This year hasn’t exactly been going to plan, for reasons I won’t get into here. “Outdoor time,” beyond sitting on the back patio, has been limited. I suppose everyone was overdue for a bit of a break, because schedules and things miraculously opened up and the family was able to grab a cabin somewhere in the mountains of southern Utah. Naturally, I jumped at the chance to fish the headwaters of one Southern Utah’s famous creeks at a primo time of year… and use this opportunity to clear my head a little bit.
Put bluntly… I was jonesin’.
Lower Mammoth Creek, down by its confluence with Asay Creek, is known for big brown trout. It’s a relatively big, wide piece of water; you certainly can’t hop across it. I’ve never had any luck there due to inclement weather, runoff, the barometer, moon phase, some planet being in some wrong part of the sky, and all of the other excuses that traveling fishermen are so keen to throw out. The fishing is regarded as being good through the whole length of the creek (and this is not a secret), but the high-elevation headwaters, especially before Mammoth Spring itself, offer a completely different experience than the bigger water downstream.
By the time we got up there in mid-June, all of the snow was gone, but I’m sure the very mild winter was a contributing factor as well. Flows were perfect. I assembled the trusty 3-weight, and went to work.
If you like fishing small streams for small, native trout, Utah’s Paunsaugunt and Markagunt plateaus are your jam. As with most other small freestones, the challenge mostly lies in getting for fly to the fish without getting it irretrievably stuck on an overhanging manzanita than it does picking the right fly or executing a flawless cast.
The native Bonneville cutthroat seem to prefer the slower sections of a stream, and I had my best luck in beaver ponds and deeper plunge pools that offered both refuge and a steady stream of food for holding trout. You can also try the undercut banks, but in those more exposed sections of the stream the fish were extremely spooky… as you’d expect.
There didn’t seem to be anything going on that I would call a hatch, which is fine with me. I went through a few flies, trying to find something that wouldn’t work, and couldn’t come up with anything. Your go-to #16 Parachute Adams (tied using MFC Widow’s Web for the post, which I like a lot) also worked well.
I also caught — and lost — a lot of fish using a #12 Antacid, Mike Lawson’s foam beetle pattern, Sparkle Duns, and Kelly Galloup’s Double-Wing Caddis. Terrestrial season is amazing.
A couple of other tips.
Stealth is important. I’d recommend watching the stream for a bit, sneaking up, and making the cast on your knees if you can. As non-selective as these fish generally are, if you blow your first cast, they will probably refuse any subsequent ones. I’d recommend picking up a copy of each of John Gierach’s classics “Fly Fishing the Small Streams” and “Fly Fishing the High Country” for comprehensive guides to fishing streams exactly like this, as this is one of those places where everything in the old books is still true.
Also, definitely do crimp your barbs down or tie on barbless hooks. You’ll lose more fish, but sleep better at night. Pulling a #12 flying ant pattern out of a 6” trout is taxing on them enough as it is.
Like I said, stealth is really the name of the game here. Everything is trying to kill these fish and they know it and they act like it. Polarized sunglasses are essential; although you sometimes can’t see trout holding beneath the ripples of a big plunge pool, you oftentimes can — especially in those beaver ponds. Sneak around as best you can, but understand you’ll spook a bunch anyway and that’s totally fine because as we all know, catching fish isn’t entirely the point.
Access to all reaches of Mammoth Creek is plentiful, but there are a few sections through summer homes and things like that so you are going to want to be cognizant of that.
In short… I guess all of the other stuff that works for all of the other small creeks works here, too.
I’m not sure how this works biologically, but I am certain that some kind of metropolitan poison builds up in the system of city-bound folk, and it needs to be exorcised frequently enough or you will go insane. And, if not literally insane, then you will certainly be grumpier than everyone around you would prefer.
When you’re out there crawling around on your knees with a big foam terrestrial pattern, sight casting to trout all less than a foot long, you can take one look around your surroundings and be forgiven for thinking that, indeed, everything going in the Big Bad World around you is going to be just fine. I know I did.
