Rush Creek is the Mono Basin's main artery — the biggest of the creeks tumbling off the east Sierra into Mono Lake, looping through the June Lake country and the storied bottomlands below Grant Lake. It carries a mix of wild and stocked browns and rainbows, with the upper reaches around the June Lake Loop giving easy, pretty pocket-water fishing and the bottomlands below the reservoir running bigger and wilder, a hard-won restoration success after decades of dewatering. It's freestone in character but managed in fact: Grant Lake Reservoir and LADWP's diversions set the flow, so the creek answers to aqueduct operations as much as to snowmelt, and a big spill year fishes very differently from a tight one. Fish attractors and dry-droppers in the upper loop water, work nymphs and streamers through the bottomland runs, and keep an eye on the release — this is a creek where what's coming out of Grant Lake matters more than what fell from the sky.

• Volcanic