Carving out a Memory

Honestly, I have no legitimate excuse for not having returned. The experience still calls like a siren song playing softly in the background. Snow-capped peaks and glaciers. Expansive vistas of low-country lakes surrounded by ghostly granite, golden grasses, and solemn conifers. Hot springs and chaparral scrublands. Mountain quail. And honest-to-God golden trout. The jewel of California's Sierra Nevada Range.

It was a bucket-list trip. One I had dreamed of for how many years, I am unsure. We had "golden trout" in Appalachia, but they were rainbow trout genetically selected and bred in a hatchery to have a golden color. "Palomino trout" is another name for them, although some like to attempt a distinction between the various mutants. Of all the years I fished stocked trout in my Virginia youth, I never caught one. To tell the truth, I was unimpressed.

It must have been Sports Afield or Field and Stream stacked on the stone fireplace hearth in my grandfather's cabin room where I read of California's legendary state fish. The California golden trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss aguabonita) is a rainbow trout subspecies native to only two watersheds draining the Kern Plateau of the southern Sierra Nevada Range: Golden Trout Creek and the South Fork Kern River. Even late in my single-digit years, I knew that one day I would cast a fly to the authentic finned bullion of the far west. The non-imposter is now sprinkled throughout the high elevation lakes and streams of the Sierras and Wyoming's Wind River drainage. Even a few alpine lakes in Washington's Cascades support the aguabonita.

Catching my breath from the miles of ascent and vertical boulder-hopping, carving new quad muscle on the ascent, I stood surrounded by the cluster of four known as the Treasure Lakes in the John Muir Wilderness. Thirteen-thousand-foot Mt. Dade peak loomed overhead to the south. A permanently shadowed, remnant snowpack, dusted pewter by the wind, was feeding the lakes. Below the shimmering surface of the crystal-clear depths lurked the paragon.

The journey itself in the cold, pre-dawn frost, giving way to the golden rays and 60 degrees in such scenic country, made for an unforgettable moment. As the wind laid, a floating fly line followed, terminated with a size 12 "cherry limeade," which is really just a Royal Wulf tied with pink wings rather than traditional white.

As the hostile water warmed into 40-something degrees, golden trout began to appear in the shallows, cruising carefully and targeting small flies. Sight-casting to a larger shape as it glided over a sandy shoal, the fish turned to inspect the fly and engulfed it nonchalantly.

A moment of panic overwhelmed me as I realized I was playing a trout I had obsessed over for somewhere upward of two decades. Kneeling on a flat boulder at the water's edge, I softly cradled my first golden trout in the frigid alpine waters. An awesome spectacle in a small package with a rich auburn belly, buttery yellow flanks, and olive-sized parr marks. A trophy in its own right and a rare dream realized.

While harvest is allowed on most lakes in the Sierra Nevada, I had no intention of bonking the most beautiful trout I had ever laid eyes on. Luckily, the only immaculate image my old cell phone would ever capture happened to be of this incredible fish as it approached the shore.

I was witnessing utter perfection. An image simply wouldn't do the memory justice. Sitting against a house-size slab of bister stone, I pondered the options as the trout disappeared past the sandy shallows into the emerald depths. How to memorialize the experience in three dimensions? Then it hit me.

Dayton's own Tom Schirm is a master carver of fin and scale. A renowned artist in the realm of hand-carved fish replicas, whose artistry is viewable at http://www.tomschirmfishcarvings.com/. An estimated length and a few photos of the fish were all that he needed to get started.

Understanding that an artist needs time to achieve perfection, I left Tom to find his muse. Wanting the fish on a free-standing pedestal, we shared a few calls to talk details. Marble or wood and stone? Either way, it would be carved from wood, per the rules of the World Fish Carving Championship, in which Tom has placed well in the past.

Standing by the folding table in my makeshift home office, every glance at the precisely proportioned and painted specimen puts me right back at the top of the crag, short of breath from the climb and elevation. Sun rays glistening atop the lake surface like they were cast from a disco ball. And the goldens are rising.