Dave Webb
July 7, 2024
We had fun camping and fishing for big brookies and grayling on Boulder Mountain over the weekend. We made a base camp in the Row Lakes area (between Row 7 and Row 8) and explored small lakes in that region. The scenery was gorgeous. It was one of the prettiest campsites I’ve stayed at in recent years. There were no other humans camping nearby but we shared the site with a million hungry misquotes and hundreds of beautiful blue damselflies.
If you want big fish on the Boulders you expect slow, tough fishing. In lakes with fast action, the fish are usually small. That’s a trade-off we understood and accepted. We were after big fish and we knew we would have to work for them, but fishing was slower than expected at the lakes we tried.
My daughter did real in a big grayling in an area lake I won’t name.
The Row Lakes are shallow and subject to winter kill some years. Since we had high water last year I hoped to find decent action on a few holdover fish, but that did not happen. DWR stocks them – the latest report says the three fishable lakes have received some catchable tiger trout this year – but we saw only small fish there.
We chose that area for our base camp because the lakes are easy to find and access roads are good. From Forest Road 154 we took 162 east to the lakes. Forest Road 262 skirts the west side of the lakes and it is very rough. Road 176 is just east of the lakes, provides access to the same area, and is smooth. People pull travel trailers into the area via that road.
We fished some of the small lakes up the mountain and found those access roads to be rocky and high clearance was definitely needed.
Rim Lake and Spectacle Lake are on top of the mountain not many miles to the east and we tried to drive 162 to them from the Row Lakes, but turned back because the road became incredibly rough even for my stock Toyota FJ.
Rim and Spectacle and other small lakes in that area are on my list so I’ll be back. Spectacle is one of the bigger and deeper lakes on the mountain and I want to fish it and its neighbors and before cold weather sets in. Coming from the north, Forest Road 1277 provides relatively easy access.
Boulder Mountain is big, beautiful, rugged, and can provide great fishing. We had fun exploring new country even though we did not find the numbers we wanted on this trip.
