The Upper Sacramento — which should be damned well unfishable right now — has fallen below 1800 cfs, and the McCloud at Ah-Di-Nah is below 500 cfs.
Neither is exactly ideal for wading, but both are wholly fishable flows (if you don’t mind walking a bit).
They’ll probably remain that way through the weekend, and if you’re thinking of heading north for a little cannonball-split-shot combat fly fishing, that’s the good news — especially if you stumble onto one of the few spots with trout rising to March Browns.
The bad news?
With our springtime weather apparently still on a train north from Cancun (the weather forecast suggests a 70+ degree day isn’t even on the horizon), you may not see those Ideal-For-Fly-Fishing-Normally-Late-Spring Flows until the middle of July (if then).
See, the real runoff event hasn’t yet begun, and in fact, we’ve added to the snowpack the last couple days.
I could write about the horrific effects that three days of mid-May snow have on a writer’s delicate psyche (and advocate heavily for some kind of federal creative disaster relief), but in a rare display of courage, I’m going to stop sniffling and hope the Underground’s California readers are taking advantage of this rare pre-runoff bonanza.
We’ll pay for it later in the form of some serious runoff, and when it happens, I sincerely doubt that the word “courageous” will be used to describe those posts.
See you hiding the tears on the river, Tom Chandler.
UPDATE: You can find the snowpack/waterpack figures here, which will tell you the high snowpack and cold spring mean the Northern Sierras are at… 253% of normal for this time of the year.
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