Chair Surfing on Pyramid Lake

On Thursday my girlfriend left me and moved to Hawaii. On Friday I fished Pyramid Lake. It seemed strangely fitting, since both experiences were difficult and life changing. Turns out catching some of the largest cutthroat trout in the world is really good for a broken heart as well! Who knew?

In fact, I almost begged off the trip I had been planning with my friend Brad Stout, since Cloe was in turmoil over taking an opportunity in the fiftieth state and moving away, and I wanted to be around to convince her to stay, or at least to sleep with her for one more weekend before she left. Yes, that’s how men think. But Brad and I had missed our annual spring fishing/camping trip this year, and the universe aligned so that the day after my woman flew out of Reno and out of my life, I was on a road trip past the same airport, headed for the solace of the high desert and a boys’ fishing adventure.

Brad is a logistics expert, and in the final two weeks before the trip, he studied the weather, analyzed the daily reports from friends who are Pyramid fanatics, and compared the trends against past years. Our plan went from including his twenty foot Alumaweld fishing boat for downrigger trolling, to just bringing his 12 foot porta-bote, then down to just fishing from ladders. The fish had moved inshore.

That’s right, Pyramid Lake, north of Reno, Nevada, is the only place in the world where you can get a custom-made fishing-ladder chair-platform tree-stand for lake-bottom cutthroat hunting. Brad bought his for a few hundred dollars, from a welder who does not want his name mentioned, as he already has too many orders for ladder-chairs. Mister Logistics actually borrowed another ladder for me to use as well though, and in the last couple of weeks before the trip I started to get pretty excited about the prospect of visiting this unique fishery, sitting in my treeless tree stand.

I couldn’t have asked for a better guide, but always the sceptic, I called bullshit when Brad said “With the whole weekend to fish, you’re gonna get your ten pounder.”

“Come on! You can’t guarantee that! You and your outrageous claims!” I tried to keep a serious face as I said it but we both burst out laughing. Then I managed the serious look and even a Clint Eastwood squint as I told him “We’ll just see. I’ll play your game Mister Stout, and we’ll just see.”

I had pumped my friend for information as we planned the trip, asking him what lures and tackle I would need. For spin fishing he suggested a reel spooled with ten-pound braid. The small diameter of the line adds casting distance over ten pound monofilament line, and the braid’s lack of stretch helps with everything from feeling a subtle bite to translating each lift of the rod tip into a crisp hop along the bottom for your quarter-ounce marabou jig. Brad told me jigs had been hot lately but that a sexy flutter and drop with a spoon is always a good backup plan.

I arrived at my friend’s house in Spanish Springs around 11:00 a.m. on Friday  and loaded my gear into his spacious fifth-wheel trailer hitched to his truck. He has the good fortune to live right off Pyramid Highway, and in less than an hour we were setting up his trailer near the marina boat ramp, strategically located just a few hundred yards stumble from Crosby’s Lodge.

Now I’ve been in more than a few dive bars, tackle shops and greasy spoon restaurants but Crosby’s combines them all and a can of Nevada kickass into a truly unique experience, a social scene centered on shared tales of the mighty Lahontan cutthroat trout. Brad bought a tribal camping permit and I picked up my three-day fishing permit. We also purchased a few Pyramid beetle pattern flies to go with our woolly buggers, and then headed back to the trailer to grab our fishing gear. We drove to the bay Brad wanted to fish, but seeing a dozen guys already fishing from ladders there, he declared it was too crowded and we went to the next bay over.

Here we were by ourselves and on this mild, breezy, late fall afternoon in the high desert, I tried ladder fishing on Pyramid Lake for the first time.  My buddy was immediately into trout, two to five-pounders, and he switched back and forth from spinning to fly gear, catching them on both.

