Recreation : Tying One On : Piru Creek: a Fly Stream Not Too Far

Some notes from a fly-fishing adventure at Piru Creek, only 25 miles from the heart of the San Fernando Valley, if the San Fernando Valley had a heart:

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The great brown trout suddenly appeared in the sun-dappled water, his thick, broad tail flicking back and forth as his massive, eight-pound body with its crimson spots rose in slow motion to the surface. He inhaled the dry fly and the sting of the hook sent him into a rage as ...

Oops. That was the Rotoroa River on the South Island of New Zealand. Wrong notebook. Let’s see here . . .

OK. Got it.

The chinook, the greatest of all the salmon, erupted from the surface as the heavy fly sank deeply into his jaw, his slab-sided, chrome-silver body sending forth a shower of frothy spray before it slammed back into the churning, gin-clear water ...

What the . . .? Sorry again. That was from the Skwentna River in coastal Alaska.

Ah. Here we are. Piru Creek:

The tiny trout snatched the fly as it drifted slowly by, and the combination of the fish’s rather modest size and the angler’s excitement as he set the hook nearly caused the poor fish to be yanked from the water and up onto the shore . . . where he likely would have landed atop a beer can, a greasy fast-food bag or some other equally reprehensible item from the heaps of trash lining the bank.

Piru flows from the dam that creates Pyramid Lake, gushing wildly as it is born and then settling into a slow rhythm as it winds its way through rocky ledges and then into heavy stands of trees a mile or so below frantic Interstate 5. With the heavy rain and snow of the past months, the flow of water from the dam is much heavier than normal, and today Piru rages in places, and mellows into deep, slow pools as it meanders back and forth across the Los Angeles and Ventura county lines.

The amount of trash that litters the streamside peaks about three miles below the dam, where the Frenchman’s Flat campground provides easy, drive-in access for anglers and non-anglers, the non-anglers tending to be the park-in-the-woods, drink-beer-until-you-can’t-talk type of folks. In some places in this area, the trash is heaped in great piles, full bags of household refuse tossed to the great outdoors.

As you walk upstream, access to the creek becomes more difficult. A long trek through the woods and then a long and sometimes treacherous downhill climb to the creek is necessary.

In the final half-mile of the upstream journey you come to the state-designated wild trout section, where fishing is allowed only with artificial flies and a single, barbless hook. No trout may be taken. All must be quickly returned to the water. And if the trash down below could be measured in truckloads (it could), the human refuse in the wild trout section of Piru could be measured in pocketfuls.

The trade-off? Well, in the general section of the river, where you can legally kill five trout a day and you can fish for them with anything this side of dynamite, the state stocks hatchery-raised trout, sometimes big trout. Fifteen-inch fish often are caught.

In the wild trout section, no fish are stocked and all the trout there are native to the creek.

And while stunningly colorful, all of the native trout are about the length of a pencil. And old pencil. With the eraser chewed off.

The trout in all areas of the creek are eager to eat, however. I caught 10 in a few hours, two that were 10 inches long in the lower sections of the river. Certainly nothing to make Curt Gowdy fall out of a boat, but compared to the four- and five-inch specimens more common to the river, those two rainbows looked like Moby something or other.

The trout that day fell to only two patterns of flies, a tiny (No. 18) gold-ribbed hare’s ear nymph and the same size zug bug, a green and gray imitation of an emerging nymph. Drifted slowly through the quiet pools and at the tail of riffles and other fast water, those two patterns consistently took fish.

They also, it should be noted, took overhanging branches and underwater snags. I lost perhaps a half-dozen of them, at two bucks a pop. But that is nothing new. In nearly 25 years of avid fly-fishing, from the small streams of New England through the Midwest and into the real mecca of the sport, Colorado and Wyoming and Montana, and off to Alaska and even New Zealand, I have only once in perhaps a thousand or more days in the water failed to snag a branch. And that day I snagged something else, sinking a No. 16 blue dun into the left side of the neck of Rob, a friend and fishing partner for all of those 25 years, so I consider my snagging record to be unblemished.

The Snagging of Rob is the second oddest thing that has happened to me while fly-fishing. (although a definite No. 1 on his list). The winner, thus far, is titled A Cow Pushed Me Into The River, an episode that occurred in October, 1987, while fishing the waters of the North Platte River in southern Wyoming. A herd of Guernseys came to investigate, apparently, my casting ability. When I heard the herd, it was too late. The cows had me surrounded. As they inched closer and closer--a cow, I might point out, often weighs more than 1,000 pounds--one began nudging me. She nudged me into a six-foot-deep hole in the river, where my hat floated and I bobbed for a few moments before floundering back to the river bank. The river bank, allow me to add, that had snow on it.

My friends, after I told the story back at camp and after they got back up off the floor and caught their breath, suggested that in future references to the incident I should replace cows with snarling wolves . More manly, they said.

Some final notes on Piru Creek, which runs along the dead-end Golden State Road off the Templin Highway exit of I-5:

Say something nice about it. OK. It’s nearby. Has some trout.

No cows.

Creek itself terrific . . . sparkling , green-hued water bubbling over rocks and boulders, etc. What people have done to area, however . . . shameful. But it’s nearby.