I knew the Upper Kerm Basin was our best bet for a good adventure.
The two weeks we'd had to summit eastern Sierra Passes ranging from 11,000 to 13,500
feet high.
We'd average 8 hours a day with 45 pound packs on our back.
It would be four days before we'd even reached the Upper Kerm and roughly 27,000 feet of
elevation gains and losses before finally returning back to the truck.
But sooner or later we are driven to climb these mountains and have a peek at one of
these iconic fish with the kaleidoscope of color.
This season my goal was to introduce some friends to one of the most remote regions
of the High Sierra.
We set out to find groups of golden trout that have been isolated for more than a century.
There is a catch though, they are found in a most unlikely place, precariously perched
in isolated streams at elevations of over 10,000 feet and very biny snow half the year.
Mount Whitney on one hand is the highest peak in the lower 48 states, yet a stone's throw
to the east sinks Death Valley, the lowest spot in North America.
Our first stop was to check in with Phil Pister, the Dean of Golden Trout, and garner information
about this fish.
Another 10 bucks I'll tell you too long you know.
I first made my backpacking trips here, first major trips, back after World War II.
If you're a professional biologist like I am, you look at these things as evolutionary
marvels.
The average person doesn't give a blast about whether they're pure or not, he wants to catch
a pretty trout, and we care because that's our job, our fishing game department, to be
concerned about the purity of species, that's why we exist.
So that's what motivated me to spend my entire life up there trying to care for this thing.
Packing two weeks of food for a trip into the back country is always a challenge.
Steaks taste best, but in reality we had to go super lightweight, and that means taking
a bunch of freeze-dried food that tastes like sawdust in a cup, but that's the balance
we have to maintain.
After packing our food, we spent a night in the Alabama Hills before heading out the next
day.
Then I found out that a Sierra Club group was going into an area near where we were setting
up our base camp on the Upper Kern.
It was a perfect opportunity to poach two sides of a mule.
When I was a kid I believed golden trout were native to all the high Sierra, but in fact
most of the Sierra was totally barren of fish.
The Kern tributaries which are the home of golden trout were isolated about 10,000 years
ago by volcanic flows.
This physical isolation resulted in a genetic drift and the divergence of the golden trout
from the rainbow trout.
Golden trout are native to only a few tiny and spared tributaries of the Kern River.
Its headwaters emerge at elevations of over 12,000 feet, one of the highest river sources
in North America.
Kern splits the Great Western Divide from the slightly higher eastern escarpment of the
Sierra where peaks rise to over 14,000 feet.
Despite their limited range, golden trout were destined to travel, and travel north
they did.
First of all, bit by bit in the infamous coffee can plants of the late 19th century.
Next, by past sheepherders tired of eating mutton every day.
As time progressed, coffee cans gave way to milk buckets and horses.
Sierra clubbers in the Department of Fish and Game began moving the fish to otherwise
uninhabited stretches of the Sierra.
By the 1920s, golden trout were 200 miles north, yet back on the Upper Kern, golden
trout became threatened in their original habitat.
First rainbow trout were planted, which they hybridized with, and then brown trout were
planted, which eat them, nevertheless the golden trout flourished, not at home but outside
of their original habitat.
While it was exciting to be among the first people of the season to go into the historic
golden trout habitat, once the higher passes were free of snow, the Upper Kern basin beckoned.
These mountains care nothing about you, they have no opinion at all, it's not man versus
nature out here, not until you start the relentless ascent of your first pass to get into the
high Sierra that this really sets in.
Luckily mountain storms don't last forever, and they bring a little gift with them, evenings
of perfectly tranquil lakes, and the hatches begin again, and the trout rise.
Hike, climb, fish, this became our mantra and rhythm for our entire journey.
This isn't the Pyrenees, the Dolomites, the Alps, or the Rockies for that matter, but
it is one of the few places in the world where you can climb alpine peaks and fish for trout.
When traveling into the remote Sierra, I pick roots that allow me to fish the way in.
The fact is, trout are all over the place in the Sierra.
Pickbub's Creek for example.
On this stream there's an opportunity to fish for about every species of trout known.
You can catch brook trout, rainbows, browns, you can catch rainbow golden hybrids, and up
high of course you start running into the golden trout themselves.
Traipsing across the high Sierra looks alluring in photographs, but the reality is much more
brutal.
These days are long, the mountains are simply sweat, dust, and exhaustion.
All you think about is water to keep hydrated and sleep.
Everything in our packs serves a purpose.
There's no superfluous gear brought along, even our spoons are made of titanium.
We bring the lightest down sleeping bag, the lightest foam pads, the lightest packs.
And some people throw it all out the window.
Do you need a bunch of fancy gear to go into the mountains?
Everybody knows the old theory that cotton kills, but that doesn't really apply to Ted.
