Tourists were drawn to Big Trees Grove for more than just the trees. The San Lorenzo River was once one of the best coho salmon and steelhead trout streams in Central California.
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| Illustration from the San Francisco Call, September 22, 1907 |
An article in the March 11, 1894 Richmond Dispatch described a lady fisherman of Santa Cruz, Mrs. Kate Blakeley as
“... a fair type of the woman experts with rod
and line. She has started off at 4 in the morning, season after season, tramped
miles in through underbrush up the “Big
Tree” Canyon, scrambled over boulders,
and sat astride giant logs to catch the spotted beauties in [d]eep pools, returning
for a 9 o’clock breakfast with between one and
two hundred trout.”
“She
has guided many a tourist to the best brooks and streams, and had
many a laugh incidentally at the preposterous sinkers some of them bring with
their fashionable paraphernalia. She fishes with a supple branch of a tree for
a pole, the finest of lines, and worms three or four inches long for bait,
which she digs herself, and handles without
tremor.”
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