Lake Life

Needing a break from winter, the author shares a story of spring.

I have a favorite lake I fish during spring runoff.  It’s close enough that I can climb there in an hour of steady hiking, and by the end of May I can make it up without snowshoes.  It’s not a remote place, but the hikers who visit intermittently throughout the day rarely stay long, and it leaves me with significant stretches of time where I get to be alone with the water and the fish and the weather.  I suppose it would be accurate to call it an alpine lake.  It sits at elevation, but below tree-line.  Still, it lacks the pristine, turquoise-blue, almost aseptic water that characterizes most of the lakes you’d hike to here in the Rockies.  It has a muddy bottom and a tannic, red-brown color that reminds me of my home waters back in the Midwest.  But you won’t find pike or musky or even bass here in the high country.  This is a trout lake.

In late May and early June the lake is cold from snow-melt.  The first time I came up to fish I took my shoes and socks off, stepped into the water and promptly jumped right out.  Wet wading in the spring is a recipe for frostbite.  But the pine trees tuck in close around the lakeshore, and getting a roll cast out is virtually impossible.  So I found a rock — “my rock.”  It sits out in the lake a couple of meters from shore, and if I scamper across a few small stones I can make it in bare feet without doing too much damage.  From there I can sit or crouch and cast 180 degrees around me while keeping my feet dry. 

Sitting on my rock, waiting to find a fish, several seasons seem to pass within the span of an hour.  In late spring, the weather still vacillates between winter and summer.  When the sun fades behind the clouds, the temperature drops rapidly, and I have to pull up my hood to avoid shivering.  But the jet stream moves clouds quickly, and soon the moment passes and there is warm sunshine.  The fish seem to vary their patterns along with these changes.  Consistent dry fly action disappears when the skies darken and wind whips the surface of the water into small, choppy waves.  During these times I wade back to shore to drink water and eat a snack, or I perch on my rock and scan the lake for signs of activity.  It pays to be patient when you’re lake fishing.

The lake’s inhabitants are savvy.  They’ve been through this routine before, and they catch on quickly.  Always moving, scouting the water for an insect snack, they are hungry but they’re not stupid.  They will inevitably move their feeding to just outside of my casting distance, rising two feet away from where I’m able to land my dry fly.  These fish are infuriating but also endearing.  When I do manage to drop my fly in front of their path, a gentle twitch usually does the trick.  They gulp it slowly and come to the net relatively easily.  After a long winter under the ice, these fish are gray, with spots that start out sparse and become a dense cluster towards the ends of their tails.  They have bright pink gill plates, a dramatic contrast to their pale bodies, and a telltale slashed throat. 

One day I decided to do a walkabout, and I followed the trail to the waterfall, where a creek pours into the lake from the mountains’ upper reaches.  Here the bottom becomes shallow and stony, and the water streams in through variegated channels.  In a clear pool carved out by the rushing current, cutthroat gathered, facing the oxygenated flows that carried what I imagine would be an abundance of aquatic macroinvertebrates — trout food. Unlike their cousins who cruise the lakeshore, these fish had found a spot where it was worth staying, and watching them swerve in and out of their feeding lanes to pick up nymphs as they floated by made me feel as if I was witnessing some kind of trout nirvana.  Of course, there is always a price to pay for easy living, and I imagine that these fish in the shallow, clear water are much more susceptible to the redtail hawks and bald eagles that call these mountains home, but on this day there were no hungry raptors circling.

Being alone at the lake can make me feel small, vulnerable even, especially when a storm rolls in and the sound of thunder reverberates off the rockslides and pine slopes.  I can hear it as it comes closer, bringing with it the wind and the driving rain, and sending me sliding down the rocky trail towards home.  In these moments I feel my humanity in its most raw form.  I too am an animal, a creature, one moment content and the next a target for an errant lightning bolt if I’m not careful.  I’ve always felt this dichotomy of serenity and feral hypervigilance while I’m in the mountains.  It feels both beautiful and terrible, a reminder that one day I too will be plucked from beneath the waterfall and carried away into the heavens.

-EH, February 2021