Fallen Leaf Lake: Worth the Trouble
May 14, 2006
The road in is a narrow, miserable affair that’s marred by countless potholes that look (and feel) like craters. There’s very little shore fishing access and even less room to park a truck and boat trailer. And to top it all off, the launch fees are ridiculous – as high as $30 round trip, depending on what size boat you have.
Despite all that however, I just can’t stay away from Fallen Leaf Lake.
The “Leaf” is a mere15 minutes from the carbon monoxide-laced din of South Lake Tahoe, yet it feels worlds away. The place is quiet and the pace of life is slow. Mount Tallac rises sharply above the lake’s perfectly clear water and its flanks are covered with impossibly green trees.
It’s the fishing, however, that really gets me going.
A whole host of finned critters call the lake home – rainbow, brown and cutthroat trout, kokanee salmon and mackinaw. The rainbows don’t get all that big, but the brownies can occasionally top 10 pounds. Lahontan cutthroat trout, which were native to the lake historically, have been reintroduced in recent years, but the majority of them seem to be getting eaten by mackinaw. Still, there are enough of them around to keep things interesting.
Speaking of macks, the lake is absolutely loaded with them. I used to run a charterboat on the lake many years ago and there were so many of them we referred to Fallen Leaf as the “trout farm.” There are not a ton of lunker mackinaw in there, but fish over 20 pounds are not out of the question. The majority, however, fall into the 2- to 4-pound class and there’s a bunch of those guys out there.
To get a crack at maximum variety, I like to troll silver/blue or clown Rapalas along the rocky shorelines at the crack of dawn. I’ll put the plugs 100 to 150 feet out behind the boat and troll anywhere from 2 to 3.5 mph. As I’m trolling, I like to continuously impart a jigging motion to the rod tip so that the lure lurches forward and then drops back. You have to use braided line for this technique because mono stretches too much. Browns, rainbows and cutties will all go for Rapalas fished this way and you can also catch the occasional mack as well.
When the sun starts to peek through the trees, I’ll switch over to kokanee. Though Fallen Leaf gets planted regularly with kokes, it’s not known for pumping out wide-open fishing. Perhaps the macks eat too many of the juvenile salmon. In any case, you don’t often find huge schools of kokes here, but the chance for a really large one is always there. There was a time, in fact, that I predicted the next state record would be caught here. I wasn’t too far off, either — in the summer of 2001, I saw a 3.75 pounder taken.
The best bet for salmon is to pull Uncle Larry’s Spinners behind Sep’s dodgers 40 to 90 feet down in 150 to 300 feet of water out in front of the marina. You can tip your lures with corn, but Leaf kokanee seem to really like nightcrawler chunks.
After giving the kokes a whirl, I switch to chasing macks. With light gear on a downrigger, I prowl the 130- to 150-foot depths along the eastern shore with live minnows or white Power Grubs behind flashers. The macks hold in huge schools in the lake and are pretty easy to find. You can also jig over a pod when you locate one or drift live minnows through them.
I got up to the lake on Tuesday and tried practicing a little of what I preach. With cloudy skies, howling wind and hail, we hooked three nice trout on Rapalas right at dawn but dumped them all. With the wind freshening and thunder cracking overhead, we put the topline gear away and busted out the downriggers. Just as I located a spot that was filthy with macks, a white squall line appeared on the west side of the lake and we got hammered by about 30 mph of wind and sideways rain. We hung in there just long enough to make two passes through the school, which resulted in one mack in the box and one lunker lost right at the boat. At that point, the weather started going from miserable to dangerous, so we pulled off and headed home early.
For info on lodging, camping and boating at Fallen Leaf, call the marina at (530) 544-0787.
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