The Sierra Lake That Isn’t on Any Map

Below the snow-cross on the shoulder of Mount Tallac lies a lake that never appeared on a California map. People who knew of it called it Lost Lake, and the trout living there put up a harder fight than any fish I had hooked before. How I reached it, recounted in the November 1951 issue of Outdoor Life, is worth knowing if you chase high-country trout, because it comes down to the questions every backcountry angler wrestles with: how do you get to fish that stay out of everyone’s reach, and how do you figure out what you have caught once you do.

The legend that started it

It began as a story. Back in 1930 I was twenty-nine, running a garage and a fishing resort at mile-high Lake Tahoe, when an old Paiute man told me about big fish holding below the cross of the gods. He aimed a finger at the face of Mount Tallac, where the summer sun eats back the glacier snow and leaves a white patch in the shape of a cross. Beneath that cross, he said, sat a lake full of large trout he had taken when he was younger.

His directions left little room for error. Go left at the stream fork, he told me, and the big-fish water lay above a smaller lake, at the top of a waterfall. A trail led up to it, he claimed — one his braves had worn into the rock.

The first trip, and the fish that were already known

Before Lost Lake came the lower lake. On that first attempt I went in with Jim Addington, a man I worked with back then. Following the Paiute’s directions, the two of us reached a small lake under Mount Tallac’s snow-cross, with a 300-foot waterfall pouring into one end. Getting there meant climbing a fifty-foot falls above Lake Cascade.

These fish held no mystery. We pulled out foot-long Eastern brook trout, and I pegged them as stock from California’s fisheries, flown in or carried up by packtrain. A dozen-inch brookie in a granite lake under Tallac is almost certainly planted, not a native holdover.

The lower lake justified the trip by itself. Both the chain of lakes below it and the fork of the creek draining it show up on California maps. Lost Lake, the upper water, does not.

Why the upper lake stayed hidden

Three years went by before I made the next attempt. I ran into Carl Gorman while out prospecting — a small, lean, dark-haired man whose grin set off a pair of reckless eyes, and who bit off his words in short bursts.

We headed in during July with packsacks, grub, and fishing tackle, fly rods among it. I also carried a five-foot casting rod rigged with a level-wind reel and spooled with 100 yards of silk line rated to nine pounds — a piece of gear that earned its keep in a way I did not expect. A film crew’s set shut off the route to Lake Cascade and forced us to go around, which, as luck had it, spared us a brutal climb above that water. The ground rose as an almost unbroken floor of granite, broken now and then by dark stands of big pine, deer sign all over it, and at one spot a grouse trailing a wing to pull us away from a hidden brood.

By ten we hit the stream fork the Paiute had named. A quarter hour up the left branch, we came again to the lake Addington and I had found earlier. This lower water was a pothole set in granite, and from its rim you could stare down into purple depths that looked to have no bottom. Above it, the left fork tumbles 300 feet down jagged Sierra rock in the shadow of Mount Tallac.

The climb

Here the trail the legend promised simply was not there. What we found was a crevasse running 300 feet up toward the falls along a slanted, dangerous line. Gorman’s idea was to climb onto my shoulders, work his way up a ten-foot ledge, and then pull me up with the casting rod. Below that ledge waited a drop of roughly 400 feet into a lake. By my reckoning, anyone who went off would hit bottom under a hundred feet of water.

I wanted no part of it. I said flat out that I would not go up the face of that cliff for all the trout in California. Gorman would, and he did. Carl Gorman scaled the cliff face to reach Lost Lake, and his nerve paid off.

What is actually up there

Lost Lake sits tucked beneath the chin of Mount Tallac, which climbs to about 10,000 feet and wears the summer snow-cross that gives it the name “mountain of the Holy Cross.” Its water runs deep and amethyst-colored, boxed in by rock walls and fringed by a swampy snarl of alder. And the fish carried no name. They fought harder than any I had hooked.

A high lake sealed off above a 300-foot waterfall is exactly the kind of place where a trout population can wander away from anything you would know from the road. The possibilities are few. Rainbow trout are known for their fighting drive and their leaps, and they bulk up in bigger water; they split into distinct drainage strains, among them the McCloud River and Kern River strains of the Sierra. Cutthroat trout wear a bold orange slash under the jaw as their surest mark, but in streams and rivers they rarely top eighteen inches, and they do not fight like a rainbow. Cutthroat and rainbow also interbreed readily, which clouds identification in out-of-the-way water where both might once have lived. A fish that fought like nothing I had landed, in a lake no one had charted, slips past every neat label.

How to fish water like this yourself

Lost Lake will not turn up on any map, but the broader point holds: the trout that fight hardest and resist naming tend to live where access is worst. The Sierra holds plenty of such water beyond the marked trails. Mount Tallac’s cross-shaped snow patch is a genuine landmark, and the chain of lakes below Lost Lake appears on charts even though the top lake does not.

For gear, respect the snow window. On the busier Sierra peaks — Mount Whitney included — technical climbing equipment is usually not needed from mid-July into early October, but in spring and early summer you will want ice axes and crampons. Use that as a rough guide to high-country timing, and read the actual conditions on any off-trail approach before you commit.

The real advantage was never the tackle. It was the willingness to chase a story past the edge of the map, and a partner reckless enough to take the cliff. Bring a rod, a permit, and someone who will make the climb.

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