Fishing East Fork San Gabriel River
Fishing the East Fork San Gabriel River among the mountains is easy, insofar as finding holes goes. Even the deeper water of a riffle like this one may hold fish. But finding larger trout is difficult.
Angeles National Forest
Considering the 22 square miles that fill out Manhattan, Angeles National Forest seems enormous at 1094 square miles, although it’s far from being the largest of California’s many national forests, parks, monuments, and recreational areas. Nevertheless, to take East Fork Road to its end at Heaton Flat and view the surrounding mountains is to feel an immensity that the closeness of fly fishing the river relieves. The famously difficult hike up Iron Mountain begins here and ends at the summit’s 8007-foot elevation. Primarily in Los Angeles County, small sections of Angeles National Forest extend into San Bernadino and Ventura counties.
By what I’ve gathered, however, virtually the entire East Fork is, as of this writing, closed because of the 2024 Bridge Fire. Heaton Flat is not only closed—the fire originated in that area. Access will come back.
Hard to believe a sight like this is within Los Angeles County. We fished in late April 2022, and that might be snow lingering on the mountain above the clouds, I don’t remember. I know we saw snow on some peaks, somewhere, but there’s a lot of white rock, too.
City and wilderness are closely entwined in California. We bought an inexpensive park pass at a 7-11 in Azusa, population 50,000. Minutes later, State Highway 39 took us through Azusa Canyon along the San Gabriel River. During our week’s stay, my wife and I frequently felt astonished at how the state’s developed land rubs against wilds. The feeling of remote wilds at Crystal Cove State Park, for example, awaits any hiker just behind Laguna Beach. My son, Matt, had lived in Costa Mesa for most of a year, so he was already acquainted with sudden entrance into stunning natural space.
Fence lizards I photographed at Crystal Cove State Park.
Matt hadn’t done any fly fishing (at least he’d fished bass!). And while the online support for the East Fork is considerably less than for the West Fork, we did a search, finding that the West Fork was closed due to recent fires. We dug a little deeper and found a video from the East Fork featuring a foot-long rainbow trout. I don’t remember broaching how I felt about fishing the river, other than that I was strongly set on fly fishing. I had packed fly rods into a tube and paid for putting it on the plane, so I wasn’t going to give up. We could’ve done an inexpensive Pacific Ocean charter all but guaranteeing catches, but all along I had expected to fly fish. My native conservatism kept me to the plan, but I was afraid we’d get skunked. I didn’t want to spoil hopes, so I kept quiet about that. We would just have to find out.
Matt selected Heaton Flat at the end of East Fork Road as our destination. It’s not necessarily true that the fishing is better all the way up there some 17 miles from the 7-11 in Azusa, but if you’re more adventurous than we were, you can even hike along the river well upstream of the parking lot. One of the destinations for hikers is the Bridge to Nowhere. By what I’ve seen online, it looks like a good spot for lunch, although I haven’t pieced apart working timelines for any hikes. Sections of river close to access points are usually considered less productive. If you’re up for covering ground, there’s a lot of it.
Matt began at a rock dam, and he found wet-wading a chilly approach. He used a longer rod—9 feet—than my 6-foot 2 weight, but he managed to catch trout on dry flies, while I missed all my dry fly hits.
Not all the trout are tiny. I saw one about nine inches long, and I imagine some are bigger.
Regardless, we approached the first couple of pools right in front of us, having rigged up little strike indicators with size 16 pheasant tail bead-heads underneath. We each got hit on our first drifts. They were little trout. My next cast yielded sure evidence, the rainbow I caught about four inches long. Others followed in fairly quick succession as we tried other spots, the biggest one only hand-sized. About seven inches.
Matt caught some on a dry fly.
We missed the hits of three or four times as many as we caught, especially after Matt discovered they like to rise very swiftly from the bottom for a dry fly. I never caught one that way, but I missed at least 20 splash rises. Matt caught some. I was using a six-foot two weight; he used a nine-foot five weight. If that made the difference somehow, I don’t know why. They hit dry flies more than they hit the bead-heads, and I’ve never before encountered trout as eager to take any sort of fly. Though these fish were mostly very small, the experience was far better than drawing no attention from any.
I’ve never encountered trout as aggressive anywhere else. Many decades ago, shortly after I earned my driver’s license, I caught native brook trout in Warren County on shad darts. Most of them nine inches long, they aggressively attacked, but since the jigs got down near bottom quickly, I could never tell how far the fish might travel to overtake an offering. Here in New Jersey during recent years, I’ve always tried to keep a bead-head under an indicator close to bottom. There in California, I found I could float one two or three feet above and the silver flash of a rainbow trout would slice upward and nail it.
The evidence of these fish’s abundance depended on luring them. Do that, and you find way more natives here, than native fish in New Jersey streams. (The rainbows of the East Fork are thought to be native coastal rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss irideus, a subspecies.) Gaze into an East Fork pool, though, and chances are you’ll see no trout, even though the water is perfectly clear. They must blend right in with the bottom. Get into a tussle with one, and two others might tag along. Once I pulled in a little fish of five or six inches. Another nine inches long followed, the biggest I saw, though enough persistent river walking might yield more of that size. Matt and I came along with his mother, so our explorations and time were limited.
The farthest I got from where the trail descends to the river from the parking lot—by a vertical elevation of maybe a hundred feet—I found a large, deep pool. I felt sure a good-sized trout might occupy it, but I caught nothing there. We never got very far, and I’m sure plenty of sizeable, deep pools exist elsewhere. Smaller ones with four- and five-foot depths are plentiful. It seems every time you leave one behind, you come upon another.
I would’ve enjoyed catching a foot-long native rainbow, but the little ones were enough. The evidence I’ve found online is that the San Gabriel River used to get stocked, but the upper reaches of the East Fork where we fished are full of little natives. The fishing has a long history dating back to the nineteenth century, the trout even more abundant then. And from what I’ve gathered, a steelhead run used to exist. The construction of three San Gabriel River dams put an end to that.
If you happen to visit the Los Angeles region, the East Fork is worth a visit. It’s nice to know that as ruined by dams as the San Gabriel is, and as crowded by human population and development as Los Angeles County is, further on upstream a native trout fishery exists that probably beats the numbers you’ll catch anywhere in New Jersey.
The original article was published in New Jersey Federated Sportsmen’s News.