A Fishing Buckaroo : Up in the Sierra, Where the West Is Still a Bit Wild, Huff Is an Angler Who Loves His Work

Around here, they tell the story of the cowboy who rode through the front door of the Kirkwood Inn, trailing his packhorse bearing a deer he had just bagged.

He rode up to the bar and demanded: “Bartender, pour me a whiskey!”

The bartender protested: “We don’t serve people this way.”

The cowboy pulled a gun and shot out the light above the bartender’s head. He got his whiskey.

Two things about the story: It’s true. And it happened only three years ago.

This may not be the Wild West anymore, but the spirit remains. It survives in the Kirkwood Inn, built by Zachary Kirkwood in 1864 to serve travelers along the Emigrant Summit Trail.

Maybe if old Zack had been a better businessman, he would have built the inn a decade or so earlier, when the Gold Rush was bringing as many as 4,000 wagons a month through the valley, along the Indian trading trails right past where his inn would stand. The trail, with only three river crossings, handled more pioneer traffic than all other Sierra trails combined.

Kirkwood and John Taylor were two of those hopeful miners, until they decided they’d do better running cattle and an inn. Some people in these parts still do. The inns--except for the Kirkwood--are just on an upper scale. The Kirkwood Inn remains pretty much the same as it was 126 years ago, but people come here now for a lot of different reasons.

Kirkwood is on California 88 at 7,800 feet, 35 miles south of Lake Tahoe. The immediate area is a lush meadow surrounded by pines and junipers leading up steep slopes that inspired its development for skiing in the early ‘70s. Traces of wagon wheels scraping the rocks can still be seen along the trail to the top terminal of Chair 4 at 9,000 feet--the highest point ever reached by a covered wagon.

No longer on the beaten track, Kirkwood’s lift lines tend to be shorter than those around Tahoe. A push is on, as with most major ski areas, to develop a summer trade with horseback riding, mountain biking, tennis and fishing.

Fishing brought Bruno here. Bruno is Bruce Huff, the resident angling expert. There are five lakes and a couple of primo streams within minutes of Kirkwood, and Huff knows them like the inside of his tackle box.

“I love to fish,” he says.

That’s why Huff, 35, moved up the hill from Stockton 17 years ago. He used to fish almost every day.

“Then I started having kids six years ago,” he said.

That probably cut his fishing down to, oh, five or six days a week, including ice fishing in the winter. He figures he catches about 500 fish a year.

He releases most but says, “I’m not a purist. I like to eat fish, too . . . smoke ‘em, bake ‘em, barbecue ‘em. I also love to cook. My speciality is wild game--grouse, mountain quail, venison.”

Close your eyes and you could be listening to Sylvester Stallone, although nobody knows how Bruno picked up a South Philly accent in Stockton. He even looks a little like Stallone. Maybe thinks like Rocky or Rambo, too.

Among the diversions offered at Kirkwood are llama pack trips.

“Yuppie pets,” Bruno says. “You can’t even ride ‘em. You walk next to ‘em. And if you make ‘em mad they spit at you.”

Give Bruno a cowboy on horseback any time, even if the ‘poke rides through the front door of the Kirkwood Inn, which Bruno manages whenever he isn’t fishing.

The inn hosts a lot of bachelor parties. It’s a tradition to hang the bridegroom by his heels from the main beam and perform unspeakable abuses upon him. That always gets the hootin’ and hollerin’ up so you can hear it all the way over at the Kirkwood condos, where the folks are getting their kicks watching cable TV.

For Bruno, it’s almost as much fun as fishing. He is a true believer of the angler’s axiom that the worst day of fishing beats the best day of work. His dream is to combine the two by becoming a professional guide for the area, which includes Caples Lake, Silver Lake, Bear River Reservoir, Lake Kirkwood, Woods Lake and the east and west forks of the Carson River.

“I learned all this by doing it,” Bruno says. “There wasn’t anybody to tell me anything. I know all these places pretty good now.”

For example, he knows how to deal with the big, wily lake trout--known locally by their alternate name, mackinaw--that inhabit Caples Lake, along with brown, brook and rainbow trout and “cut-bows,” a native crossbreed of cutthroats and rainbows.

The lake, alongside California 88 two miles north of Kirkwood, was once two natural lakes, one slightly higher than the other, until Pacific Gas and Electric dammed the lower lake to raise the level and form a single reservoir. Then, in 1963, the state Department of Fish and Game planted mackinaw imported from Michigan in a few high-country, cold-water lakes.

Mackinaw are hard-fighting, voracious fish that eat other fish but generally pose little threat to trout because they prefer to live in different, deeper parts of the lake. That’s why Bruno trolls the shorelines for browns and rainbows, using surface lures such as broken-back Rebels and rainbow patterns; and the middle of the lake for mackinaw, using flatfish lures at 30 feet deep.

He has led other anglers to each earlier this day, but now it’s the middle of the afternoon and he isn’t overly optimistic.

“Worst time of the day,” he says. “But we’ll give it our best shot.”

Bruno always has some tricks up his sleeve. He sets the throttle for a relatively fast trolling speed and says: “I’ve left this spot alone for a month now, and I haven’t seen anyone else fishing it this way. That’s one of my theories, anyway.”

The lake trout record is 20 pounds, caught by Vic Rosasco, Huff’s friend from Stockton, in 1983. The fish measured 37 inches.

“Right now, the mackinaw would be a tougher fight than in the fall,” Bruno says. “They’ve eaten a lot all spring and gained their strength. They don’t jump. They just use their weight . . . roll and spin.”

The bite will go off in the summer, he says, and return when the water cools in the fall.

“I’ve caught a few in the 18-pound range,” Bruno says. “My brother and me both. The biggest I’ve caught this year was 14 pounds 11 ounces. One year I caught 29 over five pounds and 10 over 10 pounds.”

But not today. After several fruitless passes, he decides the mackinaw are sleeping, orders lines reeled in and throttles up for the far north end of the lake. There he’ll try for browns around the large boulders scattered along the shore.

Still nothing. He even tries one of his sure-fire spots, known locally as “Bruno Point,” where he once caught a handsome 9.8-pound brown. Nothing.

But that only arouses another of Bruno’s secrets.

“People get discouraged too easily,” he says. “It figures that if you just keep fishing, eventually you’ll catch a fish.”

Good thinking. Bruno’s is the only boat on the lake. All the other anglers have given up. There weren’t many, anyway. Like the skiing at Kirkwood, Caples Lake remains a lesser-known delight.

Near 5 o’clock, as the sun starts to slant, Bruno’s companion gets a strong hit but no hookup. A few minutes later he brings in a half-pound brown, so the day is not wasted. As if a day of fishing ever was.