Every other tale we tell starts at a dock. This one starts at a trailhead, which is a dock for people who have made poor decisions. Nine miles of switchbacks, four thousand feet of gain, and a destination that on the map is a blue dot roughly the size of a period. The California golden trout lives up there and essentially nowhere else, which is the entire reason anybody carries a fly rod up a mountain in August.
The crew for this one was three of us and a nephew who had been told the walk was "mostly flat." He mentioned this at mile two, mile four, and, memorably, at mile seven, where the trail leaves the trees and you can see the whole ridge you still have to climb laid out ahead of you like a bill coming due. At eleven thousand feet your lungs file a complaint with somebody, and there is nobody up there to receive it.
Then you come over the last rise and the lake is just sitting there. Granite all the way around it, water the color of a new nickel, a few wind-bent pines that look like they lost an argument, and a surface so still that the peaks in the reflection are sharper than the actual peaks. Nobody talked for a while. Partly reverence, mostly oxygen.
Golden trout are small. That has to be said honestly, because the fish that came up for the nephew’s dry fly, on his fourth cast, before any of us had even strung a rod, was maybe nine inches long. It was also the most beautiful animal any of us had seen in years: a belly like struck brass, a red-orange band down the flank, and dark parr marks it never grew out of, glowing in his wet hand at an altitude where the light is thinner and everything looks like it has been polished. He got very quiet. Then he said, "Okay," in the voice of somebody revising a position, and we all pretended not to notice.
We caught six between us before the afternoon wind came up and turned the nickel into hammered tin, and we let every one of them go, and we walked nine miles back down in the dark with our knees narrating the descent. The nephew has since bought his own rod and now tells people the trail is "mostly flat." The Sierra teaches fast, but it does not teach honesty.