8 Days in Golden Trout Country Day 2 | Backpacking and Fishing Little Rock Creek SEKI Wilderness

Day 2 of an 8 day backpacking trip. We fish for Golden Trout in the morning and then hike down to Rock Creek and along the Pacific Crest Trail to our next destination.
Music written for me by Breaking Shadows.
#highcountryflyfisher
#jimlowe3
#HCFFGoldenTrout
#jimlowe

[@edg4462]

Fabulous video at 6.00, loved the take.

[@highcountrychronicles]

@@edg4462 Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it! Hope you keep watching. 😁

[@davis6048]

Love your videos Jim keep them coming and be safe......

[@highcountrychronicles]

Thank you! Glad you are emojifying them!

[@mmfruitveg]

Awesome Jim!!! thanks for the adventure once again....

[@highcountrychronicles]

Thanks for watching!

[@tortoisewhisperer1580]

12:00 was at that area years ago, but we came over from New Army Pass, threw my fly out right there at that same spot and caught an 8-inch Golden on my first cast. Never saw anything bigger than that. We camped at a campsite just a little downstream from there and the streams in that area were full of small Goldens. Lost count after a while. That was as far as we went on that trip when we exited, we went back out Cottonwood pass. Great video, looking forward to seeing the rest of this adventure !

[@highcountrychronicles]

8 inches! Cool! That's larger than anything we saw as we were walking past. Really cool little lake, cool area in general. Day 3 published this morning! : kzbin.info/www/bejne/anvRq2trj7-kbMk Enjoy and thanks for watching!

[@michaelsantiago7934]

Thanks for another great video. Can’t wait for Day 3

[@highcountrychronicles]

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!

[@cadthunkin]

Those were nice goldens. I always wonder why people use nets on trout, especially when not keeping them. I lift by the hook, and grab lower jaw with two fingers, then pull hook out with other hand, with as little contact as possible. Yah, the bigger ones have teeth but I think they suffer more than us from the event so I'll call it even. Great video, thanks for posting!

[@highcountrychronicles]

@@cadthunkin Thanks! I'm not fond of nets but I'm always getting a good ribbing for not using one. Roger made sure to ask me about it as I was leaving the house, so I brought it. LOL. The best way is to not even touch the fish. Just pull the fly out. Of course, in a lot of cases I can't do that and capture the fish on film but I do sometimes. 😁

[@jimpowell6789]

@@highcountrychronicles That was a beautiful fish. It woulda gone into our pan. Net = dispensable packweight = no.

[@highcountrychronicles]

@@jimpowell6789 Yeah. I gave into peer pressure. Tried it once. Never again. 🤣🤣😅

[@highcountrychronicles]

@@jimpowell6789 Oh, it may shock you to learn, I don't eat fish. LOL. I think I've ever only eaten one in the back country and at home the only thing I will eat is Ahi Tuna. LOL. I have had a long standing motto. "If it swims, I don't eat it!" (Over the years my wife has convinced me to make exceptions for Tuna and oysters. 🤣🤣) I have a general dislike for "seafood".

[@jimpowell6789]

@@highcountrychronicles That's the funniest thing I read all week! Trout is way tastier than tuna. Try it slow-baked in foil with dill and lemon. But, it's also true, I ate so damn much trout over that decade of high-duration seasons, if I never see another, I'm fine with that (making an exception for smoked). Why do the women like their men eating oysters? There MUST be a reason.

[@JoeD.294.]

Have you ever hiked and fished Vernon Lake in Yosemite Valley. Tough hike but the size of the rainbows are big especially being an alpine lake.

[@highcountrychronicles]

@@JoeD.294. No. I haven't fished Vernon. I tend to stay away from the valley given the sizable crowds these days and travel restrictions.

[@jimpowell6789]

@@highcountrychronicles No kidding about the Valley. The Tuolumne Meadow area also. Are you looking for wilderness or for Dizzyland?

[@BigDukeX]

I gotta put things on hold and get myself up there before the weather sets in.

[@highcountrychronicles]

@@BigDukeX Yeah. We're lucky that this month has been pretty benign. Better make it fast. 🤣

[@jimpowell6789]

@@highcountrychronicles They pull out the high country trail crews after the third week of September. After that, it's a toss-up. You may get some Indian summer (but still, it's very cold at elevation) or you may get a blizzard.

[@highcountrychronicles]

@@jimpowell6789 Yep. Exactly. This time of year is always dicey.

[@jimpowell6789]

@@highcountrychronicles It must be something to get caught up there in a serious early snow fall. All the trails disappear! A pop quiz on your route-finding. With serious consequences for failure, too.