And if you want to end your trip real fast, blow your feet.
Anytime you feel a hot spot on your foot, don't think it's going to go away.
Everybody has different theories on how to take care of their feet.
I wear liners and wool socks and mountain boots, but Ted wears work boots.
He doesn't care.
In the mountains, even a Ritz cracker taco is delicious.
Good?
Yeah.
Guidebooks aside, I really learned to cultivate a friendship with the people who live and work
there, the trail crew.
They know the mountains inside and out.
You just keep going up this.
And what do you call this one here?
Three bay.
Three bay?
Oh, I got you.
Decline that one.
Table?
Yeah.
All the way through Elizabeth Pass.
Awesome.
Anybody can get across the Sierra.
Nevertheless, experience teaches you to find your own rhythm, to find your own pace.
It's just constant breathing and one more step.
But then again, we had the Ravel brothers along, both national casting champions.
They gallop across the Sierra.
After days on our feet, we got our first glimpse into the Upper Kern Basin.
Here at the edge of Lake South America, we set up our base camp.
Can't get out of this thing, this thing is a fucked up sign.
The mountains are cold, even in August.
Did you get that, George?
A little popsicle.
Will work for coffee.
After living up raisins and freeze-dried food, we knew we were about to have a feast.
Exactly on time, Dave's pack train nosed over the head wall and dropped into our base camp.
I think we spent like two hours just gorging.
We had 27 sausages.
Cooked brisket.
So you get the proper insertion into this sausage.
Soy milk.
Fruit.
I found a good sight pan over there, we could do it with some olive oil.
I got a little olive oil.
We're just going to have to slice it up into little bits, you know.
Too much.
I'm just trying to think out the best way to get this out of the package.
I just cut this little dip down there.
Yeah, just figure out what you're going to do.
So it's before to time.
Yeah.
Great.
After an epic feast, we were back to the usual.
We traipsed across the Lake South America to fish.
For me it was another circle completed.
I was back on the batch of cirks in the upper cairn.
Here was a place that Ted and I had been pining to explore since we'd been here three years
before.
Before us were several days to hike, climb, fish, and fill in more blanks on our own personal
maps.
Above loomed the ragged crest of the great western divide, chiseled by eons of ancient
glaciers.
Morning came and we were back on the trail again.
Now we were hiking cross country, headed for Lake of the Fish, Sheep Herders Camp, Three
Bay Lake, and Miners Camp.
A big part of exploration is the allure of the unknown.
We're about to find out what kind of fish lived up here.
It wasn't long before we were casting to liquid gold.
Each new drainage is dripping with fresh possibilities, and by evening we descended into Sheep Herders
Camp.
There's nothing quite as cool as hanging out in the camp established by Sheep Herders
over a century ago.
In addition to our quest for liquid gold, trail workers James and Jordan had introduced
us to the intriguing possibility of rediscovering an old miner's camp.
High on the great western divide, this mine and its surrounding serks became our ultimate
tool.
Here we were at the furthest distance from our start, a solid five day hike back to our
truck.
Expect to find the unexpected in the high Sierra.
Not only did we find goldens, we found these strange speckled rainbows.
They looked like nothing we'd seen before.
Here we found the mother load.
There are a few other trout found in the high Sierra, notably the Kern River rainbow, more
like a red band you'd find on the McLeod.
And never going to see a trout like this anywhere else, it's a hybrid.
I call it a frankenfish.
With lightweight rods and ultrafine tippet, fish race to tiny dancing dry flies on every
cast.
Did I GPS it?
Could I ever find my way back there?
Hmm, it might take a bit to pry that out of any of us.
Though we'd found our fish, their future was on our minds.
The historically fishless Sierra is a landscape much altered.
By 1890 approximately 90,000 sheep were brought in for summer grazing in Yosemite Valley alone.
One of the first officers of Sequoia reported an estimated 500,000 sheep on the Kern and
Kings River.
Both sheep and cattle destroy stream banks, a controversy that recently reached the front
page of the L.A. Times.
Phil Peaster lived through this once before.
Then in came the cows.
State fish was on jeopardy, in jeopardy of being eradicated.
If they were eradicated, there aren't no more golden trout, you're not going to find
any more fish.
See, that's the wilderness, it's the golden trout wilderness where these things live.
And should you have cows in the wilderness area, that's a good philosophical question.
As a biologist we say no, but still that shows you how close we are to losing species.
The golden trout could easily have fallen into that during the South Fork Kern.
We were quiet on our return to base camp.
Now we were going home.
People asked me, is it really worth it to go to so much work for a trout?
I'll leave that to you.
We were tired.
We were hungry.
People had come and people had gone along our trip.
Our friendships were deeper and our experiences broader.
And the Sierra continues to beckon.
That's all for this video, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next
one.
Bye.
I'll see you in the next one.
