First things first, I caught a fish, but unfortunately Kris didn’t. Actually, I caught two fish, one was a Summit Lahontan cutthroat that probably weighed two pounds. The other was a Pilot Peak Lahontan cutthroat that weighed about five pounds. Those are goodly trout for anyplace else, and they were fun to catch, but I gather they are on the small side for Pyramid Lake.
Kris meanwhile never had a fish take a fly. It was nothing she did wrong. She was casting well, and while the fishing is unique, and while we wouldn’t have figured it out on our own, with a good guide it’s not hard. We were fishing with Casey Gipson out of Reno, and Casey was all the good things a good guide should be. He had good equipment, including excellent ladders. He was patient with the birds nests we made of our leaders. He kept us at plausible locations out of the crowds. When he picked us up at the hotel he had coffee. Coffee is no small thing.
He is also a great cook. You wouldn’t think that was so important, but shows what you know. We had homemade chorizo po’boys for lunch the first day and homemade chicken burritos the second. Whatever else happened, we had great food. And coffee.
But the fishing was slow. What we kept trying to explain to Casey was that this was just a normal fishing trip with the Thomases. Unless you know that the Thomases are going to be there, April may be the best time to fish Pyramid. If we’re there the fish will be down for our visit. Honestly, except for the nap I took on the bank the second day, we fished hard, we fished reasonably well, and I didn’t hurt anybody with my casting.
Casey told us that the worst fishing days on Pyramid are the nicest days, the days when the barometric pressure is high, the breezes are gentle, and the lake is glass. The best days to fish are the days when the weather is the worst. We had nice days, beautiful days, the days of the first morning of the world. Casey worked his butt off, but what can you do? It’s easy to guide when all you have to do is net and release fish. Poor Casey had to answer all the questions we came up with because we weren’t busy, plus come up with stories to keep us engaged. Nobody ever said guiding was easy.
We had planned to fish one day on the Pyramid and one on the Truckee River, the river that carries water from Lake Tahoe down to Pyramid Lake, but the Truckee flows were dangerously high, around 6,000 cubic feet per second. Our Reno hotel room window looked down on the Truckee, and we constantly checked the river, hopeful, but then had hopes washed away. The river was dashing and carrying on and generally taunting us. It was one whole lot of silted, roiling, angry water. I’m sure most weekends it it’s the gentlest bubbling brook, perfect for a three weight bamboo rod and size 18 quill Gordons.
The first day in Nevada we drove up the Sierra Nevada to Lake Tahoe, and the last day we drove to Silver City. Both are classic Western alpine environments, formed by tectonic pressures that jumbled igneous rock into dramatic poses. There are pine trees and winding mountain roads and when it snowed on our drive to Tahoe we sang “Snow” from White Christmas. Pyramid though is different. It’s also dramatic, but in an Old Testament Biblical sort of way. It looks like where Moses and the Hebrews spent their 40 years in the Wilderness.
And there are no trees, but of course that didn’t stop me from getting my fly snagged in sagebrush. There are rocks, but the rocks aren’t the product of geologic cataclysm. The rocks are tufa deposits, a deposit of carbonate minerals like what accumulates around old plumbing where the water’s hard. Sometimes the deposits are rounded and lumpish, sometimes striated like something shattered and sharp and broken. The color of the deposits matches the sand and the sagebrush; tan, grey, barren, and dry.
The lake is on the Pyramid Lake Paiute reservation, and the fishing season is from October to the end of June. It’s huge, 28 miles long and nine miles across, but the air is so clear and dry that distances are confusing. It looks like it’s two instead of nine miles across. In the warmer months fishing is closed and other uses take over. Casey thought that the tribe closed the fishing season as much to prevent conflicts between jet skiers and anglers as for conservation.
Other than the big tufa rock, the lake shore (and the lake bed) is course sand and small broken rock, a beach perfect for summer recreation. There’s plenty of sage brush, but not much else. The near lake floor is a series of shelves, and you can see the pattern repeated on the shore. Shelf, drop, shelf, drop. The trout cruise the drops, and Casey planted our ladders about 15 feet from the shore at the first drop’s edge. Now Casey is a big ‘ol boy, but it’s height not girth. He’s 6’8”, and Kris (who’s 5’4”) distrusted his awareness of relativity. He did ok though, and she never drowned nor even dunked, much. Casey said that the key to excellent ladder placement was to never wade out past his wader belt, which was not quite to the top of Kris’s waders.
When we fished, we first climbed the ladder, and then cast out 30 feet or so to get beyond the drop to the feeding fish. There be monsters. When there were no fish in the first hours, Casey had me prospect with streamers on a sinking line. I’d let the line sink and then retrieve with short strips. Other than that we fished nymphs under fluorescent Screw-Ball Indicators. Casey said that streamers are generally fished in the fall, and nymphs are fished the rest of the season, and we fished big weighted nymphs: mahalos, holographic midges, red red and more red chironomids. Ok, they weren’t always red, just mostly.
There was no real retrieve on the nymphs. The shifting lake current and the wind carried the indicator and nymphs through a drift, and from time to time you might give the line a twitch to jig the flies or an up-current mend to get slack out of your line. Sometimes the drift went left to right, sometimes right to left, sometimes straight toward you. Then you’d cast and watch the drift again. Then you’d cast and watch the drift again. Then you’d do all of that some more. It was oddly mesmerizing, watching the bobber work through the waves.
If the fishing is on then the fish take is quick and strong. Casey said that when you see the indicator go down, that with a really large fish there will be no retrieve: it’s a full stop, like hooking a rock that commences a fight.
I fished a lot of different rods, mostly 7-weights, some of ours, some of Casey’s. I fished for a while with Casey’s 11-foot two-handed rod using roll casts, and Casey said that Spey rods and switch rods were pretty much all he personally uses on the lake anymore. I liked it for a bit, but then got distracted and my roll cast went to play the slots back in Reno. I went back to single-handed rods. I’m better at daydreaming with single hand rods.
I asked Kris if we needed to go back to Nevada to catch her a fish. So far she’s caught fish everywhere I’ve caught fish except Mississippi and Nevada, but Nevada is a strange place, and it was a hard trip for a long weekend. I think she’s decided that this fish in every state business is mine, not hers, and while she likes going along she doesn’t need to catch a fish. I still need to go to Oxford, Mississippi though, even though I caught a fish in Mississippi. She didn’t catch a fish in Mississippi, but I could use that as an excuse to go again. Maybe Nevada falls into the same category.
