High Sierra 9/21
Twenty years ago I hiked up to 11,500-foot Tamarack Lakes and caught a golden trout. I only spent a few hours at the main lake and wanted to come back some day for a two-day effort. I tried last month but due to vehicular difficulties I was unable to put out the effort. I did however fix the two problems with the truck. The air pressure in the gas tank issue was solved by purchasing an official Toyota gas cap to replace the ten-year-old Standt aftermarket model. The problem with the engine herking and jerking at low speeds was only a small adjustment needed on the throttle position sensor. Li’l Miracle is back to running perfectly.
There are two ways to reach Tamarack. One trail heads south from Rock Creek Lake and the other trail I use you reach by a rough ten-mile 4x4 jeep path out of Swall Meadows called Sand Canyon Road. You park at the end then hike cross country to the main trail up to the lake. The benefit of using the 4x4 road is you remove the initial 1,000-foot climb from Rock Creek. It's the same distance from the dirt road but level ground until you are two miles in.
Tuesday morning I left the house by 7am and made it to the campsite at the end of the road by 4pm. I was quite pleased how the truck performed on the highway and the very beat up trail. I had a nice BBQ steak and potato then hit the hay around 7pm so I could get up early to fix breakfast and get going. This year Inyo National Forest is prohibiting all campfires including charcoal grills but I cooked with my Weber Portable using regular Kingsford anyway.
Wednesday morning I was up at 6 cooking Meadow Farms Mahogany Bacon and Sheepherder Bread French toast along with fresh-perked Folgers Black Silk using my three burner unleaded gas Colman stove. After I was carbed up I packed the truck, pulled out of the campsite and parked in a turnout so that all I have to do when I return from the hike is toss my pack in the back and go.
At 10 I strapped on my pack and started walking. Since I have visited this drainage only once before, I carried a topographical map I printed out using my DeLorme Topo USA software. There is a trail that leads from truck camp to the first meadow, then it disappears. You have to follow the topo lines until you head west through a lodgepole forest, past a fishless pond, cross into another meadow where you can pass over the Dorothy Lake trail, then into another meadow where you pick up the Tamarack trail two miles later. This time I decided to hike the Dorothy Lake trail just to look and found the waters too shallow to support fish.
I followed the now dry inlet creek upstream to where the Tamarack trail passes closeby. I found a pool of stagnant water surrounded by mud, imprinted into which were many medium size fresh bear prints. Don’t let the picture fool you, these paws are six inches across! I already had stuffed all my food into my Counter Assault Bear Keg and strapped that to the top of my pack, so I figure since whatever bear finds me won't be able to access my Mountain House, Kudos and Meadow Farms Cowboy jerky, he'll feast upon me instead.
Once past Dorothy Lake I forgot how much of a climb there is within the next two miles. When you pass Round Valley Mountain you look up at it, then three hours later you are just about even with the heighth of its peak.
At 5pm a decission was to be made. I still had at least an hour climb remaining and since it is three days from autum there will not be much daylight to use to set up camp if I can even find a soft flat spot between the boulder-strewn lake to pitch a tent and comfortably lay out the Thermarest pad.
Another issue is the availablilty of potable water. As you can see by the photos of the brown meadows The Sierra is under drought conditions this summer. All of the creeks I passed were bone dry with the exception of the mud puddle with the paw prints. As I stood looking up at the next 500 foot climb I heard the slightest of a trickle coming from a shroud of bushes. This is where upon a relative level flat grassy clearing I would camp for the night.
After everything was set up I blazed through the flora and filtered a half gallon of great tasting water out of the two-inch deep creek using my MSR pump. A quick meal of Mountain House freeze-dry beef and potatoes and I was down for the night by 7:30.
Thursday morning at 7:30 I crawled out of the tent into chilly air to fix breakfast and re-pack. I left my tent an bedding at the campsite and by nine was back on the trail another hour climb to my goal, Tamarack Lake.
I hiked around to the right and found the perfect chunk of tundra meadow along the shore right next to the deepest part of the lake. I planned on fishing the same way I did at Secret Brown Trout Lake in July. I set up my four-pound outfit with a one-ounce egg sinker, a swivel with a four-foot two-pound leader, a large Owner Stinger treble hook to which a nightcrawler was wrapped and a wad of Gulp Chunky Cheese dough bait was molded. I inflated the crawler with an insulin syringe and cast out as far as I could into the crystalline turquoise water.
I put that rod into a spike holder then set up my eight-pound rig with a chrome, yellow and green with black spots Kastmaster. I was just able to tie on the lure when my bait pole bent over. I could tell while reeling in it was small and by the way the fish twisted in like a broken kite in the wind it was exactly what I didn't want to catch, a finned vermin puny brook trout.
Dang, if there are any goldens left in the lake it will be difficult to entice them if the brookies are present, as they are so ravenous they will attack your bait or lure before anything else has a chance. So that the fish would not be able to spawn in the lake anymore, I tossed it up away from the water into the rocks to die. I re-baited and cast out once again.
Meanwhile I was catching a brookie every cast with the lure. Once good sign was at least they didn't have the big heads and small bodies. These things were stuffed with fat bellies full of scuds, especially the ones that were hooked out far near the bottom of the deeper water, as evidenced by this plump male in spawning blazon. In my opinion what needs to be done at this tarn is to have the DFG rotenone all the brook trout twice then re-stock with goldens.
Good thing I love to strap on 60-something pounds and hike for six hours at 11,000 feet because catching small brook trout sucks. This lake is beautiful and all that but it isn't worth the effort unless you only like to look and not fish. Subtracting a 30-minute lunch break I fished the whole time here and the other side of the lake until 5pm and ended up without any gold, only countless brookies every few minutes while using bait and lure.
There's another lake a mere fifty yards up from Tamarack called Buck Lake but I only looked and didn't fish.
As the sun dropped below nearby Broken Finger Peak I packed up and headed back down to Camp Boring for the night.
Friday morning I got up around nine, packed up and walked back to the truck in two-and-a-half hours. In some spots the aspens were turning color as is normal for the end of September but this year the leaves looked somewhat straggly. A Mammoth Times article explains this is due to the low snow winter.
On the way out along Sand Canyon Road, as soon as I hit pavement, I saw the battery light flash on the dashboard. Crap, I know this one, it means my alternator is going out. If I revved the engine the light went out, signifying more volts were output. I made it to Bishop for lunch, we started up normally afterward but by the time I passed Lone Pine the whole engine went out. What happenes is when the alternator can't keep the battery charged, all of the electronic fuel injection, radio and air conditioner drains it so the EFI won't function.
I coasted to the shoulder of 395 and pullied out my trusty new, never used, fully charged before I left, spare battery and a wrench. I had it installed in ten minutes and was on my merry way with no radio or A/C. About an hour later, somewhere in the middle of the Mojave Desert the battery light was on once again and it was almost time to have to turn the lights on. There was no way I could make it home unless I could find another alternator or two more batteries.
I took the 178 into Ridgecrest and found on China Lake Blvd at 7:30 at night, right next to the K-mart, an Auto Zone and an O'Reily's; the latter I stopped first. I'll be dam they had an alternator in stock for my 1990 Toyota! I always carry my full toolbox on these expiditions and was able to swap out the unit in only 20 minutes. I used to call this town Ridgerust but no more. It will be always the proper Ridgecrest for me.
With bright ligths, cool air in the cab and baseball on the radio I was home just before 10.