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/ of San 



SEPT. 21, 1907.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 







A Sea Angler Ashore.—V. 
THERE is every reason why all roads should 
lead to Los Laurelles, but for some reason best 
known to the good padres of old, the real Cali- 
fornia pioneers, who blazed trails along the 
Coast Range as far as the San Lucia and be- 
yond, they do not. 
One might arrive by sea, landing in the surf 
of Carmel, or walk in over or through the 
Sierra Galiban or Corral de Tierra from Salinas, 
but we preferred to find it by following El 
Camino Real, the King’s Highway, over which 
Junipero Serra and his band of faithful followers 
walked and prayed, consecrating missions in the 
cause of Christianity and discovering new lands 
and coasts for the king. You can now follow 
this old trail in a gener ral way by train from San 
Diego alongshore, passing some of the most at- 
tractive of the old missions, or their ruins, as 
San Luis Rey, San Juan Capistrano, Santa Bar- 
bara, La Purissima Concepcion, San Carlos, 
Santa Inez and others. 
Surely these old padres, philosophical and 
reverent men, were anglers. They had prece- 
dent of no mean order in good men of old who 
were brothers of the angle, and is not St. Zeno, 
the patron saint, the protector of the fly-caster, 
the lover of quiet streams where one may re- 
flect and enjoy the best that nature has to give? 
So in some way the missions and their good 
builders are associated in my mind with trout, 
quiet purling streams, riffles, shallows, crystal 
waters over clear clean pebbles, deep shadows, 
rich valleys of live oak and fishing. Possibly 
this is mere sentiment, as I cannot explain it in 
logical fashion, yet perhaps I connect the two 
from the fact that wherever you find a mission 
in California, not far away will be discovered a 
trout stream. It may not be very large, like the 
San Luis near San Luis Rey, the Rio San Juan 
at Capistrano, the San Gabriel and La Honda 
near that mission or the Santa Ynez River hard 
by La Purissima Concepcion, hence what was 
more natural when passing the fine old mission 
Carlos Borromeo, which overlooks 
Monterey on the King’s Highway, for a party 
of anglers to stop and hail a Californian after 
this fashion: 
“Good morning, sefor. Pardon for stopping 
you, but did you ever hear of any trout fishing 
in this vicinity?” 
The gentleman of Spanish lineage took off his 
sombrero galantly to the lady, and replied: 
“Trout, semor? why, the finest stream in the 
world is over there beyond the mission, the Rio 
Carmelo. You can see it through the trees, 
glistening in the sun, and you can trace it up 
the Carmelo valley for ten, yes, twenty miles 
into the Galiban and a thousand pools. Trout? 
why senor, Padre Junipero ate trout from that 
very stream nearly one hundred and fifty years 
Padre Crispi fished in it in 1770. Captain 
Rivera y Moncada, the governor, and Felipe de 
Nerve knew its pools. Trout? the finest in Cali- 
fornia, sefior, at Los Laurelles and beyond,” 
and the Californian took off his sombrero again, 
touched his horse with the big spur and passed 
on, doubtless wondering who the Americans 
could be that did not know that there were 
trout, the best in the world, around the mission 
ago. 
| of San Carlos Borromeo. 
So in California, first in gentle and reverent 
fashion find your mission, and the trout will 
be forthcoming. will not be far away, as the old 
padres had a gift for discovering the most beau- 
tiful places on the coast for their missions, of 
which a trout stream is generally and justly a 
part. 
So it came about that we left the coast line 
at Del Monte, near Monterey, where the sea 
could be heard piling in upon the sand dunes, 
and the stray wind made music in the splendid 
grove of pines and cypress, music of the sea in 
rich gradients of sound rising and falling, swell- 
ing until the air was filled with mystic strains. 
The old ranch of Los Laurelles, up Carmelo 
valley about seventeen miles from Del Monte, 
the most beautiful spot in California, became our 
objective, and we decided to go over the Salinas 
pass, which wound up the Corral de Tierra 
Mountains and fish El Rio Carmelo down to 
San Carlos Borromeo, which stands, a light- 
house to souls, overlooking the not distant sea. 
It is well for anglers not to make trout, of 
all fishes, the prime objective sport, as no more 
uncertain game loves the sunlight. To-day he 
is yours for the very asking; to-morrow the 
most luscious lure will not tempt him. One 
hour he defies you; the next gazes at you from 
some ensconcement of the fishes and knows you 
not, as you pass him, casting by. 
I believe I accumulated some of this angling 
wisdom years ago in a certain trout stream in 
New England, where the streams and pools, 
riffles, cascades, and drooping trees are fair and 
promising to the eye, but it required superhuman 
patience to lure them, and many a day I scored 
a blank, yet these days when lures were un- 
availing, the creel empty save for fern leaves, I 
found were not for naught, and learned that the 
real fishing day was a composite of the weather, 
the wind, even if it was from the east, the 
splendid colors of forest trees, the blue tour- 
maline of the sky that topped your streams am‘d 
the trees, the flecks of cloud mirrored on the 
surface, all a part of the day. The delight of 
anticipation, the casting. the play of the rod, 
the exercise of your skill, the quick turns in the 
stream opening new vistas, the little openings 
in the forest through which you saw distant 
meadows and nodding flowers, all these went to 
make up the real trout fishing, the actual catch 
being but an incident among many delights. 
