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Your friend is correct that fishing generally picks up as lakes warm. There are some folks that swear that fishing is best during ice out, but that hasn’t been my experience.
Dorothy should be good now. The upper lakes are probably still a bit cold and I’m guessing still have some snow around. But you don’t really know unless you go up and try :fishing:
The trail to Bear, Deer, and Snoqualmie is a regular trail and easy to follow. Fisherman’s trails are user routes that sometimes arise because people tend to follow the same cross-country route. If you are following a path like that you need to have good cross-country route finding skills. Some lakes in the area like Pugsley have a fisherman’s trail. Some of the other lakes have no trails at all.
You can dump it during the winter months. You pay a bit more per month if you do that, but they have flexible plans.
I mostly want to second Kathy’s thoughts. I use the Dolorme InReach. I really like the two way communication. It is much more useful then a simple SOS. But you do have to pay for the monthly subscription so you definitely pay for that improved communication. But I think it is worth it.
Thanks for the update.
It must be about 2 or 3 miles from the Necklace Valley TH to the West Fork Foss TH.
Scott, taking care of your wife is the most important thing. I hope the chemo is successful and she starts feeling better soon.
Con Mattson was, without a doubt, one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. If Gerald is anything at all like is dad you are lucky to have a great co-worker.
Feel free to email or PM me and I can fill you in on what you’ve missed at the meetings.
Welcome to the site Brad. Your comment about resurrecting this old thread got me to look back. Wow, it was started in 2002 and previously resurrected in 2012. I certainly enjoy revisiting these old threads. But what really got me was when I realized I had visited these lakes in 1984. Yikes, that’s a long time ago now. The good news is that it doesn’t sound like things have changed too much.
I enjoyed your trip report. You made one really fortuitous decision, and had one false assumption.
The fortuitous decision was not taking the trail to Square Lake. That trail was wiped out by a fire some years ago and never rebuilt so it would have gotten rough.
The false assumption is that you are more likely to get bigger fish in bigger lakes. Most of the food in a lake is produced in water that is less than 10 feet deep. Smaller lakes are more likely to have a higher percentage of shallow water so on a per acre basis small lakes are often more productive than large lakes. Of course there are many factors such as elevation, exposure, quantity of aquatic plants, etc. But you’d be amazed at what big fish can come out if tiny lakes.
The best way is to upload your pics to a service like flickr or photobucket. They will give you links you can use to post photos on the forum and you don’t have to worry resizing them.
@caveman wrote:
We are gonna make it up past golden lakes and up into alpine lake area.
That should be a great trip. I’ve been through the Golden Lakes and on to Camp Lake and beyond, but we didn’t go up to the Alpine Lakes. They should be gorgeous. You could make a super nice loop by continuing past the Alpine Lakes to the north and then over Indian Pass to get back down onto the main trail system. That’s basically what we did, but we went by the lakes NE of the Alpine Lakes and made a bigger circle around to Indian Pass.
Yep, I’ve been through there. The Winds are Mecca for high lake anglers. You won’t be disappointed. What’s your rough itinerary?
There is no trail down to Kulla Kulla. You have to negotiate the cliffs and brush to get down there.
The Cutthroat Plateau is in a DNR NRCA and we haven’t been able to stock fish up there in quite a few years. We just started to stock in NRCAs again last summer and we hope to get up to the Cutthroat Lakes soon, but right now there aren’t any fish up on lakes accessible by trail on the plateau. If you are willing to hit the brush and steeps you can drop down to some of the lower lakes like East Boardman that have naturally reproducing populations.
The Cabelas site is a bit difficult because it doesn’t tell you what color is on the back. I recommend the red/white stripe in brass and something like the Orange Potato Bug. The Brown Trout pattern looks interesting, but I’ve never fished it.
I’ve found that patterns like the crackle frog seem to be more effective in low lakes then in high lakes.
For the Jakes Spin-a-Lure I like them in this order: gold/red spots->black/yellow spots->white/red spots->sliver/red spots. Quarter oz is the sweet spot. I don’t like the lighter version (Li’l Jake) and the heavier version is too heavy. Looking at their website I see there are some new patterns that look interesting, but I’ve never fished them. I’ve only fished the 4 classic patterns.
Spinners can be very effective. I tend to not use them very often because they don’t cast as well and can be fussy. But they definitely work. The guys I was fishing with on Sunday were having good luck with black Panther Martins. If there is a big black ant hatch then a black Rooster Tail can be especially effective.
You’ll have to let me know how you do on plastics. I’ve never tried fishing them on a slip bobber like that.
I do highly recommend carrying some flies that you can use with your bobber.
