Epic Backpacking Adventure

I have a recurring dream. Well, it's not exactly recurring, because every time I have this dream it's always a little different. And it's not really a dream -- it's more like a nightmare.

When I was in grade school, I took two great backpacking trips into a basin that is part of the Three Sisters Wilderness in Central Oregon. It's a ten-mile hike into this lake-rich area, and on each trip, we spent a full week in there with no TV, no radio, no hot and cold running water, etc. The only real signs of civilization were the occasional jet trails cutting into the clear blue sky overhead. As I got older I would often have dreams of returning to this area and fishing those pristine waters again.

But in the past five years or so, my dreams about this particular place started to change. At first, the changes involved getting into the basin and finding crowds of people in there and garbage floating on the lakes. Then, lakeside houses and boat docks started appearing in my dream version of this area. In one dream, we were hiking into the basin when we came across a small but bustling town situated right in the middle of the wilderness area, with a road leading into it. My last dream involving this area featured some sort of rock-crushing operation taking place on the shores of one of the lakes which caused its waters to become cloudy.

I would always wake up from these dreams with an uneasy feeling as well as the determination to get back into this area to see for myself how it has held up over the years. I planned to go in there last September, but a bad knee forced me to cancel those plans (I went on a great fly-fishing trip to the Deschutes River instead). But this year I was determined to finally get back in there, and Danimal and Carl agreed to go with me.

We hit the trail at about 1:15 on Friday afternoon. As you can see from the photos, the weather was perfect and it remained that way for the entire trip. It took us about four hours to hike the nine miles to our destination. The trail starts at around 5000 feet elevation, which is the approximate elevation of where we were headed, so there isn't any major elevation gains or losses along the way. But the last short climb up to the lake felt like it took an eternity even though it was not that steep. Exhaustion has a way of making time move slower. When we finally got close enough to get a view of the lake through the trees, the sun was low in the west and the sunlight was sparkling off of the water's surface. It was a great sight to see given that we just hiked nine miles and really wanted to get the packs off our backs.

We set up camp near an old shelter, which was built in 1938 by the CCC. When I first visited this lake in 1976, the shelter was still in pretty good shape and we actually slept in it. Now the shelter is falling apart, and an entire section of the roof is missing. Maybe someday they'll repair it.

After setting up camp, we fished for about 90 minutes before it got dark. It was very discouraging. I had one fish on for a while -- which I lost when it apparently wrapped itself around a submerged log -- but that was it. I became concerned that we might not catch any fish on this trip, which would really suck given how far we had to walk to get to this place.

But Danimal took the skunk off of the trip early the next morning when he landed a 17-inch cutthroat trout right in front of our camp (on the left is a picture of Dan with his fish). I was still in my tent trying to sleep when that happened, but I was up and about pretty fast after Dan walked up to my tent and showed me his catch.

Dan soon landed two more cutthroat trout -- each 17-inches long -- and we hooked and lost another fish right in front of our camp before deciding to go to a spot near a cliff which had some deeper water.

My grade school friends and I had done well at that spot thirty years earlier, and it didn't disappoint this time. Dan hooked two trout there and landed one, and I landed a hard-fighting cutthroat that was very eager to wrap my line around one of those submerged logs. In fact, Carl lost a nice trout that was actually able to wrap the line around a log on the bottom. We lost several fish that way on this trip.

About a half hour after losing that fish, Carl hooked and landed what would turn out to be the biggest fish of the trip -- the fat, 16-and-a-half-inch rainbow pictured at right. Although this wasn't the longest fish we caught, it weighed two-and-a-half pounds and was at least a half pound heavier than the second largest fish we caught.

At left is a picture of Dan and Carl as we were getting ready to leave this spot and go back to camp for lunch. As you can see, it is a great place from which to bank fish. The lake is probably 15 feet deep where that log is visible (upper right corner of photo). This particular lake has some very clear water.

We continued to catch fish all day. The fishing, however, was not fast and furious -- we probably averaged one strike for every 45 minutes of fishing; and except for a short period of time on Saturday evening when we landed three fish in about 5 minutes, the bite was spread out and steady all day long.

We hooked about 20 fish this trip, landed 12, and kept six of them to eat (there's two of them cooking at right). We had trout for breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Saturday. We ate so much trout, in fact, that I carried back most of the food I had packed in.

Dan had the hot hand this trip fishing-wise, and was responsible for at least half of the fish we hooked and landed. Most of the trout we caught were in the 16-17 inch range. All of them were in excellent condition and fought hard.

I definitely want to go back in there next September, but spend three nights instead of two, because it takes me at least three nights to recover from the hike in to the lake (every muscle and joint in my body is aching as I write this). But it was great to get back in there after all these years and see that, except for the deteriorating shelter, the place looks just the same as it did three decades ago.