Just how long one could be content with mere 
scenery in lieu of trout, I am not prepared to 
say. If pushed to the wall, I confess when I 
am fishing I prefer trout to scenic effects. I 
am aware that this method of angling is not in 
vogue with some, and would be deemed fanci- 
ful by many more, yet it is based upon a true 
and homely philosophy not of to-day, the phil- 
osophy of patience and contentment. ‘How 
poor are they that have not patience.” said 
Othello. It is well to be content with things as 
we find them, and it is well to go a-fishing, not 
to catch fish alone, but every good thing the 
day has to give. This should be an easy matter 
for the angler. as Walton tells us that “angling 
is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so.” 
In this satisfactory frame of mind the sorrows 
of an empty creel are discounted at the start. 
We left the splendid pines, cypresses and oaks, 
the vistas of Del Monte, of ocean and moun- 
tains, and drove down into the little valleys over 
the Corral de Tierra Mountains in search of 
Los Laurelles somewhere on the Rio Carmelo 
down in the San Lucia range. For several 
hours we rode on the Salinas grade; now climb- 
ing the sides of picturesque ranges, where 
“the mountains kiss high heaven,” and from the 
summit of some of these peaks on the divide, an 
extended and beautiful view of the San Lucia 
and Galiban ranges was seen. They are less 
rugged than the Sierra Nevada: long sloping 
ranges come rolling down into the valley. 
It would be difficult to find a fairer land than 
this in April, a land running riot with wild 
flowers, stretching away as far as the eye can 
reach, acres, miles of golden poppies merging 
into the tracts of purple, crimson and lemon 
vellow. Along the road were lines of baby 
blue eyes, and among the wild oats whose awns 
jangled in the wind, the yellow violet of Cali- 
fornia, the buttercup and many more. Groves 
of oaks and tree-like brush in vivid greens raced 
up the hillsides. Here madronas and manzanita 
filling little parks and valleys, but the fields of 
flowers constantly caught the eye, they were 
everywhere; now filling some little potrero to 
disappear in the chaparral, coming again over the 
divide where the soft wind ripples over fields 
of grain, where shadows race with cloud flecks 
and all the world runs riot with color, tint and 
shade. Here are valleys of the painter’s brush 
and acres of blue bells and marigolds paint the 
mesas green, gold and white in seeming count- 
less forms. 
In other places the bluish-pink of the alfileria 
like a flame covers the ground from potrero to 
mesa and on to mountain slope, lines and rivers 
of a cream-tinted bell flower poised on jaunty 
stalks. In shaded places the shooting star is 
seen mounted it would seem in banks of clover, 
fairy-like crucifers in white and yellow garbs, 
blending into fields of violets that reach away 
and are lost in this carpet of nature. Where the 
road climbs to the divide, delicate ferns, big 
brakes appear in shaded nooks, the scarlet 
tints of painted cup, massed with the glowing 
color of the cardinal flower, and could we tarry 
for days or weeks we should see a procession 
of flowers moving on and on in seemingly endless 
variety, beginning with the low creeping alfileria, 
including a marvelous host, bell flowers, iris, 
wild morning glory, honeysuckle and many 
more. Directly below us, half a mile perhaps, 
we could see two or three other mountain 
roads winding by little ranch houses here and 
there, environed by great ranges beyond Mt. 
Fremont in the Galiban, rounded peaks, 
crimpled mountains forming other and countless 
valleys far away to the south where the Big 
and Little San Felice came piling down through 
rocky gorges to the sea. 
The valley of Carmelo was always over the 
next range, just beyond, but after a while we 
reached the real divide and looked down int 
the Rio Carmelo and its fair valley surrounded 
on all sides by the spurs of the Santa Lucia 
range, garbed in oak and chaparral, with groves 
of huge live oaks in the valley, and the river 
marked by long sinuous lines of vivid green 
willows, laurels, cottonwoods and alders, with 
here and there a scintillating gleam, the little 
stream itself as it flowed on and on down to 
the old mission of San Carlos Borromeo and 
the sea. 
Down the Jong trail we rode, 
meeting a rancher. coming nearer the live oaks, 
passing between low forests of manzanita, the 
green of hills and mountains becoming more 
vivid, and the masses of flowers that covered 
the land, forming a literal field of the cloth of 
gold; then we came to the lower reaches of 
the trail and a strong pungent incense filled the 


occasionally 
air as the coach brushed the trees, the laurels, 
here protesting loudly in sweet odors, great 
bays, suggesting that Los Laurelles must be 
near, and suddenly we bowled out into the road 
in the valley of El Carmelo, a perfect environ- 
ment for the little river winding along the 
mountains to the south. 
Up a long country road we went; now in the 
open, again shut in with groves of live oak on 
every hand, listening to the music of the meadow 
larks, the notes of the plumed quail “K-wook- 
k-wook-k-wook-k-wook,” borne on the. wind, 
and suddenly reached Los Laurelles, seventeen 
miles up the cafion from the sea, directly on the 
highway and fronting the river that here flows 
along the base of high mountains. The ranch 
house is a long rambling building surrounded 
by palms, the front yard glowing with roses. 
At the north end stands a splendid live oak 
which covers two hundred or more square feet 
and could protect a thousand men. Here we 
found that rare thing, immaculate neatness with 
good cheer; then there was real cream, fruit 

