Hot Creek is a glassy spring-fed meadow stream below Mammoth, a Wild Trout water and one of the most technical pieces of dry-fly fishing in California — a place that will make a good caster feel ordinary. The wild browns and rainbows sit in clear, weed-lined runs and have a PhD in tippet diameter. It runs cold and constant from its springs, but there's geothermal water in the system too, so the thermal picture isn't the simple cold-tailwater story you'd assume — fish it in the cool of the morning in high summer and let it rest in the heat. Strictly catch-and-release on the famous interpretive reach. Small flies, long fine leaders, downstream presentations, and a sense of humour.
Hot Creek is a small spring creek that punches improbably above its weight — a short, clear, weed-rich meander through a high sage meadow under the Eastern Sierra near Mammoth, fed by cold springs and warmed, downstream, by the geothermal water that gives it its name and eventually boils up in a gorge of hot springs. The public interpretive section is the famous bit: a couple of hundred yards of glassy, gin-clear spring creek packed with wild browns and rainbows that see every angler who pulls off the highway and behave accordingly. The flow is constant off the volcanic aquifer; the bed is silt, gravel and rooted weed; the surface gives nothing away. Wading is not allowed on the interpretive water — you fish from the bank, on your knees, with the lightest tippet and the smallest flies. It is tiny, crowded, and one of the best technical dry-fly tests in the West.
Wading: No wading; bank only, total exposure
- Mixed
- Unconfined
- Spring creek
- Meandering
