One of my biggest accomplishments so far, the California heritage trout challenge. Fort the first trout, I went up to the Tahoe area to catch the Lahontan cutthrot trout. I would say that this was the hardest one of the bunch since most of its range has been invaded by other introduced trout, some areas still hold a decent population of these fish. After this, I went up north to catch mccloud redband, goose lake redband, and warner lakes redband. The scenery for all three of these was absolutely unbeatable, with beautiful veiws of Mt.Shasta on the mccloud, and views where you could see miles and milles from atop mountains near goose lake. Out of these three, the warner lakes redband trout was for sure the most difficult, and probably the most difficult of this challenge. The creek I went to was no more than a foot wide in most places with one or two pools that may hold trout, I got lucky and caught one after about 3-4 hours of clambering through bushes and finally finding a little hole that held a couple trout. For the last two, I went high in the southern sierras at about 8-10 thousand feet which is the highest ive ever been outside of an airplane. The drives here were long and foggy for the most part, with some fantastic sight seeing once you broke through it. Both the California golden and the little kern golden were in some pretty standard high mountain tributaries but what I noticed about the California golden trout is that you had to be very stealthy to get a bite as they spooked easily. And that concludes my experience with this challenge! I had to censor my real name for internet reasons and I also gate kept the spots since some of these populations are pretty sensitive unfortunately but I found the challenge more fun doing my own research anyway. Also sorry for all the watermarks but people love to steal photos from reddit
Posted by FishEnthusiastCali