It was pretty windy so I threw out cast after cast on spinning gear, trying different colors of marabou jigs. Nothing. Brad was still catching fish. So I stopped fishing and just watched him. I watched the way he would pop his jig with the tip of his rod then reel in the slack and I copied him. Then I start catching fish. Missed bite. Three-pounder. Six-pounder! I ended up with four fish caught and released and a few other bites, while Brad caught ten; five on woolly buggers on the fly rod and five on marabou jigs on spinning gear. My six pounder was the largest fish but we had several others nearly as big. These cutthroat fought hard too, and I was impressed with the experience. As we carried our ladders to shore at sunset, I told my friend thanks: “This was perfect, now I feel tuned up, like you gave me a lesson in how to catch these fish. Now I’m ready for the rest of the trip.”

“You’re gonna get your ten!” Brad promised again.

“Stop saying that!”

Upon our return to camp we met our friends West and Todd, who had set up West’s trailer next to ours. They handed me a “Welcome to Pyramid” gift, a mini tackle-bag with a box of custom marabou jigs made by West and another box of Pyramid woolly worms that Todd tied, along with a custom two-fly leader for casting them. West told me this offering would “Help me pop my Pyramid ten-pound cherry”  And we all laughed, then laughed some more as we walked up the hill to Crosby’s and I told them how Brad would not stop claiming I was going to get a ten-pounder.

We ordered the chicken-fried steak with mashed potatoes for dinner, then my buddies started buying and handing me drinks faster than I could keep up as we perused the big-fish photos while waiting for our food. A significant section of the wall behind the pool table was taken up only by pictures of fish over ten pounds, caught in 2014. Photos from previous years are taken down and put into photo albums, the most recent of which are also on display for visitors to flip through. I felt the Pyramid fever. My friends told me that until a few years ago having one or two fish over ten pounds a month showing up on the wall of fame was the norm and a twenty-pounder would make fish of the year from this thirty-mile long lake. Pyramid is experiencing a rebirth of sorts though, thanks to the extensive hatchery propagation and stocking in recent years of Pilot Peak strain Lahontan cutthroat trout. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s web page for the Lahontan National Fish Hatchery Complex: “Although the last spawning run up the Truckee River from Pyramid Lake occurred in the late 1930’s, transplanted fish were found in the Pilot Peak Mountains in the late 1970’s along the border of Nevada and Utah. Utilizing genetics of museum mounts from 1872 to 1911 of fish known to be of the Truckee River Basin, it was determined that the LCT in the Pilot Mountains were descendants of the original Truckee Basin LCT.”

Those fish discovered in the seventies were tiny stream denizens, and nobody was sure at first if they would really grow to fulfill their genetic heritage as the largest lacustrine (lake dwelling) cutthroat in the world. But they did! They are! And they’re still growing! Now fish from ten to fifteen pounds are an everyday occurrence, and a new photo of a twenty appears on the wall nearly every week. As trout well over twenty pounds have become more common in the mix as well, the anglers drinking at Crosby’s talk not unrealistically of expecting to hear any day about the first documented thirty pounder caught in close to a hundred years!

We thoroughly enjoyed our classic diner meal then continued to party at our table until we were asked to move it to clear the dance floor for karaoke DJ night. I had asked Brad earlier what kind of social scene we would find here and he replied “You just have to see it, every night is different.” I asked him what he meant. “Well the crowd is always different. Some nights you only have local cowboys and Paiutes, and sometimes you have guys from all over who are here to fish famous Pyramid Lake. It’s always fun though!”

And it was. Along with the cowboys and visiting anglers there were some lively Nevada cowgirls, who danced and sang and bought us drinks. We had squeezed a couple of the tables that we moved off the dance floor into a spot by the pool table, and our group mixed with a few other anglers, holding court here, while these ladies came over and flirted with us, with one of them proclaiming “I loooove my fishermen” as she wrapped her arms around the ones on either side of her. There was one pretty lady in tight jeans who I was having a nice talk with, but then she jumped up and hit the dance floor with her friends because “Oh my God, I love this song!”

My buddies were watching me, laughing and telling me to go dance with her to “All About That Bass”, but I was tired and thinking about Cloe in Hawaii. Besides, when a woman whispers in your ear that her husband is a long-haul truck driver who won’t be home for a week, it’s important to consider that he might return early. I reminded them that we were planning to get up before sunrise to get prime spots on our chosen beach, and convinced them to stumble back down to the trailers with me.

