The morning was once again sunny, so I broke camp as early as I could manage and got going. The lake I was targeting was on the other side of the Buchanan Creek valley, so essentially I had to lose 2000 feet, go up the valley about a mile to Thunderbolt Canyon, make a new camp off trail, and then regain the elevation up a trail-free mountainside to the lake.
Things went well enough during the morning. I made fairly rapid progress, got down to the junction, and headed further up the Buchanan trail.
Some sections of Buchanan Creek looked really promising, but I was tight for time and didn’t stop.
I got to the mouth of the canyon, where there’s a beautiful meadow, around mid-morning. I found a group of young people camped in a big tent there. They were nice. They didn’t seem too experienced. They hadn’t noticed, for example, the moose standing beside their camp.
The kids all swarmed out with cameras. I surveyed the meadow. Thunderbolt Creek ran through it. It’s not that big. But it’s big enough you have to wade it. I figured that given I was looking at a serious climb and descent, it might suck quite hard if at the end of the day I had to face wading the creek. So I got it over with now, and camped along the edge of the meadow, directly beneath where I was heading up.
I wasn’t ready to head up until about 11. The weather was already starting to close in and look iffy. But, what the heck, I was there, I only had a permit for one more night. Nothing better to do. So I headed up.
Yowza. And so came another experience to join the list of the grimmest endurance-related moments of my life. The grand mother of all death slogs was still well in the future – it capped and ended the trip a couple of weeks later. But this one was plenty good. As I’ve said, it was 1400 feet, from around 9700 feet in the meadow to the lake at 11,100 feet. In places it was steep enough that you had to climb, but there was nothing really dangerous or challenging in that respect. The main issue was that it was almost all heavily wooded, so it was just endless fallen trees to climb over. The exception was when you could find a little ridge of outcrop and walk up it. There were some impassible cliffs, but it was fairly easy to spot and work around them. Toward the top I started to run out of gas again, as the altitude and accumulated exertion of the past few days caught up to me. But I made it. The last few hundred feet were on the haul up twenty feet and bend over and gasp until the pulse seems to get below 200 bpm, repeat plan. It was one of several undertakings on the trip where as you’re doing it, you can’t quite imagine actually reaching the end. But you keep doing anything, it’s eventually over.
When I got to the very top, I saw that the lake was surrounded on the downslope side by trees and huge unmelted snowbanks. I was instantly worried that I was looking at another Island Lake situation, but soon I could see through the trees and spotted open water. Okay, so I was going to get a line in the water. I collapsed and panted for a while.
It was now 2 pm and the weather had deteriorated badly. I spent as much of the afternoon huddled in the trees with my rain gear on as I did fishing, and a lot of the time when I could fish, the wind was up and there was chop on the water.
But.
Sometimes, the fates do actually reward you. I got to the edge, geared up. I fished the GM 39 to start, with a black woolly bugger.
And on the first cast, four large cutthroat followed. I hooked and landed one of them, a 14″er.
I’ve rarely experienced the kind of fishing excitement that first cast unleashed. It’s happened before back in the day, hiking in to a remote Canadian bush stream and having multiple large grayling chase. But it’s been a while. I wish I could say things went perfectly. If I’d gotten there early in the morning on a good weather day I’m convinced I could have caught many dozens. Playing hide and seek with electrical storms and sheets of rain, and able to fish only in snatches wasn’t ideal. Still, it was pretty much a paradise. I ended up with 21, most in the 13-14″ range, with the largest around 15″. Although I lugged the western rod along, I fished exclusively with tenkara rods. The woolly bugger accounted for the majority, but I also caught trout on a foam winged ant, foam egg, Frenchie, beadhead hotspot killer bug, leech, and a handful of other things.
We’d only caught our first cutthroat on the first western swing, at Great Basin National Park. The internet tells me these are supposed to be Colorado River strain cutts. I’m not used to the blasts of colour. There was quite wide variation, as you can see in the photos, but some of them were almost garish, with bright red bellies.
So…there was something to be said for just being here. And dragging myself to special places was satisfying. But suddenly the trip was for real. Some lakes do have fish. And I know how to catch them. Despite the weather, it was some of the best hours of fishing of my life. So far.
I kept bargaining with myself about when I had to head down. Sunset, minus mountains, was around 8.30. I obviously didn’t want to get caught in the woods on the descent in the dark. In the end I hung on to 6.45 pm, then packed up and beat it.
Getting down went reasonably well. I got a little off my bearing and at one point ended up on top of a cliff and had to sidetrack. But it wasn’t terrible.
When I popped out of the brush about a hundred yards up the meadow from my tent, not one but two moose looked up, startled. Looking at me like Whut the…?
Moose, like most wild animals, can occasionally be dangerous. And like most wild animals, 99.something percent of the time they’re not. I’ve seen dozens and dozens of various critters up close on foot (including dozens of black bears, one grizzly bear, and thirteen polar bears) and, knock wood, I’ve never had an incident of any kind of animal aggression. But I’m not stupid (not in that way, anyway). I don’t approach them, I just, you know, let them be. Almost always, they just ignore me. In rare instances they run away (most black bears run away). But mostly they just go about their business. Cow moose with a calf can be extremely dangerous. Bulls in rare instances can lose it and charge. I dunno what you have to be doing to make that happen. Maybe trying to pet their snout or something. Anyway, the moose looked at me for a minute, then resumed placidly munching bog. I went to my tent and got my bear bag from the woods and “cooked” dinner. They gradually worked their way toward me.
But as darkness fell they just up in unison, as if a signal had been given, stood up and headed off together up the meadow and into the woods.
The next morning was overcast and sopping wet with dew and condensation. I lingered until the sun appeared over the canyon wall mid-morning, tried to dry the tent out a bit, then faced the stream crossing and slogged seven miles back down to my car. A check of the forecast showed the weather caving in, with rain and highs in the low 60s for the coming Fourth of July weekend. I booked a Holiday Inn Express in Fraser, had a hot shower and a pizza (Elevation Pizza Co – no town in the Colorado Rockies is now without its craft pizza hipster joint – this one was really good), a decent breakfast (Sharky’s – absolutely awesome selection of variations on my beloved eggs benedict), and a great double caramel latte (Rocky Mountain Roastery and Coffee Co.). Then I figured out my next step.