We started the drive from the Bay Area to Bishop at noon on Thursday. We drove through Yosemite which turned out to be a mistake due to the road construction that is going on in Tuolumne Meadows. There is about a 4 mile section of road that is all dirt and there is one lane traffic control. It probably cost us an hour. We did stop at the Tuolumne Meadows store, which is open and fully stocked and we even saw a couple of PCT hikers there. We stopped in Bishop at the Holy Smoke BBQ restaurant to grab dinner to go for the campground. We snagged a walk-in campsite at the Lake Sabrina Campground. This brought back good memories from when I was there 5 years ago. I was very surprised to see a massive boulder blocking the entrance to the bathroom. Unbelievable that the boulder missed the power pole and the bathroom. The camp host stated that it happened 2 years ago and the forest service hasn’t been able to remove it yet.
Day 1. We woke up early and drove up to Lake Sabrina to take a look around and found the lake extremely low.
I dropped everyone off at the Lamarck Lakes trailhead and then drove back to park the car at the trailhead parking lot. It was pretty easy hiking to reach Lower Lamarck Lake where we fished for about an hour. We caught quite a few small brookies.
Later we decided to hike up to Upper Lamarck Lake to give fishing a try there in hopes for larger fish. We sited many large fish in the lake near the outlet and also large fish in the creek outlet. We fished for about an hour and landed many large brooke, rainbow and I believe rainbow/golden hybrids.
Largest fish caught, a 13-inch rainbow.
Dylan enjoyed having a conversation with his fish before releasing it back into the lake.
We had lunch and then got back on trail and headed back down to Lower Lamarck Lake and then started to go off trail on the north side of the lake to make our way towards the Wonder Lakes area. We found the route finding pretty easy. There seemed to be an endless amount of waterfalls along our journey to one of the large lakes at elevation 11,000 ft.
Largest lake below the one we camped at
We reached our destination lake around 5 pm and were treated to a magnificent huge waterfall backdrop across the lake from our campsite.
We fished for a while and caught enough small brookies to make fish tacos for dinner. We hit the hay after some card playing in the tent.
We were thinking about trying to head up to the upper Wonder Lakes basin in the morning but the off trail, steep, boulder covered terrain made us decide to instead spend the morning fishing at the lake inlet area.
We constantly caught small brookies for about 2 hours before heading back across the lake to have lunch and to breakdown camp.
We headed back down towards Lower Lamarck Lake with the intention of camping for the night at the next large Wonder Lake but due to the mosquitos we decided to keep hiking and to set up camp at Lower Lamarck Lake where we had been and had found not too many mosquitos the day before.
More of the Wonder Lakes waterfalls.
We set up camp in a dry area with limited mosquitos at Lower Lamarck Lake. We rested and fished and we had dinner free from mosquitos bothering us.
We celebrated Dylan’s 12th birthday with a candle stuck into some freeze-dried ice cream! After some Texas Hold’em in the tent, it was time for bed.
The wind howled all night long, which made it hard to sleep due to the constant tent shaking. In fact, the wind persisted during breakfast and camp breakdown.
We made the quick hike back to the car at North Lake and drove to Bishop to grab some Schat’s Deli turkey sandwiches for the long drive home. It was definitely clouding up as we drove north. We decided to drive back over Sonora Pass to avoid the Yosemite road construction. We hit many rain showers on both sides of Sonora Pass.
Overall, great trip to an area with great fishing and great scenery. The amount of waterfalls in the Wonder Lakes area is second to none.
Hope you enjoyed the report and reporting of current conditions. The mosquitos at times in the Wonder Lakes area between Lower Lamarck Lake and the lake we camped at were probably a 3 out of 5 but we lucked out by having great, dry campsite areas were the little devils we not that bothersome. Lastly, we were able to cross all creeks without getting boots wet by crossing on rocks and logs.
