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Fishing Reports
Bear Creek- San Bernadino Mts.
July 19, 2004
Posted by David McNicholas
Email: davidmcnicholas@hotmail.com
Current Report
BEAR CREEK: July 17 -2004
After 2 years of reading
about the fabled Bear Creek I
finally ventured up to fish
it. The alleged myths about
the creek is that it is hard
to get to, heavily covered
with over growth, riddled
with poison oak, and marbled
with rattle snakes, and oh
yeah, had alot of wild brown
trout in its pools. about 4
years ago the Forest service
reported registering only 15
fisheman for the year! Well,
I can confirm, the myth is no
myth, but true. I took a
combination of dirt roads to
get to Bear Creek. I took
road 1N95 to 65 which after
40 minutes of driving and 10
miles an hour or less on a
somewhat harsh and bumpy
road, spit me out at a
portion of Bear Creek. The
flow was about 42-60 CFS and
the water was crystal clear
and shallow. The water
temperature was 57-63 degrees
(got warmer as the day
progressed) Usually the fish
will rise to just about any
dry fly, and the wet fly to
use is a brown caddis nymph
size 16-18. Sure enough in
every hole there were 3-5
brown trout- wild ones
stacked up. The over growth
was so heavy on the creek
that navigating all the
poison oak and finding a pool
that was workable was
difficult. But there were
very many castable holes with
fish in all of them, and they
were bigger than I expected.
(11 -16 inches, some
smaller) The problem is, I
have never seen such spooky
fish in my life. If a butter
fly flew over head and cast a
shadow on the water near the
fish, the fish would torpedo
to its sheletering holding
spot. The only way to
navigate the stream was to
stay in it and walk up the
middle and spot fish. I
could usually get 2 maybe 3
casts near a fish and if it
wasnt perfectly placed the
fish would swim away and I
was using 6X tippet. Casting
around the over hang was
challenging, but for a
decently experienced fly
fisherman, very doable. The
stream was very heavily
clouded with giant gnats and
insects in some spots, so
much so that I gave up on
trying to swat them away and
just let them hang out all
over my neck and face until I
could hike out of the area.
The final straw was when I
almost stepped on a rattle
snake and I heard several
others that I never really
saw. My guess is that at the
right time of year when the
over growth isnt so heavy and
the rattle snakes not in
prime season, that this
stream could be awesome. I
bumped into a Forest ranger
who was also a fly fishing
enthusiast, and he said the
stream was much lower than
normal, so the usually not so
selective fish were unusually
spookey.
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