My first
mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance,
had its genesis in an episode that occurred in Alpine County CA, on the east
slope of the Sierra Nevada. Like my protagonist Quill Gordon in Chapter 2, I
was fishing on a small stream in a remote area when some people camped nearby
came over to let me know they were doing some target practice.
The sound
of their gunfire became so unnerving that after several minutes of it, I moved
on to another creek. My shooters were just a bunch of weekend plunkers, but it
occurred to me, with the citizen militia movement in full bloom at the time,
that if it had been such a group, there would be a story there.
Alpine
County is one of many places I’ve drawn on for the settings of my three Quill
Gordon novels, and for a long time it was one of my go-to fishing places. In
the past decade, I’ve drifted away from it, and this year I decided to go back
for a short visit and see how its fine streams have been affected by the
drought.
Roughing It No More
I used to
go up in my 1977 VW camper and stay at Grover Hot Springs State Park, but I
sold the camper in 2011. Instead, I booked a small cabin at the Carson River
Resort, about two miles out of Markleeville, the county seat. It turned out to
be just right for my purposes.
From the
cabin, you could walk across Highway 89 and fish the East Fork of the Carson
River. Like all the streams in the mountains this year, it was down
considerably. The river, in fact, was more like a large creek, and it was hard
to believe that in a normal wet year, there are companies that set up river-rafting
expeditions on it.
Even though
the water level was down a foot or more from normal, the East Carson had plenty
of fish in it. There were good deep holes and decent riffles still, and I
caught a few fish and saw others. I had feared it would be even lower than it
was and unfishable, but that turned out not to be the case.
The Reservoir Was Down
My first
morning there, I drove up the highway to Kinney Reservoir, near the summit of
Ebbets Pass, thinking I might try my luck there. No such luck. Ordinarily, you
could walk out on the dam and cast into the lake a few feet below. The morning
I got there, the water was about 60 feet below. It was like looking into the
crater of a volcano.
So I went
over the pass and took a rugged dirt road to Highland Lakes, about five miles
off the highway at an elevation of 8,600 feet. I was glad I did. Those lakes
are natural, and they were full. I fished a couple of hours and had a few
bites, but just being there was enough. There had never been any reason to go
before because the streams were always full enough to fish.
What this
tells me is that drought conditions are situational. In the river, places I
didn’t fish before were pretty good and places I usually fished were
unfishable. One lake was fine and one wasn’t. It depends. However bad the
drought might get, the fish will usually find a place to live. If you want to
find them, you have to go check it out for yourself.
