Armen did more searching through the library, and found a few references to an old trail that crossed golden trout country. The trail followed all the principal streams of the golden trout as if that were what the trail was intended for, but that was coincidental. The Hockett Trail had been blazed during the Civil War to facilitate the movement of Union troops, miners, and supplies across the Range. Conceived by Visalia merchant John B. Hockett, it was given a distinct name for each of its dual purposes. It was named the Hockett Trail as a commercial trail, and named the Trail to Fort Independence as a military trail. Armen thought of it as the Golden Trout Trail.
Hockett’s trail was also used by explorers in its early years. It provided access to the highest point in the United States, called Fisherman’s Peak by locals, but officially named by a federal agency in honor of a myopic, desk-bound bureaucrat, Josiah Whitney. Clarence King, a charming pretender with a gift for exaggeration, a nose for personal financial gain, an inclination to shirk responsibility, and a knack for getting lost, had named the mountain after Whitney, his boss at the time. King had twice failed to reach even the foot of the mountain, yet a few Lone Pine fishermen had gained the summit on a leisurely side-trip. They, like King, had entered the Range by way of Hockett’s Trail.
Livestock gate in the Big Ditch
The first “white man” thought to have seen the alpine valley of Mineral King accessed that valley by way of the Hockett Trail. The same trail was used as a livestock trail as early as 1863.
The utility of the Hockett Trail waned in 1865 with the end of the Owens Valley Indian War and further in 1868 with the first silver shipments from Owens Valley to Los Angeles, but the Hockett Trail continued to be a major recreational trail well into the Twentieth Century, traveled by fishermen and mountaineers alike.
The old trail led almost directly east from Visalia, the principal town of the Sink at the time, and then ascended eastward along the South Fork Kaweah River to its headwaters at the Kern-Kaweah Divide. It then cut around the southern end of the Great Western Divide, following the Little Kern River and then the Big Kern. Once it got to Golden Trout Creek, it forded the Kern at a broad, shallow point and ascended the creek until it reached the South Fork of the Kern, which it then followed nearly to the fork’s headwaters, and turned eastward toward the crest of the Range. One could hardly conceive of a better point-to-point fishing tour of golden trout country.
The streams of the golden trout flow off of three divides. First, the principle divide of the Range, the Great Wall; second, the Great Western Divide; and finally, the less commonly known Western Divide which defines the western edge of the Kern River watershed from Mineral King’s Farewell Gap south to Bakersfield.
These three divides extend southward toward the sun, virtually parallel to each other. The southernmost ten-thousand-foot peaks of all three of these divides occur at the same latitude, flanking one another like the three prongs of a fisherman’s trident. The Hockett Trail can be found weaving between these peaks, skirting around the middle divide, and following each great trout stream in the process.
The trail follows and outlines the local anatomy of the Range, taking advantage of ridges, plateaus, passes, seismic faults, saddles, canyon bottoms, and fords in ways that almost appear preconceived by the Range itself. It was initially a primitive trail. Neither explosives nor bridges were involved in its construction. This is a rather remarkable characteristic for any pack trail that crosses such a massive, rugged mountain range.