Spring offers some of the best fishing of the year in Siskiyou County – both for conventional tackle anglers and fly fishermen.
This year’s cool (and downright cold) weather has delayed the hatches – good news for fishermen who haven’t yet made their plans.
On both the lakes and rivers, water temperatures are rising, and the fish (mostly trout) are becoming more active – as are the things they eat, including the big bugs the trout and fly fishermen both love.
An Upper Sacramento Green Drake (photo courtesy TroutUnderground.com)
And even if the fishing’s tough, the mountains in spring are almost impossibly beautiful.
Simply put, Siskiyou County’s almost never a bad place to be.
The Fly Fishing Can Be Great – If The Rivers Aren’t Too High
Fly fishermen are especially drawn to the hatches of big bugs – the Golden Stoneflies, the salmon flies, and later (some years), the fabled Green Drakes.
And why not?
A Golden Stonefly (photo courtesy TroutUnderground.com)
The big stoneflies represent a sizable meal for trout, making this one of the few (short) windows where the biggest fish in the river may happily eat a big dry fly.
The strikes are vicious, and the fishing – especially in the evenings – can be nonstop fun.
Tempering the excitement is the real potential for unfishably high spring flows – as the weather warms, the snow melts, the rivers rise, and the fly fishermen get grumpy.
The wet winter of 2010 saw our snowpack grow to 140% of normal, and spring has been slow in coming, so the rivers have been easing into runoff conditions.
In essence, the rivers are still fishable (but wading and fishing is tough). They remain high – and may become largely unfishable for a short time once the weather warms to really melt the snow.
That’s OK; while Siskiyou County’s blue-ribbon trout waters are the main attraction for fly fishermen, our lakes – and a few small streams – still offer great fishing.
The Lakes
Siskiyou County’s Lake Siskiyou continues to offer excellent fishing to anglers – both boaters and bank-bound anglers.
As the weather warms, trout fishermen will have to go deeper, but the smallmouth bass wake up – and fishermen ignore feisty, hard-battling smallmouth bass at their own peril.
A summer evening spent catching smallmouth bass on small poppers and surface lures – often from a float tube, which is a floating easy chair after all – is an evening well spent.
Castle Lake sits a mile high, so trout fishing remains good most of the summer. Many, many other lakes dot Siskiyou County, though some remain inaccessible until early summer due to snow.
The best places to find information on river levels and fishing?
Go to Visit Siskiyou’s fishing page, which offers links to flow gauges, guides and fly/tackle shops.
Siskiyou County | admin May 30, 2010 | 
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In far eastern California, the small town of Tulelake is home to a colorful past and a new National Monument.