I spent my summer vacation hiking and camping in the Sierra Nevada with my friend Kyle at the end of July. This was the second attempt to reach a remote basin of lakes above 11,000′. I spent 10 months training and lost 25 pounds in anticipation of the ass kicking I was going to take at altitude.
After taking a scenic detour that added maybe nine miles to the unmarked, single lane forest service road, we arrived at the trailhead two and half hours later than we planned.

The first day, we hiked in just over two miles. The trail was awesome, winding around big trees…

As well as some gorgeous water

We set up the first night’s camp along the creek.

At this point, we were down low, just around 8,000′. That evening, we caught a bunch of browns, including one Kyle landed that was damn near 16″. The next day we got up early and hit the trail.  As we covered the 15 miles we had planned for the day, the trail angled up pretty quickly and the trees started to thin out.

We stopped for lunch right along the creek.

We fished this spot for a couple of hours, catching almost nothing but brookies in the process.   My buddy caught one good golden trout in a waist deep riffle that I would have skipped. So now he has biggest fish and the first golden of the trip.  Afterwords, we packed our packs, again, and headed up. And up. And up. After a couple of hours of hiking, my buddy was done- and I was tired, too- so we found a spot along the creek to camp.

After he got his lungs back, we fished the stream right next to camp.

And I finally caught the first couple of these…

As the sun began to set, we were attacked by the most hideous swarms of mosquitoes imaginable. Unable to even take a bite of food without getting them in our mouths, we were covered from head to toe with the damned things. It was horrible- and it happened each morning and evening for about two hours.
Kyle wasn’t able to train as much as he would have liked in preparation for the trip, and was really hurting at the high altitude. So after realizing that we were not going to make it to our original destination, it was decided that evening, that this camp at about 9,300′, would be our base camp for the next three days. We would strike out on day trips from here.

The next morning we packed what we needed for the day and hiked to a lake just above 10,000′. The hike took us past a high meadow…

And around the base of a 13,000′+ mountain we were going to try to summit.

The lake was beautiful.

We caught the heck out of goldens in this lake where they would often swim from 20 feet away to take our dry flies.

Somehow, we eventually got tired of catching trout after several hours of fish on almost every cast, and decided to spend some time exploring the area around the lake before heading back down to camp. On the way we passed a group of college-age kids who were clearing trails for the summer. Good on ‘em, wish I had taken a job like that one summer. Three of the guys were fly fisherman. They showed us a couple of places on the map to try next time and we left them with a couple of leaders as thanks.

The next day we planned to hike up to some small lakes above 11,000. We had a beautiful 4 mile hike through this…

Before stopping here for lunch…

This time I was cooked. Took my pack off and laid down on some granite for a few minutes. We only had to cross the creek and top the low ridge in the center of the picture. The lakes were in a hanging valley to the right of the summit in the background. We were close to another epic day of fishing.

Wait…is that thunder?

Yup, time to head down. We hauled ass to get back down to camp and hopefully away from the storm, but it followed us out of the valley and down to camp. It rained the rest of the afternoon and all night.

The high valley was nice and sunny in the distance though…

At least we had a rainbow.

And a nice little fire.

We fished the creek around camp the next day. The altitude was affecting Kyle so we high-tailed down to the car the following day. Hopefully, I’ll get back there and make it to those lakes. Third time’s the charm, right?