In the early 1990s, when I first moved to Montana, I learned that come fall, the average Treasure State angler lost interest in fish and began dreaming of elk.
I got in the act myself, killing a couple of elk, though both were in Arizona after I moved away from Montana. I enjoyed elk hunting, but never got the fever for it the way some folks do. I preferred the Arizona approach to hunting. Instead of a general season that extends from late October through the end of November, in Arizona, most big game hunters get tags that are only good for six days. This spreads out that state’s larger hunter population across the fall season. Personally, I found it easier to focus on the shorter season.
Later, I got my first English setter, and I’ve mostly chased birds in the fall ever since.
I still enjoy fall fishing, but I just don’t get as many opportunities this time of year as I’d like. A guy is still allowed to dream. My fall dream this year is for an emergency shutdown of campus for a week, which would give me plenty of time to drive across the Great Basin to Nevada, where, just shy of the Sierra Nevada, is the best cutthroat trout fishery on the planet — Pyramid Lake. Fall is prime time there for big Lahontan cutties.
The trout fishing opener at Pyramid is Oct. 1, and reports say there’s usually a good bite working in deeper water in that first fall season. Then, about Nov. 1, the second fall season starts. By then, the water has cooled enough for big cutthroats to move into shallower water to feed. That’s when the ladders come out in force.
One of the oddities of Pyramid is that in that second fall season, lasting into December, anglers take step ladders out into the lake to use as casting platforms. This helps with both casting distance and warmth. The ladders lift anglers out of the water as winter encroaches.
Early December in northern Nevada isn’t cold by Montana standards, but then, Montanans are usually prepping for ice fishing that time of year.
Restoration of the Lahontan cutthroat trout fishery at Pyramid Lake is something of a miracle. When I started fly fishing decades ago, the fishery existed only in legend.
We often have just a vague guess of what pre-European settlement conditions actually consisted of. For instance, we had an idea that Pyramid Lake once supported ginormous Lahontan cutthroat trout. Lahontan, by the way, is the name of the ancient Pleistocene lake that once covered 8,500 square miles of northern Nevada and parts of Oregon and California. Pyramid Lake is the largest remaining remnant of Lake Lahontan.
That giant cutthroat theory was largely supported by a few amazing cutthroats — including a world record 41-pounder— that were caught in Pyramid before the Truckee River was dammed to divert water for irrigation. This cut the fish off from their spawning grounds and drove them to extinction.
Or so we thought.
Biologists eventually found a small mountain stream somewhere in the Great Basin that still hosted a population of Lahontan cutthroats with the same DNA as those old Pyramid Lake bruisers. Though the fish were limited in size by that small stream habitat, when a few were taken back to a fish hatchery to reproduce and their offspring were released into Pyramid Lake, after a few years, the ginormous cutthroats had returned.
No one has yet caught a cuttie to rival that 41-pounder, but the shores of Pyramid are once again crowded with anglers, trying.
I’m not going to make it to Pyramid this fall. As nice as it might be to have a week off, I don’t want school to shut down. The good news is that there’s also a great post-spawn bite at Pyramid in June.
That’s just about right for me.