MATTHEW DICKERSON

Standing at the edge of the Trinity River by the Rush Creek boat ramp, I watched the recently risen sun struggle to push a few beams of pale yellow light through the cotton-ball clouds rolling through the foothills of California’s Trinity Mountains. To be more specific, I watched the clouds, sunbeams and occasional glimpses of snow-dusted hills only until I heard the sounds of rising fish — large ones, I judged by the loudness of the splashes. At that point, my attention was immediately diverted to the water. Were they steelhead slapping the surface or some of the river’s resident brown trout?

My brother Thanh and I had driven up to the little mountain town of Livingston the previous night from his home in Roseville three hours to the south, crossed a pass at 3,255 feet of elevation before dropping back down below 2,000 feet to Livingston. We spent the night at a friendly and quiet motel in an overly warm room, woke to snack food we’d brought with us and horrible coffee from a nearby convenience store, and then met our guide Travis Ortiz outside for a day of guided drift-boat fishing on the Trinity River. It was the first time in almost seven years Thanh and I were getting to fish together in in his home state of California.

While Thanh and Travis taxied the truck and boat trailer at our takeout location eight miles downriver, I used the chance to stretch my legs by the riverbank. And then they were back. We loaded into Travis’s driftboat, pushed a little ways out into the river where Travis anchored us long enough to set up the rods with a rig of three flies — all nymphs to be drifted below a strike indicator — before he pulled up his anchor and we began our drift.

The Rush Creek access area where we began our float is about four miles downriver of the Lewiston Lake reservoir and a fish hatchery where returning steelhead are stripped of their eggs and sperm so that juveniles can be reared in a controlled environment with a higher incubation and survival rate than eggs in the wild. From the dam down to its confluence with the Klamath River, the Trinity flows freely for 110 miles as a wild and scenic river. Although the Trinity continues much farther up into the mountains above the Lewiston Lake and large Trinity Lake reservoirs, the dam at the hatchery is the upstream end of the free-flowing portion, and thus is as far as the steelhead are able to swim.

Much of the river, both above and below the dam, flows through the Shasta-Trinity National Forest and drains the Trinity Alps Wilderness area. Though most of our 8-mile float was through developed towns along private land, with frequent glimpses of houses and only occasional public river access, it is nearly surrounded by national forest and recreation areas to the north, west and south.

We were only about 75 minutes into the float when I hooked and landed my first steelhead: a brilliantly colored male with a gorgeous reddish “steel” gill plate, olive sides, sparse black spots above its lateral line, and the bright red stripe down its side that gives its freshwater cousins their common name of rainbow trout. (Steelhead is the name given to rainbow trout that swing out to the ocean or Great Lakes to spend much of their adult lives before returning to freshwater rivers to spawn.) It was one of those hookups that gives great satisfaction to a guide, since moments before the fish took my fly Travis had given me some instructions for adjusting how I mended my fly line to get a more natural drift in the current in which we were fishing.

By then, the sky had cleared and the weather had turned beautiful. The air temps, which had started the day near freezing, had risen to 50 degrees. In places where the river turned southward, we were gifted some gorgeous views of the snow-covered Trinity Alps highlighted by the azure backdrop. And though we frequently saw signs of civilization ranging from hilltop houses and riverside cabins to private river access spots, the only other anglers and boats were friends or fellow-guides of Travis from the same fly shop. There was no combat fishing in part because all the guides were friendly and respectful of each other, and also because there was so little fishing pressure.

It was later in the morning that I hooked my second fish, which hit my fly only seconds after it dropped in the water, and before it could sink to the bottom, meaning also before I was even ready for it. It was probably a somewhat bigger fish, too, based on how fast it shot across the river, angling upstream, and disappearing in the brush on the far bank. Which is why I can only say it was probably bigger since I never actually saw the fish; I only felt it spooling out my line.

After that, the fishing slowed down for a couple hours. We were only about an hour and a half before our take-out location when the action started to pick up again, right about where Travis said it would. I landed a smaller trout that probably hadn’t even gone out to sea yet, along with two more adult steelhead, both chrome in color indicating a fresher fish more recently come up from saltwater. And Thanh managed to hook and land the biggest fish of the day and earn the bragging rights.

And both of us started wondering when we’d get to fish together again in a beautiful spot, and hoped it would not be another half dozen years.