Saturday morning we woke up to temperatures in the mid-thirties before sunrise, quite mild for November in the high desert. We drove to the bay that Brad had found too crowded with ten or twelve guys the day before, but now at seven in the morning there were at least twice as many anglers. My friends charged the beach, getting on their waders and carrying their chairs out into the water as fast as they could, before more competition arrived. Brad pointed to a fly fisherman to our right just starting to wade out with a step-stool.
“Weez” he told me, “Get out there quick before that guy with the pantry stool pinches you off!”
“Hahaha wow, combat fishing?” I threw my thirty-pound ladder-chair over my shoulder and headed out into the lake faster than Pinching Stool to my right. We climbed up on our fishing platforms and over the next several hours, Pyramid Lake blew my mind. It was like a steelhead or salmon run was in all up and down the beach. For a while the fishing was slow, with only a few two-to-five pound trout caught that I could see. I had no bites at all.

Then I noticed a lady, the only one on a ladder among thirty men nearby, who kept catching fish. Some of them were pretty big.
At first there was only a ripple on the water, but a north wind began to build, and we were in the southern end of the lake. As waves starting splashing us in our chairs the bite began to turn on. Brad was catching fish on both spin and fly gear as usual, and I started getting bites too, catching a four-pounder and a couple of smaller fish on my marabou jig. Then at around nine I hooked something right in front of me. It bent my rod deeply and thrashed weirdly, not pulling hard but not coming in at all either. Brad watched for a minute then asked me if it was big.
“It’s either big or it’s foul hooked ’cause it ain’t coming in!” I yelled back across the wind and waves.
My friend watched for another minute then his eyes grew large and he said “I saw it” as he climbed down off his perch and waded quickly back toward the beach, shouting “It’s big, I’m getting the net!”
I carefully descended the ladder on the side of my stand while holding my rod high in the air, trying to keep the line tight. The waves coming in were already big enough that I had to jump up as the peak of each roller washed over me, to keep from shipping water down the top of my chest waders.

My fish now was pulling pretty hard and going on short runs against my lightly set drag. I slowly was able to walk it toward shore though, and in two feet of water in the breakers, Brad met me with the huge net. Now for the first time I had a good look at my fish, a colorful cutt that looked to weight at least ten pounds! As it turned on its side and lay motionless for a moment just beneath the surface, Brad closed in with the net and I said “Well, that wasn’t too hard.”

Wrong! My fish saw Brad coming, righted itself and shot back out for deep water, heading right for the legs of my ladder. There were almost no rocks or other underwater obstructions in this area, and fishing platforms must certainly look like the best available cover for fleeing trout, so they often head straight for them to hide under them. Mine almost made it but I tested the limit of my twelve-pound fluorocarbon leader as I bent my rod over sideways and horsed the fish away from my ladder. Then it hurtled toward Brad’s ladder but I was again able to pull it away at the last second, and it made a dash between the two structures, heading straight out into the lake. I loosened my drag a bit and let it run, then I was able to work it back in and after a few shorter runs, it finally came up tired enough for Brad to scoop it in the net.

I just stood there for a moment, in belly deep water, jumping up with each passing wave in a reaction that had now become automatic, like breathing. I was stunned.

“You did it!” I yelled to Brad.

“What do you mean? YOU did it!” he replied.

“No, you put me onto a ten pounder! You fulfilled your outrageous claim! That is just unreal!”

“I told you, that’s Pyramid baby!”

We walked the fish, safely in the water in Brad’s salmon net, into shallower water where we took some quick photos and video. We weighed it in the net, then subtracted the weight of the net and determined that my big Pyramid cutthroat trout was just over thirteen pounds! It was short and girthy, a very healthy, well-fed fish. I held it in the water by the wrist of its tail, pulling it back a few inches then pushing it forward repeatedly, flaring its gills until it shook free of my grip and swam down and away.

