High (relatively) Hike-In Lakes Report

I like lakes with multiple trout species; it is always interesting to see if I can tell the species by their fighting behavior and I like the diversity, beauty and solitude of mountain lakes.

I recently hit two lakes on consecutive days. The first lake has cutts and bows and the second one has cutts and brookies. Both require a long drive up a gravel road and a hike; the first one is pretty short but steep the second one is longer (I heard between 1.5-2 miles) but minimal elevation gain/loss.

The first one I had never fished though friends/co-workers have talked about it before. I didn't see any other anglers this trip. I hooked a fish on the first cast on both lakes and both were accidental, meaning I merely clearing the line from my reel. Each time I knew it was going to be a good day.



Steep canyon walls on all sides of this lake.

After fishing black woolly buggers and mayfly dries most of the day, on a whim I tried a San Juan worm (first time ever in a lake) and it worked surprisingly well, even during an intense mayfly hatch (see below). I didn't fish that way very long as it seemed a little sacrilegious to fish that way, just slightly a notch up from fishing bait. But I probably caught as many fish in 15 minutes as I did the previous hour. Before the mays, there was a pretty good damsel hatch, of which I didn't have a single pattern but it didn't seem to matter. Surprisingly, there was not intense surface feeding, even with all the damsels and mays.



Second lake. Not much of any bug-hatching activities but you could either troll and catch fish or throw a dry fly out and wait within a minute or two and catch fish. I did both. I had two rods strung up with me; a full sinking type III line and a floating line fishing dries on the shallow flats. It was a little too overcast and breezy to sight fish so it wound up being mostly blind casting and waiting. Or waiting for a rise and quickly cast near it.

Been a few years since my last double header, which was a bow and a brown. Today it was two brookies.


I hardly ever use two flies, mostly because I fish BC a lot and it is prohibited up there. I rarely use the common hopper/dropper setup on the Yak as I prefer to fish one fly well rather than trying to mix up two techniques and fishing both flies mediocre. But slowly trolling in a float tube leads itself to using two flies (when legal) except when trying to release two fish at the same time.

As is often the case, the first lake had larger but fewer fish. But whenever you cast to a riser, it usually ended up with a hook up. The second lake had more fish, but were smaller on average.

Just a few more memories that will get me through this winter.