpack disabled.
That was it for fishing.
As I was driving up Monday morning the whole desert was smoky and so especially was Bishop. As I climbed the 4x4 dirt road to hike camp you could barely see the immediate mountains. I thought, this will be a wasted trip. No way can anyone trek and breath hard at 11,000 feet while wallowing in this poison.
In the middle of the night a wind kicked up and by morning all the smoke was gone as if by miracle. After the normal pre-hike breakfast of mahogany smoke bacon and Sheepherder Bread French toast, I geared up and was at the lake before two hours.
The next day I hiked from the lake into the high country. There is an official Forest Service trail but it is faint in many places, as it is not very popular. I will not give away any of the place names to keep it this way.
Since Secret Lake will pass away soon, I looked for something else to do up here. I found two mountains to climb next summer. Also, I scouted another lake which according to DFW recordkeeping contains rainbow trout and is a short hike from the end of another 4x4 trail. In this picture you can see during the current drought it is full and deep with no humans around on a beautiful day in the summertime. This one will be a whole week investigation next August.
Another thing I noticed while up here today was, not only the lake I just showed was full but two other major lakes in the same drainage as Secret are also full. This lake is four times larger and deeper than Secret Lake when it is full but it only contains brook trout, which are always small up here. At 11,714 feet, it is very difficult to access and on a normal year is only unfrozen two or three months. Goldens would do better than brooks in this body of water and in my opinion the lake is mismanaged.
Also, as I looked down into the drainage, the lake right next to Secret is full, as is a pond in the meadow. Something about Secret makes it drain through a porous bottom faster than any other lake in this zone.