The fishing at the upper lake was very good with relatively large brookies and great fighting larger rainbows. I had my heart set on getting into the Palisade basin, so the next day we headed over Knapsack pass using some before mentioned intel of making sure to stay low enough to be out of the boulders, but not lose a lot of elevation. On the way, we saw a huge buck.
It was my first X/C experience, and I found it to be lot of fun. We fished a lake in the basin that Papercup had PMed me about and his intel was right on. We caught quite a few of my largest to date sierra trout using #6 weighted line and an olive wooly bug as Dave had suggested. This was my first attempt at weighted line, and had very good success with it thanks to Fly Dave.
We had planned on exiting out through Knapsack, but since we were so close to Thunder bolt Pass and we had now seen both sides, we thought we could handle it even though I knew it wasn’t going to be as easy as KS pass. So up we went.
The ascent was easy, but the boulder field on the descent was tiring. In retrospect, we probably should have traversed the field near the top, but we decided to play it safe and follow the very faint use trail down the boulder field.
Got back to camp around 3 in time to cook up some pizza and reflect on my first and second XC passes ever. Since this trip was relatively easy, I experimented with our meals in an attempt to spice things up a little. I hit home runs with making pizza and Breakfast Burritos from mostly dehydrated, lightweight products.
The rest of the trip was uneventful as we headed out the next day and were back in Huntington Beach by 8.