I watched it go, mesmerized, then someone hollering broke my trance. Turned out it was me! Two hours later a fish splashed at the surface out in front of Brad’s chair. “That was a big one!” he yelled as he continued to strip his woolly bugger fly along the lake bottom. Then he yelled “And I got it!” as he lifted his rod and bent it into a deep arc. This fish was very strong and he just could not get it into the shallows inside our gauntlet of ladders, so West sprinted through water nearly to the top of his chest waders, seemingly as fast as he might run on dry land, and netted the fish with one deft stab! It had been such a dramatic fight and West’s Olympic caliber net job was so amazing that the entire line of anglers in our vicinity let out a collective roar!

We took photos and video of Brad’s big fish as well, which turned out to be eighteen pounds, his largest to date on a fly rod! He had caught it on one of the woolly worm flies Todd had given me. And some of my fish for the morning came on one of West’s custom jigs from the same tackle gift-bag. Thanks guys! Shortly after Brad’s big fish our friend Tony on the next ladder down caught a sixteen pounder. Alicia, the lady who had been the hot rod all morning, had a twelve, and her boyfriend Scott netted one right around ten pounds that I was able to photograph for him before he released it. In the early afternoon Brad took a walk up the beach to talk to some other anglers and came back to report that a nineteen pounder and one in the low twenties had also been caught in the area this morning.

We went back to our vehicles periodically for snacks and then a late lunch, but we all knew this was a magic day and we intended to fish until dark. Clouds gathered as the wind continued to howl, and we could see what looked like a rain or snow storm rolling onto the lake north of us, near Pelican Point. Right when we were expecting the late afternoon bite though, the storm hit us and proved not to be precipitation at all but fine, alkaline sand that blew in on high winds over miles of open water and began to scour our skin raw. It got in our eyes, mouths and nostrils, and we toughed it out for as long as we could, hoping it would subside, but after a few minutes of spitting out grit and feeling it under our eyelids, scratching our eyeballs, we retreated.

The twenty-minute drive north to our campsite took us out of the dust storm. We cleaned up in our trailers, and then walked up the road to Crosby’s for dinner again, where I saw that what Brad had said earlier was true: every night is different here.

There were less dancing cowgirls on Saturday and way more anglers as the night wore on, some of them still fashionably attired in chest waders. Shortly after we arrived though, just before sunset, an older man came in, dragging a hundred-quart white ice chest full of water across the wooden floor. Though closed, it sloshed water out with every step he took as he headed purposefully past the bar.

Though this barely drew any attention from the crowd, I followed the trail of puddles and watched in fascination as he opened the chest and pulled out a cutthroat around fifteen pounds that was still squirming. Against the wall by the bathrooms there was a scale equipped with a sort of cradle to hold fish and measured their length while being weighed. An employee came over and took a picture of the man’s trophy cutthroat then recorded its weight and length. Then the fish went back in the cooler full of water and the angler dragged it back out of the lodge. Slosh, slosh, slosh, out the door and then he managed to get it back into the bed of his pickup truck, minus a few more gallons of water. As he drove down to the Marina boat ramp to release the fish, Brad and I talked about what we had just seen.

You see Crosby’s has always been an old-fashioned fishing saloon, and old-fashioned fishing is hunting, chasing fish and harvesting them for the table. The west was not won on catch and release. And since fishermen are also notorious liars the traditional (and once the only) way to get your ten-pound-fish pin and your free drink token has been to bring in a dead cutthroat. You had to produce a body. But catch and release and a conservation ethic have caught on in recent years, especially among fly anglers, and now I hear Crosby’s will give you the pin and a token if you bring in a photo of a fish you let go that clearly looks over ten pounds. And in between the dead and the released you see coolers full of water being dragged across the dance floor. Because some guys want to let that big fish go, but still want the old-time glory of the weigh-in for the crowd at the bar. Some even outfit their ice chests with battery-powered aerators; bubblers to keep the water oxygenated like a fish tank. And this was the topic of a lively and sometimes heated discussion at the bar that night.

“You can’t tell me that fish is gonna live!” exclaimed a red-faced fly angler. He had a point, I thought. The trout we had just seen on the scale did not look very lively at all, and had that whitish discoloration of death that anyone who has left fish on a stringer for too long would recognize.

