Of angling and life on the trail in the High Sierra

Mammoth Lakes - Under lodgepole and Jeffrey pine, white and Douglas fir, aspen and cedar, a team of horses and riders crisscrossed the lonely landscape. Not far behind, a pack train hauled freight and the hired hands.

Missing were the cattle, or the scene would have been reminiscent of the Old West. Instead, lassos were traded in for fly rods, and the goal was to leave civilization far behind, not to bring the herd into town.

The characters were as contrasting as the times. City-folk fishermen with unblemished fleece pullovers and swank sneakers catered to by a cook and a packer whose Western shirts and Carhartt vests were stained by the dust and sweat of a thousand trail miles.

Yet up here in the High Sierra, the great outdoors is the great equalizer, marrying the centuries and all those who pass through it, no matter how different the visitors might appear. On this particular journey, the cast realized a better appreciation for one another; it became much more than a fly-fishing trip; a chance to embrace varying social, cultural and economic backgrounds and commingle them.

"People who work in the outdoors enjoy the outdoors. People who visit the outdoors come to enjoy the outdoors. One group doesn't love the outdoors more than the other, so they find common ground. And as long as there is a common denominator, everybody seems to have a good time," our Mammoth Lakes fishing guide, David Moss, explained at Second Crossing on the banks of Fish Creek in the Sierra Nevada's stunning John Muir wilderness.

And so it was, anglers discovering the ins and outs of a packer's life, and a cook asking about the subtleties of selecting a fly pattern when not preparing savory meals for a party of nine. The learning experience is one that won't soon escape me.

I rode atop Andy, a tall workhorse, the 16 miles from Red's Meadow Pack Station to aptly named Cascade Valley in Sierra National Forest. With seven hours in the saddle (but none in the 20 years prior), I was sore at day's end. But it wasn't my, rear, end or even my back that was the problem; more than anything in horseback riding, the knees take a battering.

But I wasn't about to complain. I was used to toting a 50-pound pack on my back and breaking out the white-gas burner for freeze-dried meals. The comforts of having an animal deliver me to a wooded outpost and someone else cook my meals -- everything from waffles and hash browns to barbecued chicken and peach cobbler -- for four days was an utterly foreign concept. And check this out: A pit toilet was even dug, complete with wooden seat and a tarp for privacy. Talk about plush. Having a guide to define the nuances of targeting trout in a freestone stream using 3- and 4-weight rods, 5X leader and size Nos. 14 to 18 dry flies was absolutely outlandish.

While tackling brookies, goldens, rainbows and a remarkable range of "goldenbow" hybrids was the object of our travels, my interests soon turned to the relationship between the anglers -- also known as clients or guests -- and the cook and packer. Besides, in the unpressured waters of the High Sierra, fishing is too complicated a term. "Catching" is more like it. If you can get a fly on the water, you will hook fish, lots and lots of fish. I landed and released more than 150 myself in well less than three days. The largest was 11 1/2 inches. There were bigger fish to fry in the personalities of our "hosts."

The cook, Laura Storm of Exeter in Tulare County, a 10-year veteran in the business, wondered aloud about the assortment of fishing flies: "Do any of the flies really make a difference?"

To which Irvine fisherman Rich Amerian, a North Hollywood native, replied: "It only makes a difference if you're not catching fish with the fly you have on; then it makes a tremendous amount of difference. But if you're catching fish with the fly you have on, then it doesn't matter at all." The point of "matching the hatch" become apparent.

And our packer, Jim Macey, an ol' hand from Keeler in the Owens Valley, later chimed in with his admiration of the anglers' skills.

"I wish that I'd gotten out more on the stream because I know fly-fishing is an art form, a refinement that people are constantly seeking and I can respect that," he said. "It seems that you guys are more focused on doing what you do in the stream than getting drunk or gorging out or overindulging. Some groups, they want to be pampered, they want services."

"We have our concerns, you have your focus on the river. It all works. Plus there is no attitude," Macey said.

How's that for copasetic?

American argued the real skill lies with the packers. (The cook joins the fraternity of packers and their duties on the trail.)

"There is a lot of knowledge, but there is a lot of art to what the packers do," he said. "The art is being able to read the animals; the personality of the animals are as varied as people. That includes looking at animals' behavior on the trail and knowing instinctively what that animal is doing, if its load is off-balance, for example. It's the subtleties that most people wouldn't notice."

Of course, from my perspective -- a would-be city slicker in the eyes of the pack-station crew -- I too was most impressed with the people who do this sort of thing for a living.

Fellow angler Ernie Lopez of Placentia, a saltwater fanatic who reeled in his first ever fly-caught prize at Fish Creek, agreed: "It's interesting to hear the packers' stories. They are very knowledgeable in the scene. If you think they are a bunch of country bumpkins, they are not."

Storm is the one with the sun-wrinkled face and the pretty smile.

She's seen horses beat up by bears and cougars. . .and so many in-house romances that she's gotten to calling pack stations the Peyton Places of the wilderness.

Among her duties: "Get the menu ready ahead of time, pack up, cook, gather wood if you can, get the water in, do all the dishes and just try to keep everybody happy. Occasionally you have to work out a domestic issue or be a baby-sitter."

Here in the backcountry, women do the cooking on pack-train trips. And it's the cook who chases off the bears.

"They're the meanest ones," Macey said.

With a last name like Storm, she won't deny it. "Lean and mean," she clarified.

Macey is the packer with the black felt hat and usually something to say about politics and government.

"Being a packer is like being a taxicab driver; you're delivering goods or a client to a place," he said.

But be sure to call him a packer, not a wrangler or a cowboy; interchanging the terms is offensive to all parties involved.

"When I got here, I had seven mules packed with freight and nine horses to deal with," he said of his responsibilites in the camp. "I've got to unpack the mules -- that is our dinner, our camp, and the camp has to be set up immediately. Wrap up lash ropes, the tarps, the pack gear, unsaddle all the animals, put the saddles somewhere -- under tarps if it's going to rain.

"Then it's almost dark and (Storm) is making dinner, and I've got to tie the lead ropes of every horse to the neck of another animal and lead them off to some place they've never been before and put them out on a meadow that turns out to be a bog."

Believe me, the list goes on.

But for all their arduous labor, little glory and less pay, it's the great outdoors that draws these packers again and again, like moths to the flame.

"If I didn't like it here, there is no way on Earth anybody could hit me with a sledgehammer hard enough to do this (stuff), because it's hard work. But I like the animals and I like being out here," Macey said.

Click here For another David Moss fishing story, about fishing in the Duck Pass area.
Click here For another David Moss story, about fishing the San Joaquin.