Trip Overview

There are a few Forest Service facilities along the sierras that are quite difficult to get reservations for: Van Vleck Bunkhouse, Robbs Hut, Fallen Leaf Lake, and the Calpine Lookout. So, with the help of one of my coworker’s automation scripts, and combined with the cool factor of staying in an old fire lookout, I got a reservation for the Calpine lookout. The lookout (as it is named) is near Calpine, CA, which is ~40 minutes north from Truckee, a little far from the Bay Area, but totally worth the drive. We ended up driving up there Saturday morning, stopping at Sardine Lakes for a hike with the dog. We started by following the upper lake shoreline, which was rocky but Edna (the dog) loved being able to go in and out of the water as she pleased. Then, we took a hard right, and scrambled up what we thought was a trail up to another trail to make a loop, but it turned out that trail was difficult to follow, and we ended up doing a good amount of bushwhacking to make it up to the other trail. Edna even needed airlift a few times because the bushes were so dense! Once we made it up to the main trail, we took it down for a little bit until it split, and then we took the right fork to end up near one of the old mines in the area. It was very cool, since there was old railway path on the side of the hill that was constructed out of stone, and had a great view. However, we wanted to take a shortcut from this mine down to the lake again, so that we would not need to climb back up the trail to go back down. Oh what a bad idea! The shortcut consisted of a mining trailings that we could “butt slide” down, but it was actually quite steep. There were two sides to this trailing chute: the left, which was steep to start, but mellowed out and had good path if you could complete the first traverse, and the right side which was a little steeper, but provided helpful vegetation to grab onto. I decided to take myself and the dog down the right side due to the vegetation, but Michaela decided to take the left side. As I went down, sliding no more than a few feet at once, I hear a larger rockslide to my left… Oh no! Michaela was sliding down the hill at considerable pace, and only stopped after 25 or so feet. Her hiking pole was left 10 or so feet away from where she stopped, but due to the instability of the chute, it needed to stay where it was. Michaela luckily was able to go across the chute to the far left side, and was then able to climb out of it with only bruises and scrapes. Whew! I was able to climb out with the dog no problem, and then we made the call to just climb out from the mine and go down the trail. The hike was hard on Edna’s paws, so by the end, I was carrying her across the rocky sections since she had some tears on her paw pads. Once we made it back to the car, it was almost dark, so we went straight to the lookout. The road to the lookout was nicely graded, and once we got there, I was excited to start cooking our dinner. It consisted of loaded baked potatoes, with cheese, green onion, bacon, and tomatoes, as well as a homemade peach cobbler for dinner. It was a great meal to end the day on underneath the propane lighting, and once we were done we turned into bed pretty quickly. Early the next day, we woke up for the sunrise, which was amazing from the lookout. I don’t think it would have been such a bad career to be a fire watcher! After watching the sun rise for 15 minutes, we went back to bed to get a few more hours of sleep, since our bedtime was quite late the day previous. After waking up the second time, we had a good breakfast with breakfast sausage, eggs, and toast, and then we packed and cleaned the lookout up, and headed out. On our way out, I wanted to stop at the Feather river (see below) to fish, and after that short detour, we then headed home on SR-49, which was an awesome and beautiful drive. I do think that the North Yuba along that road would have been a much better fishing opportunity than the Feather, but that needs to wait until next time!

Fishing

The only fishing I ended up doing was on the middle fork of the Feather river, which ended up being quite low flow. I was surprised that I’d read that the Feather river was good fishing, but at the spot that I stopped (by the Clio bridge) I was not really impressed with the quality of the water, nor the environment where the water was. During the ~1h that I fished there, I ended up only catching a small rainbow. There wasn’t much surface activity, so I ended up nymphing with a beadhead hare’s ear most of the time.