There is no better time to fish the trout streams of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park than fall. With shorter days and cooler nights, water temperatures begin to fall and stream levels begin to rise with welcomed rains.
Trout are rejuvenated after the long summer. Whether they are rainbows, browns or the native southern Appalachian strain of brook trout the park has worked so hard to successfully stabilize in its streams, all of them will be feeding up prior to winter.
The browns will be making their annual upstream runs to spawn, which can be a great time to encounter some of the larger fish that are notoriously difficult to catch at other times of year. The little brookies, known locally as “specks,” will also be engaged in spawning behaviors and decked out in all the oranges, purples and deep greens that make them some of the most beautiful creatures on the planet. The rainbows won’t be spawning, but they will be feeding on a smorgasbord that is the insect life of the Smokies.
For the fly fishers and bug nerds out there, October brings on hatches of brightly colored and sometimes large insects that are a very welcome sight to dry fly anglers. These are not the massive hatches of the West, with clouds of bugs over the water inciting a topwater feeding orgy. In the park, things are more subtle. In October, one might see a few bright yellow sulphur mayflies flitting around above the stream, a caddis or two, or gatherings of midges or blue winged olives to clue them in on what the trout are looking for. And then there’s the October caddis, known elsewhere as the great autumn brown sedge. These big caddis hatch mostly at night, but when they’re around the trout know it and they will be keyed in on a big orange bug.
Dry fly fishermen can try to match the naturals or go with an attractor pattern that mimics the colors and look of multiple bugs. Yellow is a perennial favorite in the park, and it’s tough to go wrong with an orange Stimulator.
Of course there’s also the sub-surface option. A vast majority of feeding occurs underwater when it comes to trout streams, and fishing a nymph or a nymph dropped on tippet a couple feet beneath a big bushy dry fly will undoubtedly improve success rates when the fish are not actively feeding on the surface. Going for a big fish? Once trout reach a certain size, their diet swings toward heavier protein packages than a bug can provide. Streamers that imitate small fish or crayfish will often produce the larger fish from any stream.
There are 29,000 miles of streams within the more than 520,000 acres of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee. About 20 percent of them hold trout. That’s a little less than 6,000 miles of trout water waiting to be explored over hundreds of miles of trails. Some streams have roadside access, where one could hop out of the truck and start fishing. Others require hikes of up to several miles to reach. An easy afternoon on the water is possible, and so is a pack-in backcountry trip to waters that seldom see another angler.
Pretty much all of these streams are small mountain flows with wild trout. Even the larger ones, like the aptly named Big Creek and Deep Creek, are small in comparison to rivers elsewhere. This is high-elevation small-stream fishing at its finest.
Although some large brown trout come from the streams of the Smokies every year, it is not the place to go if you are looking for trophy trout. High in the mountains, these fisheries are infertile, and the trout do not grow very large. What they lack in size, they make up for in looks and a willingness to play. The infertile conditions mean there’s not much to eat naturally, which makes fish opportunistic. That’s not to say they’re easy to catch. They can be frustratingly difficult at times.
For most of the streams on the park, a 3- or 4-weight rod with floating line will suffice, and for some of the smaller brook-trout streams a short 6-footer is the tool to creatively serve up flies in pools beneath dense vegetation. A 5-weight might be useful on some of the park’s larger streams. But gear any heavier than that would be overkill.
Abrams Creek, Little River, Raven Fork, Oconoluftee… even the names sound like an adventure waiting to happen. It might not be swinging streamers for giant rainbow trout in Alaska or drifting huge nymphs for enormous brown trout in New Zealand, but exploring around each bend of a small flow high into the mountains has its own appeal. The fish might not be big, but they are there. And as far as places go, there aren’t many better than off the beaten path in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.