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SLIDE LAKE THEN AND NOW -- ONS-matthews column -- 24jun10
Slide Lake was a trophy brown trout hotspot in San Bernardino Mountains
By JIM MATTHEWS, Outdoor News Service
Ed Stinson of San Bernardino started fishing Slide Lake on Bear Creek in the San Bernardino Mountains in 1955, a spot that was known for its large brown trout.
“I never did catch no super big ones,” said the 75-year-old Stinson. “My best fish was an 8 1/2-pound brown, but I saw one I know was double digits. I saw one guy up there battle a fish for 45 minutes in Bear Creek, but he lost it. That had to be a pretty huge yellow-belly. That’s what we called the brownies.”
Chuck Rogers, a 77-year-old from Pinon Hills, also fished Slide Lake since the 1950s.
“The biggest brown trout I caught out there was 5 1/2 pounds, but there were a lot of three and four pounders,” said Rogers.
Devon Terry is 82 now and lives in Barstow. He moved to California in 1958 and started fishing the Santa Ana River, Bear Creek, and Slide Lake only a couple of years after that. After catching a four-pound brown trout in Seven Oaks, he was hooked on the region and fished Slide Lake until it washed out during the flood in with winter of 1968-69.
“It was a trout Shangrila before that with lots of three and four pounders, and if you used hellgrammites, you could catch five to 10-pound browns,” said Terry.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a column asking for reader’s help, hoping to gather more information about a place called Slide Lake on Bear Creek below the Big Bear Lake Dam in the creek’s rugged canyon. The calls and e-mails poured in.
When I started fishing Bear Creek in the early 1970s, there were still signs on the dirt roads calling a rocky place in the main canyon Slide Lake. But there was no lake then. All the old-time anglers at local sporting goods stores and in area fishing clubs back then spoke in hushed tones about Slide Lake. While hardly a secret, it was perhaps the best trout fishery in Southern California, and they all told about how good the brown trout fishery was in the little lake and stream above it.
Tom Atchley, who worked for the Forest Service from 1962-68, is a local history buff who has done an incredible amount of research on local mountains, but even he wasn’t sure when Slide Lake -- really just a pond not bigger than five acres in size -- was first created.
“The rumor I heard is that the lake was formed from the 1862 flood which caused the massive slide off Slide Peak. The debris from the slide formed a blockage of Bear Creek,” said Atchley, even though he’d been unable to find any mention of the lake on his maps or some historical journals from the turn of the last century.
Other people who called or e-mailed had other dates and theories. Gary Hatfield of Mountain Home Village said he was “90 percent sure” it was formed during the Long Beach earthquake in 1932. There were also votes for quakes in 1892 and around 1906 or 1907.
While I couldn’t pin down a date for Slide Lake’s creation, everyone agreed with Atchley that the massive winter storms of 1968-69, especially January, 1969, blew out the rock and rubble dam. Roy Hill, a 55-year-resident of the San Bernardino Mountains, said the rainfall total was 138 inches that year.
Everyone also agreed that it was an amazing brown trout fishery, and that the only way to catch the browns were on big, natural baits -- with big stoneflies, called hellgrammites by most anglers of that era, by far the best bait. Grasshopper and crickets or big nightcrawlers were all distant runners up for fooling the big browns.
“If there’s a German brown in a pool, and you catch a hellgrammite, I guarantee you’ll get ‘em -- or get a strike. They can’t resist them,” said Stinson.
When I first started fishing Bear Creek, it was still recovering from the massive flood. The canyon was scoured of all brush and trees and the stream from the mouth of the narrow part of the canyon below Big Bear all the way down to Bear Creek’s confluence with the Santa Ana River was a long, shallow series of riffles. Up in the canyon, there were still a lot of big, deep pools that still held some good trout, but the flood had all but washed out the trophy fishery.
It also apparently did something else. It damaged the habitat for the huge population of stoneflies, a big aquatic insect that lived in the stream and allowed the trout to grow to those bigger sizes. With the plentiful supply of big mouthfuls of food gone, the brown trout couldn’t grow into those huge sizes any longer. While the stream now has more pools and a canopy of brush and trees again, its fishery has never come back.
Today, a 14 or 15-inch brown is a trophy fish, and most are eight or nine inches long in Bear Creek. There are gear and size restrictions on Bear Creek to try to protect the fishery from over-harvest. These regulations have been in place since the 1980s, but sadly the trophy fish don’t seem to be coming back.
But once upon a time, there was a place called Slide Lake.
Devon Terry said simply, “It was like a Garden of Eden for fishermen up there -- an amazing place.”
