This past weekend two friends and I went up to the Kernville area for a long awaited weekend backpacking trip in to fish...ummm...what I will call "a tributary of the Kern", in respect to a promise to keep the area somewhat under-publicized.....
So, we drove up late Friday and arrived in Kernville in time for some burgers at Cheryl's diner. Yum. Afterwards we headed up the river a little ways to try to find a campsite for the nite as we just needed a place to sleep, so we could then wake up in the morning and head up to the trailhead. I was surprised at the number of people already in the canyon, although alot of the sites were only "reserved" and no one had actually shown up yet, even though it was almost 9pm by this time. But, no problem as we wound up at one of the dispersed sites and quickly set up the two tents (I slept in the car), and then had a few beers before dozing off. Some nice folks from the 909 showed up at about 10:30 and deposited themselves right next to us, pickup trucks, motorcycles, coolers, girlfriends, loud music and all. This was somewhat uncool, but they did finally crawl into their tents and pass out somewhere after 1am leaving us to sleep in peace.
In the morning we woke up and got breakfast at Cheryl's, then we headed to the trailhead. Since we overslept a little and spent more time at breakfast than planned, we didnt actually start hiking until about 9:45. The trail starts out as Forest Service road, then degrades into a 4x4 road and then finally a foot trail. It was about 5 miles or so from the car to where we dropped our stuff to make camp about 3 hours later. The temps had started off surprisingly cool but warmed up quickly once we got into the more sun exposed part of the trail. Still, it was tolerable. The trail follows a feeder creek that closer to its confluence with the main creek down canyon had some nice looking pools and a few nice looking trout that we spied. When we reached the main creek at the bottom of the canyon we were rewarded with some nice views of big waterfalls and pools, although some of them looked very difficult to get to. We followed the trail upstream to where the canyon opened up a bit and there was more access to the creek and better campsites. Really beautiful country.
The fishing? Hot. We each caught easily over a dozen fish, wild rainbows. Most were only about 6-8", but a few 8-10" ones and I did manage one that was about 11" and missed another that might have gone a little bigger. I would agree with what I was told about this place, that there was definitely the potential for some big fish in places - especially some of the bigger pools that would have taken some scrambling (death-defying!) to get to. The Fly Of The Day was a #16 Sparkle Dun, although success was also had with #18 PMD imitations. On the way out the next day I fished a big pool on the feeder creek and spooked what looked like about a 14" fish, and caught another 8" on a #16 Deep Sparkle Pupa.
The hike back up out of there was challenging (1200' over 4-5 miles) but not death-defying. Also, when I got home I found a tick helping himself to a meal courtesy of my blood. I plucked him out - nasty - hopefully I won't get lyme disease but so far it looks ok.
All in all a fun trip to a beautiful area, thanks to Matt for all the tips and info. I have some pics but haven't uploaded them yet - maybe tonight, but first I have to weed out the ones that would blatantly give away the location
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