Heritage Trout Challenge Vol. 2 - Kern River Rainbow Trout

After succefully catching my first Heritage Trout, the California Golden Trout, in July of 2008, all of the sudden it was November before Jamil and I had a a free weekend simultaneously and the California trout fishing season was about to end. I needed to catch at least one more Heritage Trout before the the second weekend of November or else it was going to be a long and painful off season. At the time I was trying to save my vacation days at work and so I wanted to try and go for a Heritage Trout without using any of my time off. So basically I needed to drive somewhere after work on Friday, camp at the trailhead, hike in, catch some awesome fish, hike out, and drive back down to Orange County. The logistics pretty much limited my choices to the Coastal Rainbow, the Little Kern Golden, and the Kern River Rainbow. At the time, the Coastal Rainbow seemed too bland a choice to go for, and plus I think I subconciously wanted an excuse to feast my eyes upon the gorgeous Golden Trout Wilderness one more time before having to wait 7 or 8 months for weather conditions to improve enough to do a trip out there again. I ultimately decided to go for the Kern River Rainbow because, for the Little Kern Golden, I knew exactly where I wanted to fish, and that was too deep into the back country to fit into my narrow time frame.

As I stated in my previous post documenting our California Golden Trout trip, my goal in completing the Heritage Trout Challenge is to not simply catch the fish that will qualify for me to get the certificate, but it is to catch the best examples of these fish that I possibly can for the sake of documenting something that is rare and precious and, sadly, all too often clinging only tenuously to existance in this world. To accomplish this goal for the California Golden Trout, I had in my possession a few different scientific reports that docmented the results of genetic testing done in various sections of creek and this information allowed me to pick the best spots to fish in the South Fork of the Kern, Golden Trout Creek, and Volcano Creek (though I didn't make it to the Volcano fish). The Kern River Rainbow however is the least studied of the three trout subspecies of the Kern Plateau. At the time there were simply no published genetic reports on the Kern River rainbow which could tell me where to go to get the best examples of this subspecies. Also at the time, it was believed that the entire Kern River, even within Golden Trout Wilderness, had been polluted with hatchery rainbows and that therefore there were no pure Kern River Rainbows left. (Note: Data has since been published stating that a few pure populations have been found in tributaries of the Kern! I now know where they are and will go back for them someday.)

So at the time I felt like I needed to lower my standards somewhat for this trip. I went knowing that most, or all, the fish I caught would be hybrids. Therefore my goal was to catch fish and document the various Kern River Rainbow traits each one had, and hopefully I would catch a fish that while being a hybrid, would display the Kern River Rainbow phenotype nicely. This reminds me of the people fishing for the extinct Alvord Cutthroat trouts; while the fish in its pure form is extinct, fish still exist which carry Alvord genes, and the goal is to catch a fish that displays as many of these genes as possible. 

With this in mind here are the traits I was looking for:

1) Bright pink gill and stripe along lateral line. 

2) Visible parr marks, although they begin to fade somewhat in the larger and older fish.

3) Secondary and even tertiary parr marks; rows of tinier parr marks in between and below (sometimes above) the main row of parr marks along the lateral line. Many but not all Kern River Rainbows will have these.

4) Yellow/Olive background coloration. As opposed to the more grayish/silver background of your typical rainbows. 

5) White tipped fins, although the dorsal fin is often times orange. 

6) Flashes of blue in the light reflected off the sides of the fish. This is a strange trait that is cool to see in person.

7) Small clumps of golden/orange scales randomly spinkled along the sides of the body but tending to cluster along the lateral line.

8)  Orangle sprinkled along the belly.

9) As with many other rainbows, the sides are heavily spotted with tiny and irregularly shaped black spots both above and below the lateral line.

10) Historically the Kern River Rainbows were rather large in the main stem of the Kern, but over the years their size has reduced dramatically. So the CA DFG has a weird size restriction in place in which you can keep fish under 10 inches and you must release fish 10 inches or larger; I guess they want to put selective pressure for larger fish. So ideally a good Kern River Rainbow will be large compared with other trout of the Kern Plateau.  

The fishing on this trip was totally different from when we fished for Goldens in Golden Trout Creek and South Fork Kern. While we fished for goldens in tiny creeks in which you always could see the fish biting, the Kern River is relatively large and the vast majority of the time you do not see the fish below the surface; this makes it tough to know if you have spooked the fish away or not, difficult to target a fish in the first place, and difficult to set the hook. Also, whereas we caught 116 Goldens between 2 people in 3 days on our previous trip, on this trip we only caught 13 fish between 3 people in 2 days. It took Jamil about an hour or two to catch the first fish in our group, and then the day was half way over when I finally caught my first. I had even begun to grow incredibly nervous that I would get skunked on the trip. Bianca, Jamil's girlfriend, (Anyone know how many girls have done the HTC?) caught her first about 20 minutes after I caught mine. As I said in my last post, we do not fly fish, so we were mostly using plastic worms and Panther Martins as the river was too big for us to get flies out to the middle or opposite side of the river with our spin setup. Jamil caught 2 with the plastic worms, and 2 with Panther Martins, while Bianca and I caught our 4 and 5 respectively with Panther Martins. While the fishing was super slow for half the day and we mostly caught small fish, it got hot on the Panther Martins for about 1-2 hours in the afternoon and Jamil and I each managed to catch a couple nice sized fish.

Sadly, as I suspected, most of the fish we caught did not have the distinctive Kern River Rainbow Trout look that I was going for. I was particularly disappointed with the lack of a nice red/pink band along the lateral line on most the fish. However most of the fish did at least have some of the Kern River Rainbow traits listed above. And one of the fish I caught, shown in picture 11, was actually very close to what I was looking for and was truly a gorgeous trout.

One thing I am wondering is if I was simply fishing at a bad time of year. Perhaps if I were to go back during spawning then more of the fish would be displaying the colors I was expecting. This is something that frustrates me. I know that trout can change in appearance due to many things and so its hard to know if a trout is naturally less colorful, or just not colorful because of the time of year, or not colorful because it is hybrid, or because of its diet, or because of the environment it lives in. All of these things are interacting all at once and there does not exist good scientific data that I have seen which documents exactly how these different factors exacty influence appearance.

Anyways, it was once again truly beautiful in Golden Trout Wilderness. There were no mosquitos this time and that was great. However in the middle of the night an intense thunder storm rolled in out of no where and it did began to rain really hard. We had to fantically bring our supplies into the tent and of course the tent had a hole in it so I woke up in a puddle of ice water. And when we got back to the car we had to drive through a couple inches of snow that had come down. The lesson to keep in mind is that the weather changes super fast in the mountains and so you need to always be prepared. 

Quick notes about my pictures:

-Picture 1 is a typical trail view of the Kern River.

-Pictures 2-5 show some of our first few fish. The smaller fish tended to be less colorful than the larger fish. 

-Picture 6 shows how beautiful some of the sections of trail were due to trees displaying their autumn colors.

-Picture 7 shows a friendly little garter snake we caught.

-Pictures 8-11 show our 4 largest fish.

-Pictures 4 and 8 do a good job of showing the distinguishing trait of the blueish hue in the light reflected from the sides of the fish. 

-Picture 9 demonstrates another feature I noticed about many of the fish; a disproportionately large tail. I suspect this evolved because the Kern flows relatively fast.

-Picture 10 was our largest fish.

-Picture 11 shows my best Kern River Rainbow. It displays pretty much every trait I was looking for.

-Picture 12 shows what I least expected to see when I started hiking in clear skies only 24 hours earlier.