When my alarm goes off a 4 am, it better be good. A text immediately follows: "meet in the parking lot?"
I wandered out into the night from the hotel in Sparks. Snow drifted down, illuminated by parking lot lights overhead. Trucks lined up, warming in the cold. Wandering around outside, as well as in the corridor indoors, groups of anglers be-decked in waders, headlamps and other accouterments of flyfishing began to assemble.
Our convoy lurched out onto the highway. "follow my white truck," was the last I heard from Kevin until we turned off the highway and onto the North Nets beach at the lake.
Hatches on camper shells opened, ladders rolled out, quivers of fly rods were stacked vertically on magnetic windproof keepers. Mercury construction lights on tripods cut the night. Tables, chairs, pots and pans quickly assembled. Stoves hissed, and steaming cups of coffee and hot chocolate were served. Anglers began wading out into the water, just headlamp spots out in the waves. I'd fished here before, and with some success, but was having difficulty grasping this military like organization. The snow had stopped, the cold breeze momentarily let up. There began a faint bluing of the sky on the eastern horizon. The whole scene began to dawn on me. Ah, I thought, this is the way they roll, ladders mark spots no other group of anglers can purloin.
This is the Pyramid Lake angling cult. These are the experts, driving up from LA each year in search of Lohontan cutthroat. I had to name them the "Ladder Day Saints." They will put in the bone chilling hours on their ladders, come wind or snow, season after season.
These are the world's largest cutthroat. It is remarkable that they should be here, on a lake in the Nevada desert. Some trout in the world do grow large: Gerrard rainbows in British Columbia's Kootenay Lake, closely related Taimen in Mongolia, Lake trout (though a char) in northern Canada, and a few others in certain circumstances, but few enough to be rare.
Equally remarkable, seventy years ago, the fish of this lake were considered extinct. According to an article in Nevada Today, a publication of UNR, isolated stocks were discovered in a small creek on the Nevada-Utah border, the result of nearly forgotten plants nearly 100 years ago. Genetic analysis conducted by biologist Mary Peacock of the University tested them against fifty other populations.
"Even though they were in that tiny, dinky stream on the edge of Utah, they had maintained that capacity to grow into this big fish...people just went completely wild," Peacock effervesced.
In some mysterious way, these fish grow at a rate if 1/2 inch per month. Yup, not a typo. She claims in six years they can reach 24 lbs. While the Pyramid Lake-Truckee River-Lake Tahoe conduit is still broken, perhaps Nevada's state fish might someday fin their way back into California.
Craig's Corner
by Craig Ballenger, CalTrout Ambassador
The "Ladder Day Saints" of Pyramid Lake