[@highcountrychronicles]

@@jimpowell6789 😅 Check out the last day of our last trip to this area. 🤣 I'll find the link when I get home.

[@TrailStrider909]

Day three on the way!

[@highcountrychronicles]

@@TrailStrider909 Yep. Tomorrow late afternoon!

[@TrailStrider909]

@ ❤️❤️❤️

[@roddines8329]

This is fun, I am tracking your trip on a too Map And google Earth.

[@highcountrychronicles]

@@roddines8329 cool! Glad you're getting into it!

[@jimpowell6789]

Fantastic. Big thanks. Can you tell us the name of the lake? I'm trying to follow you on the map but need a clue here and there (Mt. Guyot helped & the PCT Rock Creek crossing). A brutal long day's hike for sure. You guys push yourselves pretty hard. What's getting you tired sooner and more than you expect is increased pack weight plus climbing plus high elevation plus the cold start effect. The energy required to lift a weight (i.e. climb with it) goes up with the SQUARE of the increase in weight. A ten pounds heavier pack is a lot harder to carry uphill than you'd think. Gravity is a bitch. Thinner air at higher elevations makes it harder, too, because your muscles burn oxygen and replenish slower.. Pace is key. Slowing down on the climbs helps. So does -- especially -- trimming pack weight. The impromptu gates you are encountering are stock check gates. Their purpose is, when a party of horsemen puts their stock out to graze at night, if one breaks its hobble and wanders off, it gets stopped by the gate instead of traveling all the way back home, as it will otherwise tend to. On trail a good average base for calculation is 2 miles per hour plus one hour for each 1000 feet of elevation gain. We could often do somewhat better but it works out as a good rule of thumb. Sometimes on a good trail mostly level we could make 2.5 or even 3 mph. Rate of travel crosscountry varies widely depending on the terrain but will seldom allow much more than 1 mph and is often much slower. A quarter mile of boulderfield can take an hour and kick your ass. Better to go around. Etc. Why waders? As a kid I fished Summit Creek above Kennedy Meadow wading in jeans and sneakers. At that elevation you dry out instantly anyways. Looking forward to more.

[@highcountrychronicles]

Hi Jim, I can't tell you the lake. Golden Trout lakes are somewhat sensitive and I try to keep the channel more about the journey than the destination. Experienced Golden Trout fishers will no doubt know and those that aren't can enjoy the challenge of discovery. For lakes that are less known to the general public, I try to avoid "hot spotting". That said, your deleted comment is where we ended up this night but the first night's destination was different. 😅 Feel free to ping me privately. It was definitely the pack weight and lack of rucking I had been doing that had me tired. That and the fact that I'd upped my ultra training. I substituted my normal Sunday rucks for Sunday long runs. In my training schedule I had scheduled this as a "rest" week since I wasn't running and really should have scheduled the rest week the week prior. The 71 mile week the week prior had been my largest of the year and sometimes.... I forget my age and ability to recover. LOL. Why waders, mostly to keep things clean, warm and somewhat dry. I say somewhat because my waders have a hole so my feet usually get somewhat wet but as you'll see in other videos, Roger wades up close to his chest. The water is ice cold so keeping our bodies dry and the things we're carrying (like car keys, knives, whatever) dry is pretty important. We're bundled up at times so getting cold and wet isn't really an option if we're to stay comfortable. I'm often times wearing waterproof shoes and once they get wet, they stay wet (and tend to freeze at night). Wearing waders would have been helpful on the first lake, to navigate the muck and tules and reach more / present better to fish. In the second lake, it's simply useful to reach farther than we can cast from the bank.

[@jimpowell6789]

