Heenen Lake
As the temperatures drop and the leaves start to change fiery shades of yellow, orange and red across the Sierra, I always get excited for fall fishing. Water temperatures are cooling off but, many rivers have been so low that some are no longer fishable. Also, many of the fisheries I visit throughout the summer have seen a lot of action by the time September rolls around. In fact, with most of our fisheries now open year round, they rarely ever get a break anymore. The concept of refugia has been somewhat lost in the management of most of our fresh water lakes and rivers.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a fishery that is closed to protect the brood stock and then opened for a short time to provide
catch and release angling for fat happy fish that haven’t been abused all summer?? Well that fishery is Heenen Lake!
Nestled high up in a little nook near the top of Monitor Pass off Highway 89 sits a little lake called Heenen. Once a popular lake for the Native Americans, Heenen is now most well-known for it’s Lahontan Cutthroat trout (LCT) fishery. Due to it’s high elevation and slightly alkaline waters, Heenen is a perfect habitat for this native strain of giant trout. Lahontans are one of California’s 11 native heritage trout species. They once inhabited much of the eastern Sierra and great basin of Nevada and are best known for the great size they used to reach in the Truckee River and Pyramid Lake.
Years ago, Heenen Lake was set aside by the Department of Fish and Wildlife (DFW) to be a rearing lake for brood stock LCT. On the east end of the lake, sitting on the main tributary, is a DFW rearing station where they collect the eggs of spawners in the spring. These eggs and their subsequent fry are used to keep the lake population healthy and large, as well as to ship off to other hatcheries and stock many waterways throughout the eastern Sierra.
Photo: Mike Wier