#high lakes

He reaches out to it..

...and his eyes widen in disappointment. "Again," he whispers. "Great Sky. If only..."

My dad taught us a lot when we were young.  A lot of what I remember is about fishing.  He seemed to know I would need fishing later in my life for my sanity.  It seems to me that the more stories I write, the more I remember about my youth.  I didn’t know it then, but I had a marvelous time when I was a young boy.

Dad started this lesson by telling us we were going fishing in the high lakes.  One thing he didn’t do on this trip was bring fishing gear.  We had no poles, line, lures, bait, no nothing.  This puzzled my brothers and I to no end and we really let him know it.  He said, “Don’t worry about it.”  And that was that.

Up past Inskip a couple of miles we turned off the main road onto a pretty rough dirt road just before the turnoff to Philbrook Lake.  A half-mile or so down the road we reached one of the prettiest meadows you have ever seen and Dad pulled over.  We got out and walked a couple hundred feet to a crystal clear creek about 5 feet wide and a foot to two feet deep.  We didn’t notice anything special about the creek until Dad pointed out that this stream had an undercut bank on our side that ran for 50 to 75 feet.  He lay down on his belly carefully and quietly and slowly felt along under the bank until he came to a resting trout.  Ever so carefully and slowly he put his hand under the fish until he had his hand all the way around it and suddenly squeezed and lifted the 12 incher out of the creek.

Here we were thinking and whispering that our father had finally gone completely around the bend and once again he comes through with a lesson.

The other day my Dad said to me, “I wish we could do it all over again.” He was talking about some of the trips we used to take.  Re-living it in print is great, but no comparison to the real thing.  I believe we get to do it all over again, but without mosquitoes, rattlesnakes and falling down on the rocks.  God tells us there are many mansions in Heaven.  I am going to guess that mine, and Dad’s, have great fishing.

Howard Johnson, my Dad, has always looked for a challenge, especially when he was younger.  He was feeling particularly frisky the day he took us to walk in to Murphy Lake in the high lakes north of Paradise, CA.  Our cousin, Gary Elliott, was visiting from Yuba City and Dad decided to take him fishing.  There is a hard way in to Murphy Lake that you cannot drive to.  You drive to within about two miles and then walk a moderate trail, the last ½ mile of which is uphill.  

This was too easy for Howard Johnson.  He took us the back way, up Highway 70.  We parked at Indian Jim’s School.  My brother Daniel and I looked at each other as though our father had finally gone around the bend.  Across Highway 70, there was a trail that led up a steep mountain for at least a mile straight up.  Alongside the trail was a creek that flowed like a waterfall almost from the top to the bottom.  That is Chip’s Creek, and we were on the Chip’s Creek Trail.

We criss-crossed the creek many times on the way to the top.  We also stopped many times for air and water.  We talked about bears on the way up and food on the way down.  Our cousin Gary had a good time and I’m sure he remembered the trip as well as we did.  We made it to a lake, however, we were not sure it was Murphy Lake.  It turned out to be well worth the voyage--we caught some of the prettiest Brook Trout we had ever seen.