@@highcountrychronicles I deleted it for you. Yah, that was a stupid comment about waders. I was forgetting the difference in temperature between a running creek at 6000 feet and a lake at 9000. Also the difference between the metabolism of a ten year old boy and ours. I understand what you mean about not naming places or being too specific. I've loosened up about mentioning things like that crosscountry route to Snow Lake. Anyone who has the skills and the passion to get there and find it will be rare and will also be steeped in the wilderness ethos. I never met anyone in the actual wilderness who wasn't real good people and fully hip to zero-impact. But any place you see five (!!!!!) packtrains in a day .... what can I say? I understand that's just on your approach route, but still ... One nice thing about a place like the north border (for instance) is, you couldn't possibly get a horse in there. Longer trips also figure in to this. The longest trip most people ever make is about a week -- so, three days in and three days out. By the time you're four or five days in, you've left 95% of everybody completely behind and everyone who does get in there knows what they're doing, and why, and how. The wilderness is a great bozo filter. Still, I won't mention Elysian Lake by name, or that whole 50 square mile trail-less zone southwest of Buttkick Pass. Our first high-duration season I wore "modern" high-techy "hiking shoes" (upscale tennis shoes, really) and didn't like the way they performed or handled or wore. Then for two years I wore Danner Canadians, which are super solid and toasty warm but quite heavy. Then I switched to a Vasque mountaineering boot, high tops (10 inch), all leather, Vibram soles. I put over 1000 miles on them, resoled them and put several hundred more, and they still work fine -- better than my bod does any more. The uppers are "like new." They don't absorb water, at all. My stream crossing routine was to just slosh through, then take them off, pour out water (if any), change to a dry pair of socks (heavy wool trekking socks always), wring out and secure (that's SECURE) the wet ones to the utility strap on my pack. At high elevation they dry out quickly and within an hour or so the boots and the fresh socks hike dry too. With the high tops laced snug, If the ford was fairly short and I didn't dawdle, even if the water went over the tops not a lot would infiltrate, and if the water didn't go over the tops they stayed dry (one-piece leather tops, serious construction). I give Vasque six stars and an exclamation point. Make that seven. They're somewhat more expensive than the techy-fabric shoes but you'll get five times as much wear out of them, and vastly superior performance. Red Wing is their work boot line and also quite fine, but a mountaineering boot is a mountaineering boot.

[@roddines8329]

You must have cut across before going to Crabtree meadows?

[@highcountrychronicles]

@@roddines8329 haha. Trying to keep the destination somewhat on the down low. Feel free to ping me privately. Either email or on IG.

[@michaelherzer4349]

I like the back packing and fishing video's, but what's up with the knife fetish?

[@highcountrychronicles]

@@michaelherzer4349 🤣 Not a fetish. It's man's most basic tool after the club. I use them everyday.... also makes it easy to cut firewood and other stuff in the back country. 😁 Fortunately, the channel has a little for everyone. Enjoy!

[@jimpowell6789]

@@highcountrychronicles I look at that big knife and I think, wow, I bet that weighs 16 ounces. When we got really serious about pack-weight, planning our fourth season, we weighed everything to the ounce. That knife wouldn't have made the cut. So to speak.

[@highcountrychronicles]

@@jimpowell6789 🤣 Well, you got to remember that I often times backpack alone so I like to be self sufficient and prepared in case I have to build a fire or a shelter or something like that. I've read more than my share of books of people stuck in the backcountry and separated from their packs. Sometimes weight will come into play when selecting a knife for a trip but I happen to really like this knife and given our experience last time (kzbin.info/www/bejne/Zqq7n2dpaNuZn9Usi=luYPGlgxdPuPtwZP&t=1668) it could come in handy. Weight wise, sure it adds to total carry weight but it's on the hip. Completely different in terms of load factors and muscles recruited.

[@jimpowell6789]

@@highcountrychronicles Weight-wise every ounce adds an ounce. It's the great immutable karmic law of backpacking: if you brought it, you have to carry it (if you forgot it, tough luck). When we got really rigorous about honing packload it made a big difference. A 2-week load that weighs 62 lbs counting 2 liters of water is manageable. Our first 10 day trip my pack was nearly 80 lbs. I was carrying all manner of stupid stuff I was persuaded was indispensible. It took four years of experiment and trial to whittle it down to just the honest-to-god essentials. But, true, our essentials include a 300 ml Vesuvio espresso pot (22 oz.), probably as much as your scimitar. How do you get separated from your pack? We would sometime cache our gear, in the shade, well-wrapped to prevent curious animals, and then go off on dayhikes, sometimes for half a day, exploring or scouting or just looking around, maybe circumambulate the lake -- but we had good route finding skills and map and compass and made damn sure we didn't lose track of how to get back to camp. If you get immobilized, that's different, and a bigger problem than a knife is likely to solve.

[@highcountrychronicles]

@@jimpowell6789 Actually it's not a bigger problem than a knife is likely to solve and that's the point. Say on one of those side hikes you slip and tumble 60 feet to somewhere not travelled? (A true scenario by the way- check out the book Angels in the Wilderness.) No pack, no sleeping bag, no tent, no PLB if it's on your pack. The knife could help you make a splint if needed. Build a shelter, a signal fire, a small game trap. It can quicken your possibility of being found and make your stay more comfortable while you wait. "We" is typically the exception rather than the rule when I go out... I like to be prepared. Just check KZbin. Folks are going missing / get in trouble in the backcountry all the time... I don't plan to be one of them.