The biggest spring creek in California — wide, glassy and weed-choked, fed by groundwater so it runs clear and stable all year regardless of the sky. The wild rainbows here are big and they're glass-shy, which is a polite way of saying they'll humble you. Most of it's fished from a pram or a quiet electric-motor boat, since much of the bank is private. PMD, Trico, callibaetis, and a hex emergence on summer evenings that's worth staying out late for. Long leaders, drag-free drifts, and a thick skin.
The Fall River is the largest spring creek in the West and one of the hardest places in California to put a fly over a trout, mostly because you can barely get near the water. It rises from enormous springs in the volcanic Fall River Valley near Mount Shasta and runs as a wide, slow, glass-clear meander through private ranch land — weed-rich, fertile, full of large wild rainbows, and so soft-bottomed and deep along the banks that it is fished almost entirely from a boat. The flow is constant and cold off the lava aquifer; the bed is silt and rooted weed; the surface is a mirror that broadcasts every mistake. This is technical spring-creek fishing at its most refined — long leaders, small flies, the fish sipping in flat water that hides nothing. Wading scarcely figures. It is beautiful, demanding, and humbling in the particular way only a great spring creek can be.
Wading: Soft deep margins, boat water
- Volcanic
- Unconfined
- Spring creek
- Meandering
