Tell people you are going trout fishing in Baja and they will wait politely for the rest of the joke. Baja is cactus and roosterfish and tacos on a beach. It is also, a hundred and some miles south of the border and a mile up, a granite mountain range with pine forest, snow in winter, and a handful of thin cold creeks holding a native rainbow trout found nowhere else on earth.
We went in late September with my cousin Beto, who grew up in Ensenada and had been promising this trip for eleven years. The road turned from pavement to gravel to a suggestion. We left the truck where the suggestion ended and walked down into a canyon with three weight rods in tubes, a bag of tortillas, and more water than seemed reasonable until about noon.
The creek, when we found it, was narrow enough to step across in places. It ran clear over pale granite, pool to pool, under cottonwood and willow, with cactus standing on the slope above like it had wandered into the wrong photograph. Beto put a finger to his lips and pointed. In a pool the size of a kitchen table, six trout hung in the current, none longer than my hand, every one of them looking directly at us.
These fish have survived drought, flood, and a few thousand years of isolation, and they did it by being suspicious. You fish on your knees. I crawled to the tail of the pool, flicked a small elk hair caddis up under the willow, and a trout rose and ate it with no hesitation at all, as though it had been waiting on that exact fly since the last ice age. It was seven inches long, heavily spotted, with a rose stripe and a butter colored belly. I held it in the water for a second and it left like it had somewhere to be.
We caught and released a couple dozen that afternoon, the biggest maybe ten inches, which Beto declared the trophy of the range and photographed from four angles. Then we walked out uphill in the heat, which is the part of the trip nobody puts in the story. At the truck Beto handed me a warm soda and said now I could tell people I had caught trout in Baja. I have. Nobody believes me, and Beto says that is the best conservation plan the creek has.
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