As wildfires burned in San Diego County nearly a month ago, Willard Lepley broke away from preparing for the worst by reflecting back to the last blaze that touched Lake Cuyamaca.
That was the devastating Cedar fire of 2003, which cremated neighboring Rancho Cuyamaca State Park and burned around the edges of Lake Cuyamaca, where Lepley is supervising ranger.
Like many in the tiny town of Cuyamaca, Lepley lost his home in the Cedar fire. This time, his home only suffered wind damage when a limb from a big oak slammed into the living room.
Union-Tribune photo
Lake Cuyamaca has a variety of fish for anglers.
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“It didn't take long for the lake or the community to recover from the Cedar fire, but in terms of the way people think of us, I'm not sure we're over it to this day,” Lepley said. “People still come up and are amazed we didn't burn, and the Cedar fire was four years ago. That's the tough part. It's not so much us recovering and the habitat recovering, it's getting past the public's perception that you burned up in the fire.”
Lepley has done his best to spread the word that Lake Cuyamaca, a Sierra-like 110-acre lake set at 4,600 feet in what's left of Cuyamaca's oak and pine forest, is open and loaded with fish.
Each year Lepley, as his predecessor Hugh Marx did before him, stocks the lake heavily with trout, more than 44,000 pounds of rainbows this year. It's the only lake in San Diego County that gets trout all year. And last year it became the first and still the only public county lake to get rainbow trout from Tim Alpers, the famed Owens River rancher and trout farmer.
Alpers' rainbows in Cuyamaca were an instant hit, a natural fit for California's most acrobatic aquatic performers. Lepley has another stocking of Alpers fish due next week so folks can celebrate Thanksgiving and catch an Alpers or two to go with their turkey.
“Tim Alpers will be here the week of Thanksgiving with 2,000 pounds of trout, 500 pounds of which will be German browns, along with some trophy trout,” Lepley said. “We'll tag five of them for fun and prizes.”
What separates Cuyamaca from the rest of the lakes in the county is the diverse fishery it offers. In addition to the standard Mount Lassen rainbows and DFG rainbows from Mojave Hatchery, Cuyamaca has a healthy population of Florida-strain largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, channel catfish, crappie, bluegill and even sturgeon. The lake record for sturgeon is 42 pounds, 8 ounces, caught June 24, 2007, by David Howard of El Cajon.
Cuyamaca has turned out a 14-1 trout, a 14-3 bass (although many think larger ones have been caught and released secretly), catfish to 28-5, crappie to 2-8 and bluegill to 1-6.
There's no reason to leave once you arrive, not with 40 RV sites and 14 tent sites next to the lake, not with two large cabins and three smaller sleeper cabins right at the lake, and not with Franz Dorninger's Austrian-themed Cuyamaca Restaurant overlooking it.
If you should get the itch to take a break from all the nature, the historic mining town of Julian is just a nine-mile drive to the north.
Ed Zieralski: (619) 293-1225; ed.zieralski@uniontrib.com
This is the 18th in a Saturday series on San Diego County's lakes. To see previous stories and a map of area lakes, go to uniontrib.com/sports/outdoors
