Where the Fishing Is as Hot as the Creek : Trout: Unusual Eastern Sierra stream warmed by thermal springs is one of the state’s best spots for anglers.

Even after trout season ended in the Eastern Sierra last week, when the campsites were empty and the tackle stores closed, certain people were catching fish on Hot Creek as fast as they could count them.

Wading the little stream three abreast, they were collecting as many as 2,000 trout a day, hardly able to contain their excitement.

“There he is!”

“Go get him.”

“Behind you.”

“Got him.”

“Big one!”

It was shocking--actually, electrofishing , a season’s end project by 13 California Department of Fish and Game employees and volunteers hoping to increase the knowledge on how this finest of Western trout streams works.

After being stunned, netted, identified, measured, recorded and, in some cases, marked, all but one rainbow among nearly 8,000 fish taken during the week were returned to the stream, none the worse for the experience as far as anyone could tell. Thank you for participating in our survey.

One trophy-size brown of 20 inches was even caught twice, on successive days, from the same hole. Maybe he liked being a part of scientific research. Anything for Hot Creek, as ideal a home as any fish could hope for.

John Deinstadt, head of the DFG’s wild-trout program who led the project, said: “We probably spend a disproportionate amount of time (studying) Hot Creek because of its uniqueness.” Hot Creek is the miracle mile of fishing, a trout’s version of Club Med. It’s warm--but not too--year-round, has plenty of food and a high class of angler, the fly fisherman. Best of all, although trout are caught at an extraordinarily high rate of 1.3 per angler hour, none is apt to wind up in a frying pan.

Managed as one of the state’s designated wild-trout streams, Hot Creek allows fishing with artificial flies and lures only--no Power Bait, no worms--and has a zero limit, meaning it’s all catch-and-release.

Still, Deinstadt says, Hot Creek is “our most heavily fished mile of wild-trout water in California.”

Not only fishermen but sightseers come from miles away to hike into the colorful gorge east of U.S. 395 where steam with the odor of sulfur rises from geothermal vents--a clue to the source of water that sustains a steady flow and temperature year-round.

Deinstadt learned at a recent symposium on popular trout streams that the average use was about 500 hours per surface acre a year. Hot Creek’s use was rated at 3,500 hours.

In another survey, Deinstadt said: “Hot Creek came out being the most productive stream in terms of biomass in the western United States.”

Biomass means total weight of fish per surface acre. The survey included the famous Montana fly streams.

Another way of rating streams is fish per mile. Hot Creek, with a shallow depth and an average width of only 30 to 40 feet, gives up a lot of water to the big-time streams.

But, Deinstadt said, “In roughly one mile of stream from the footbridge up to the boundary of the Hot Creek Ranch, we have as many fish caught as in, say, eight to nine miles of the East Walker River.”

If man set out to create the ideal trout stream, it would be a lot like Hot Creek. The stream flows from springs at the DFG hatchery and through the flatlands of the ranch and into the gorge, where the fishing starts. A mile farther, after the footbridge, hot springs heat the water to 90 degrees, forming a thermal barrier to trout.

In between, several factors work toward a prime fish habitat. “With spring water, we have more nutrients coming up,” Deinstadt said. “(And) we have added nutrients coming down from all the fish in the hatchery--all their excretions.

“So we have a stream that has a high nutrient level, and it’s shallow, but what makes Hot Creek is the amount of aquatic plants--enough to give excellent cover.”

Aquatic plants? Fishermen call them weeds--weeds that snag on hooks and give little fish places to hide, not only from anglers but from larger, voracious fish.

Deinstadt said, “It’s like condominium living. These fish have so many spaces created by the aquatic plants that it gives excellent cover for small fish to survive.”

Also, for fish, the living is good year-round.

“It’s a spring-flow stream, so it doesn’t have (an annual) fluctuation of a real high runoff period and then a very low level, especially during the drought years,” Deinstadt said.

In early November there is ice on the easy walking paths along the stream, but because the stream’s source gurgles out of the ground at more than 50 degrees year-round, it will never freeze.

“It’d be a rarity to have much ice down here,” Deinstadt said. “That’s another reason the stream is productive. It doesn’t have to go through the harsh winter conditions.”

Hot Creek’s only weakness may be a lack of good spawning gravel, except in the upper quarter-mile, where wiser anglers have learned to go for the big ones. Now, in the late fall, the older fish are paired up, laying the eggs that will perpetuate the miracle.

The DFG stopped stocking Hot Creek years ago.

“We found that as we built the population up, the growth rate went down,” Deinstadt said.

“Even though the stream is so good, it won’t give anglers their cake and allow them to eat it, too. They either have a lot of small to medium-size fish and a high catch rate, or they have a lower catch rate and bigger fish. Our longtime goal of having a high catch rate and big fish, too, has been hard to achieve.”

So the stream has settled into a natural three- or four-year cycle of more but smaller fish, followed by fewer but larger fish. Recently it has been in the big-fish cycle.

“We’ve found that nature can do it just as well or better,” Deinstadt said.

But Hot Creek does have a serious problem. The same factors that created it have attracted energy proposals that could destroy it.

There is a small geothermal plant in the Casa Diablo area a few miles near the Mammoth Lakes turnoff, and in recent years there have been moves to build others--plus one in Chance Meadows about a third of a mile from the hatchery and the creek.

Curtis Milliron, a DFG fisheries biologist based in Bishop, said that could ruin Hot Creek and the Eastern Sierra’s most productive hatchery.

Milliron said that geothermal plants not only change the temperature by taking up hot water and reinjecting cooler water, but change the localized pressure as well.

“Either an increase or decrease in temperature at the Hot Creek Hatchery probably would have devastating effects,” he said. “The hatchery has been there for over 50 years, operating with whatever nature provides, which happens to be right on for trout.”

But although a shift to less, cooler water could be disastrous, the Mono County supervisors approved the project. The DFG, CalTrout and the Sierra Club appealed and won, but now the developer has appealed.

Meanwhile, the DFG has reached a compromise with the developer of the Casa Diablo projects to reduce the proposed capacities to levels it is hoped won’t affect Hot Creek. But the scientists would still like to learn the little stream’s secrets.

Carrying power backpacks and long-handled anodes that resemble metal detectors, “shockers” Milliron, Rob Wickwire and Ray Romero lead the way upstream, sweeping 300 volts from bank to bank.

Netters Kyle Murphy, the crew leader; Rod McLeod and Wayne Iseri follow close behind and scoop out the stunned fish as they drift downstream and dump them into plastic, perforated barrels of water called “live cars,” carried by Shawn Hayes and Mike Embury.

When the load is sufficient, the barrels are carried to the bank and the fish emptied into tubs, where Deinstadt, assistants Dave Lentz and Janna Herren and volunteers Heather Kent and Nora Dunbar check them off before returning them to the stream.

It’s exhausting and cold, but it hardly seems drudgery.

“I know now where to fish this stream,” one worker says. “Everywhere.”

Initially, the survey showed that browns outnumber rainbows by as much as nine to one--although proportionately more rainbows are caught by anglers.

Also, Lentz said, the fish were found to be “much larger than we expected.”

Hayes, who lives in Mammoth, said: “I fish this stream 20 days a year, but I’ve never seen big ones like we’ve got this week. This inspires me to fish here every day. Once you shock it, you know what’s in there.”