“You don’t know!” shouted another boozy fisherman. “You can’t say you know a fish won’t live after it swims away!”

Brad elbowed me lightly and said “Let’s get away from these guys, they might fight.”

“Yikes, people get all fired up about this, don’t they?”

“Oh yeah! See that guy over at the bar with the whole stack of drink tokens? He’s the Pyramid king. Or one of the two Pyramid kings, and the catch and release guys think he’s a mass murderer for all the big cutthroat he’s caught. Those are all ten-pound-fish drink tokens.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I think he’s an awesome guy, and an amazing fisherman. He has so many fish over twenty pounds it’s ridiculous! I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s the first one to catch a thirty! He lets some big ones go, too.”

“No, I mean, what do you think about the catch and release, the putting ’em in coolers, the whole thing?”

“I figure in the coolers, some of them live, some of them don’t. Depends on how long they’re in the cooler, water temperature, a lot of factors. But not too long ago every one of those fish on the wall would have been dead” he said, pointing to all the photos behind the pool table. “And don’t forget, these are not wild fish that make babies if you let them go. And there are a lot of them. So I say angler’s choice, and people shouldn’t fight.” The arguing guys were now laughing and drunkenly hugging.

“Well I think what we did was best if you’re not going to eat the fish.” I declared. “We caught them, took photos and video, and let them go quick.”

“I’ll drink to that!”

After the previous night of drinking and a long day on the water though, I could barely keep my eyes open and left the bar early while Brad, Todd and West partied for a while longer. But we were still all up well before sunrise again, determined to make it back to the hot stretch of beach even earlier this time to beat the Sunday crowd. Overnight however, a powerful cold front had moved in with that sandstorm, and it was at least twenty degrees colder than the morning before. Still there were hardy souls already on the water when we arrived and carried our ladders out into the lake at first light. A frigid east wind whipped spray and waves that dripped and turned quickly into icicles hanging from our ladders. I learned that with practice I could still cast my spinning rod accurately in fleece gloves, but in less than an hour my fingers became painfully cold anyway, and then lost the dexterity to release the line at the right moment. After three bad casts in a row, I needed a break.

Brad had the same idea, and as we sat in his truck blasting the heat, holding our hands in front of the vents, we noticed many of the other anglers on the water were coming or going from warm-up sessions in their vehicles as well.

“You know that kind of cold where you just bang your fingers lightly against something and it hurts so freaking much you get tears in your eyes?” I asked.

“Yup, I just did that.” Brad replied. “And then when you warm them up quick they hurt again, but it’s more like they itch really bad.”

“Oh that’s just your tissue dying. Beginning of frostbite.”

Our hands were bright red and itching as they thawed in front of the heater vents. We got in and out of his truck twice to make it until nine in the morning.

Brad, the man, the myth, caught a couple of fish. I was skunked. Some of the other early arrivals on the beach were already leaving, due to a slow bite and frostbite. The inshore run of giant cutthroat had passed. My waders had developed a slow leak. On my third trip to the truck I just stayed there. I thought about Hawaii, and Cloe’s warm skin. I thought about the trout we caught the day before and I was satisfied. I had seen Pyramid Lake in its new heyday. I watched Brad grind out another fifteen minutes of pinpoint casts, and just when I was feeling like I needed to stop being such a nancyboy and get back out there,  he climbed down, lifted his ladder onto his shoulder and started the hundred-yard wobble to shore. I waded back out to get my amazing portable fishing tower.

The next day at home I looked through some of the photos I had taken, and one thing that struck me was that the waves looked way bigger than I remembered. I really didn’t notice at the time; they were just something I had to work around to achieve my goal. The fishing was that good. One picture I took from my chair, just as the dust storm moved in, showed three-foot breakers washing over my friends as they stood on their platforms, casting into the wind for monsters. That gave me the title for this story. I put the pic on Facebook and some people thought we were really surfing, on surfboards with chairs, while fishing. Now that would be badass. For a dedicated trout fisherman though, what really goes on at Pyramid Lake is badass enough.