Slide Lake was a trophy brown trout hotspot in San Bernardino Mountains
By JIM MATTHEWS, Outdoor News Service
Ed Stinson of San Bernardino started fishing Slide Lake on Bear Creek in the San Bernardino Mountains in 1955, a spot that was known for its large brown trout.
“I never did catch no super big ones,” said the 75-year-old Stinson. “My best fish was an 8 1/2-pound brown, but I saw one I know was double digits. I saw one guy up there battle a fish for 45 minutes in Bear Creek, but he lost it. That had to be a pretty huge yellow-belly. That’s what we called the brownies.”
Chuck Rogers, a 77-year-old from Pinon Hills, also fished Slide Lake since the 1950s.
“The biggest brown trout I caught out there was 5 1/2 pounds, but there were a lot of three and four pounders,” said Rogers.
Devon Terry is 82 now and lives in Barstow. He moved to California in 1958 and started fishing the Santa Ana River, Bear Creek, and Slide Lake only a couple of years after that. After catching a four-pound brown trout in Seven Oaks, he was hooked on the region and fished Slide Lake until it washed out during the flood in with winter of 1968-69.
“It was a trout Shangrila before that with lots of three and four pounders, and if you used hellgrammites, you could catch five to 10-pound browns,” said Terry.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a column asking for reader’s help, hoping to gather more information about a place called Slide Lake on Bear Creek below the Big Bear Lake Dam in the creek’s rugged canyon. The calls and e-mails poured in.
When I started fishing Bear Creek in the early 1970s, there were still signs on the dirt roads calling a rocky place in the main canyon Slide Lake. But there was no lake then. All the old-time anglers at local sporting goods stores and in area fishing clubs back then spoke in hushed tones about Slide Lake. While hardly a secret, it was perhaps the best trout fishery in Southern California, and they all told about how good the brown trout fishery was in the little lake and stream above it.
Tom Atchley, who worked for the Forest Service from 1962-68, is a local history buff who has done an incredible amount of research on local mountains, but even he wasn’t sure when Slide Lake -- really just a pond not bigger than five acres in size -- was first created.
“The rumor I heard is that the lake was formed from the 1862 flood which caused the massive slide off Slide Peak. The debris from the slide formed a blockage of Bear Creek,” said Atchley, even though he’d been unable to find any mention of the lake on his maps or some historical journals from the turn of the last century.
Other people who called or e-mailed had other dates and theories. Gary Hatfield of Mountain Home Village said he was “90 percent sure” it was formed during the Long Beach earthquake in 1932. There were also votes for quakes in 1892 and around 1906 or 1907.
While I couldn’t pin down a date for Slide Lake’s creation, everyone agreed with Atchley that the massive winter storms of 1968-69, especially January, 1969, blew out the rock and rubble dam. Roy Hill, a 55-year-resident of the San Bernardino Mountains, said the rainfall total was 138 inches that year.
Everyone also agreed that it was an amazing brown trout fishery, and that the only way to catch the browns were on big, natural baits -- with big stoneflies, called hellgrammites by most anglers of that era, by far the best bait. Grasshopper and crickets or big nightcrawlers were all distant runners up for fooling the big browns.
“If there’s a German brown in a pool, and you catch a hellgrammite, I guarantee you’ll get ‘em -- or get a strike. They can’t resist them,” said Stinson.
When I first started fishing Bear Creek, it was still recovering from the massive flood. The canyon was scoured of all brush and trees and the stream from the mouth of the narrow part of the canyon below Big Bear all the way down to Bear Creek’s confluence with the Santa Ana River was a long, shallow series of riffles. Up in the canyon, there were still a lot of big, deep pools that still held some good trout, but the flood had all but washed out the trophy fishery.
It also apparently did something else. It damaged the habitat for the huge population of stoneflies, a big aquatic insect that lived in the stream and allowed the trout to grow to those bigger sizes. With the plentiful supply of big mouthfuls of food gone, the brown trout couldn’t grow into those huge sizes any longer. While the stream now has more pools and a canopy of brush and trees again, its fishery has never come back.
Today, a 14 or 15-inch brown is a trophy fish, and most are eight or nine inches long in Bear Creek. There are gear and size restrictions on Bear Creek to try to protect the fishery from over-harvest. These regulations have been in place since the 1980s, but sadly the trophy fish don’t seem to be coming back.
But once upon a time, there was a place called Slide Lake.
Devon Terry said simply, “It was like a Garden of Eden for fishermen up there -- an amazing place.”
