LANE COUNTY, Ore. — About an hour and a half east of Eugene and high in the hills, Boo Boo Lake is a small lake filled with trout that aren't hard to catch. In order to get to Boo Boo Lake, it first takes a hike.
"OK, we're off," said Jeff Ziller, district fish biologist for the Upper Willamette District for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW).
The hike starts out steep, but eventually levels out. It took us about an hour to get up, with a stop or two along the way, and about 45 minutes to hike back down.
The unmaintained trail can at times be a little hard to follow, but it's something Ziller has done before. When asked how often he makes it to Boo Boo Lake, he said about every two years.
"When we bring fish in by helicopter, I actually get to visit this place about every other year — from the air," he said.
From the ground, it was a different number.
"Once," Ziller said. "Now it's going to be twice if we make it to the top."
Though the steep hike eventually levels out, hikers should be prepared for an elevation gain of about 1,000 feet on the way up.
"Almost there. All we have to do is hike right up over this ridge here and we'll be there," Ziller said before we came into view of the small body of water. "Well, there is some green water and this is always the joy of getting up here and finding a wet spot in the middle of a dry forest."
For this hike it wasn't about the journey, it was about the destination.
"This is Boo Boo Lake," he said.
High above Highway 58 and away from all the noise sits the small two-acre lake. At its deepest point, it's about 18 feet. And it's full of trout.
"One thing to take note of out here, is you're going to start seeing fish rising," Ziller said.
Before long, fish were seen coming to the surface and making a splash before disappearing back into the blue-green water.
Ziller brought along his fly rod and within minutes of casting his lure he had a bite. "This is the last of the Hackelman cutthroat we have. They're just gorgeous fish," he said.
Boo Boo Lake is what Ziller calls a very productive lake, but it wasn't always full of trout. In fact, the reason it still has trout is because of an ODFW trout stocking program.
"On the odd years, we stock somewhere in the neighborhood of 300-400 lakes in the cascades with a helicopter. That's the whole cascade range," he said.
For more than a century, ODFW has been stocking High Cascade lakes with trout, a tradition that started as a way to provide additional fishing opportunities for those that hiked up the mountain.
In 1963, before it was named Boo Boo Lake, the unnamed body of water was seen in aerial photographs, but wasn't on the list to be stocked by a pilot that year. Fish biologists had planned to have a pilot stock another lake just north of Boo Boo Lake with trout. They thought they had the right one in their sights when they let the fish fly.
"From the air, a lot of these lakes look alike," Ziller said. "The only directions they had were a map and probably an aerial photograph so they could take a look and say 'well, that must be it.'"
There was little room for error as the planes or helicopters zipped by. Errors did happen, though.
"It's probably somewhat legendary that they rained a lot of fingerling trout into the forest, but they did hit water quite often," Ziller joked.
In 1964, ODFW fish biologists came up to the lake to see if it would be a good option to stock with fish, but they noticed fish were already jumping. This struck them as odd because lakes in the High Cascades weren't all full of trout; in fact, about 20-30 lakes actually had fish in them before ODFW's program began stocking hundreds with trout.
"And they're going, 'wait a second, this has not been stocked,' and yet, when they went out and sampled it, they found fish that were not native to Oregon in the lake," Ziller said. "So they said, 'oops, somebody made a boo boo here and stocked the wrong lake.'"
The name stuck and Boo Boo Lake became the official name of the once-unnamed lake.
Ziller said Boo Boo Lake is home to three kinds of trout. "At the moment we still have the hackleman cutthroat, we have rainbow trout and we have brook trout in here," he said.
In the hour we were there, Ziller felt multiple bites.
"Very good fishing, I think would be the first thing that they would say," he said. "It is a fairly shallow lake that is very small actually for the number of fish that it actually holds and, oh that's a brook trout!"
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