Little Colorado River

The upper Little Colorado is about as far from the muddy desert river most people picture as a trout stream gets. It starts as snowmelt and springs off Mount Baldy — Arizona's second-highest peak at over 11,400 feet — and runs cold and clear through the meadows of Greer at more than 8,000 feet before the plateau flattens and warms it toward Springerville. This is small water: the USGS gauge at Greer typically reads in the low single digits to teens of CFS in summer, so plan on wading a creek, not floating a river. What sets it apart is that it's one of the few places you can cast to a wild, native Apache trout — Arizona's state fish and a federally managed recovery species — in its own historic water, alongside stocked and holdover rainbows and wild browns.

It fishes like the pocket-water meadow stream it is. You wade it and fish it small and stealthy: the water through Greer is open and often clear enough that fish see you coming, so an upstream presentation, light tippet, and low profile matter more than fly selection. A dry-dropper is the workhorse — a Purple Haze, Elk Hair Caddis, or Chubby up top with a Pheasant Tail or Hare's Ear below — worked into the deeper pockets, undercut banks, and riffle seams. Terrestrials earn their keep along the meadow banks from midsummer on. Arizona Game & Fish stocks catchable rainbows and Apache trout through the Greer mainstem and at the West Fork's Sheep Crossing from roughly May through September, so summer is the busy, family-friendly season; the water gets low and warm by late August. The Oct 1–Apr 30 catch-and-release window (artificial fly and lure only on the mainstem) is the quieter, more technical time to fish it.

Access is the honest limiter. The mainstem runs right through the village of Greer with easy public entry via the Greer Village Walkway, and the West Fork opens up on Forest Service land above town, but the best meandering meadow water — especially on the South Fork — is locked behind private ranches like the X Diamond and The Ranch at Southfork, where you fish as a paying guest. Two fork reaches (a segment of the West Fork above the fish barriers near FR 116 and the lower South Fork below the Phone Line Road crossing) are closed to all fishing year-round to protect Apache trout recovery, so know where the lines are before you wet a line up high. Just north of town the three Greer lakes — River, Bunch, and Tunnel reservoirs — hold stocked rainbows (River also carries browns and largemouth bass) for anglers who'd rather work stillwater; a float tube outfishes the bank. At 8,000-plus feet this is a summer refuge from the desert and it snows in through winter, so the season runs roughly May through October.