Medicine Lake lolls in a forested bowl in extreme northeastern California--so far north that some people sneak up on it from Klamath Falls, Oregon. We drove up from Sacramento, turning east through McCloud to Bartle, and then north, ogling Mount Shasta’s white slip. We took the world’s internal temperature at the ice caves, and shot past the turnoff for Bullseye Lake. We crept like burglars down the dirt alleys near Medicine Lake, on past experience. Some of the cabin owners object to road dust with bizarre but heartfelt profanity. See "morphadite."
Medicine is foster home to rainbow trout, and some bewildered brook trout. The lake’s only tributary is an inconspicuous trickle at the far western end, and there is no outlet except evaporation. Steady at 6700 feet, Medicine is the model for alpine lakes, and can be found posing on page 229 of the planet builders’ catalogue. In winter the snow piles up 30 feet deep. All the cabins have sustained dislocated porches and sprained chimneys trying to shoulder the shifting weight of the snow pack. One winter an outhouse got separated from its cabin--it wandered down the road a ways and couldn’t find its way back. The snow prematurely ages buildings up here, and gives some of them Alzheimer’s.
My argument with M over the source of the lake water began when he told me before we left Sacramento that the state had recently planted hundreds of thousands of fingerling trout and a busload of brood fish in Medicine Lake. I had to say something, so I remarked that all the fish in the lake were hatchery fish.
"Native brook trout are strictly East Coast," I declared unnecessarily. "No native brook trout in California--and rainbows won’t spawn without a stream. Maybe some of those fish make it through the winter, but all of them came from a hatchery at some point. There’s no stream in or out. That lake is a big sink full of melted snow."
The dispute came like a dinner check. M insists that the lake is fed by cold springs, and maybe he’s right. The lake and the forest are hunkered down together in a lava field rolled out like a carpet runner at the feet of Mount Shasta and a bunch of other muttering semi-inactive sister volcano pensioners lined up in their wheelchairs on a sunny verandah. No doubt there is some water percolating up through all that crumbly lava. Some of the cabins have good wells.
But all that snow has to go somewhere. I don’t know M’s theory vis-à-vis the snow. Maybe he thinks it goes on vacation in the summer to Isla Mujeres. That’s where M goes sometimes in the winter. Isla Mujeres is a shoal just off the Yucatan that used to offer seclusion and some hammocks tied to palm trees. Now it has hotels and taxi cabs and whores that take the ferry over from Cancun to work the beaches. M has never mentioned any snow in connection with his vacations, and the snapshots he brings back show mostly sunshine and sand. Maybe he and the snow keep missing each other in Isla Mujeres. Certainly when he is there, in February, the snow is up at Medicine Lake. Somebody should visit Isla Mujeres in August just to see if the snow is on vacation down there, squeezing lime wedges into beers. For all we know, the snow pack is down there riding around in taxi cabs, and falling asleep on the beach and getting sunburned. I am tempted to call up the hotels in Isla Mujeres in August and ask, "How’s the skiing?" I am not tempted to visit the snow up at Medicine Lake in February.
Maybe Medicine Lake is melted snow, and maybe it isn’t. It is partly damsel flies. The nymphs are small, about a size fourteen to maybe a twelve, and dark brown, almost black. I didn’t see any nymphs this trip--too late even in an El Nino year for the damsel migration--but I couldn’t miss a blue million adults, each about an inch and a half long.
Wading about ten feet from shore I sherlocked for bugs under the water. A beetle floated sullenly by, and squadrons of damsels and dragonflies were dogfighting above the chop. Midges harmonized in a makeshift band shell at the base of an uprooted spruce. Dark caddises veered in maniac loops, grazing the water, provoking fingerling trout into violent, pointless leaps. Tiny frogs packed the gallery at the water’s edge. Under the surface the lake revealed no clues of any kind. That water was as closemouthed as a mob accountant.
I interrogated the weed beds and submerged tree trunks with a #6 black and red seal bugger on a clear full-sinking line and a 15-foot leader. I might just as well have stayed in the car talking to myself. The lake lawyered up and four of my streamers buggered off. I changed the subject with a size 12 stillwater nymph in goldish olive, with orange hackle palmered through. The lake took the fifth.
M thumped along the shoreline in a base drum disguised as a rowboat. He blustered with a red humpy. The lake coughed up a rainbow but retracted its statement upon further reflection. Sensing weakness, M leaned on it with a #12 bead-head zug bug retrieved fast. A square-tailed trout in a bookie jacket spent time in the boat but wouldn’t talk. Meanwhile our hostess E got answers with a blue Z-ray spoon. After hours of this, dark came and we went. I told the lake not to leave town.
Midmorning on the 23rd we tried Little Medicine Lake, a two-acre wet meadow skulking at the northwest corner of the basin. Old recreation brochures claim that Little Medicine offers Californians "a unique opportunity to encounter Arctic grayling." Apparently Little Medicine mistook us for Kansans and wouldn’t introduce us. The grayling stuck to their little immigrant neighborhood in the lake’s ghetto. We had left our bona fides in the car.
A couple of splashes out in the middle pretended they were fish, but an hour’s casting proved the lake to be utterly barren, except for water boatmen, dragonfly nymphs, more tiny frogs, and an embarrassment of black and white tadpoles, two-toned tiny transistorized killer whale look-alikes. I used the same pitch as I had the day before and got the same response, except the submerged logs didn’t snatch any of my flies. The grass behind me had cornered that racket.
Cormorants have set up housekeeping at the lake this summer. Possibly they are involved in some kind of exchange program with the snow pack. I was unable to verify whether the cormorants were from Isla Mujeres. I spoke Spanish to them but they kept cool. There is no direct evidence that they are responsible for the poor fishing, but their presence here is unusual to say the least, and I don’t believe in coincidence.
© 1998 Hal Dasinger
New York City flyfishing photos
