Arizona

Arizona is a desert state with a handful of genuinely cold, genuinely good trout water, and the trick is knowing that elevation runs the whole show. The marquee fishery is Lees Ferry — fifteen miles of the Colorado River below Glen Canyon Dam, a tailwater so cold and clear it fishes like a spring creek scaled up to a big river, with wild rainbows keyed on midges and scuds and sight-fished off the gravel bars at low water. Because Glen Canyon is a peaking hydropower dam, the flow breathes on a daily cycle — often 7,500 CFS overnight climbing past 11,000 in the afternoon — so the fishing clock is set by the power grid, not the weather, and the reservoir tile above matters as much as the hydrograph. Everything else worth fishing sits up in the mountains: the White Mountains in the east hold the state's freestone trout, small high-country streams like the Black River and the upper Little Colorado around Greer that carry native Apache trout — one of only two trout native to Arizona and a real conservation-recovery story — alongside wild browns and stocked rainbows. Oak Creek threads the red-rock canyon below Sedona, technical wild browns in the West Fork above and stocked, tourist-busy pools in the lower canyon.

The seasonal arc is about running from the heat. The low desert is simply too warm to hold trout for most of the year, so the calendar pushes anglers up: the high country fishes spring through fall and freezes off in winter, while the tailwater at Lees Ferry stays cold and fishable every month. The summer monsoon — reliable afternoon thunderstorms from July into September — is the freestone spoiler, blowing the Black River and the Salt to mud in an hour, so mountain-stream trips get planned around morning windows and storm cells. Much of the best water carries an access wrinkle worth knowing before you drive: the lower Black River and large stretches of the eastern streams run through the White Mountain Apache and San Carlos Apache reservations, where you need a tribal permit rather than (or in addition to) an Arizona Game & Fish license. The Salt River below the White/Black confluence is the honest edge case — a wild, remote canyon that fishes for trout through the cold months and turns warmwater by summer. Arizona Game & Fish sets the statewide trout regulations and special-water rules; the tribal fisheries set their own.