Oak Creek

Oak Creek runs down the Mogollon Rim from the head of Oak Creek Canyon to Sedona and on toward the Verde River, and it's really two fisheries wearing one name. Up top — from the Highway 89A bridge at Slide Rock State Park upstream to the Sterling Springs Hatchery boundary, and including the West Fork — it's catch-and-release, single-barbless, artificial-only water holding wild brown trout, a few of them genuinely large. Fourteen to eighteen inches is common and fish over 20 inches turn up in a creek you can step across. Below Slide Rock, through the swimming holes and roadside pull-outs along 89A, it's a stocked, tourist-thick put-and-take stream that Arizona Game & Fish plants with catchable rainbows through the warm months. Knowing which reach you're standing in is the whole game here.

Practically, this is small, technical, wade-in creek fishing — pocket water and runs connecting a chain of pools, cut into a slot canyon so narrow the walls do half your hiding for you. You're mostly casting upstream and short, keeping line off the water, drifting drag-free to fish that see a lot of people. A 9-foot 4- or 5-weight, a leader to 5X or 6X for dries (drop to 3-4X for nymphing the deeper pockets), and a stealthy, low-and-slow approach do the work. Nymphing carries most days; when Baetis come off in spring or Tricos come off on July-through-September mornings, the dry fishing turns on. The upper reaches and the spring-fed West Fork run cold enough to fish year-round; the lower canyon warms hard by midsummer and fishes best spring and fall.

The trade-off is people. The lower canyon along 89A is one of the busiest recreation corridors in Arizona — Slide Rock, the swimming holes, the leaf-peeper traffic in October — and the stocked pools get pounded. The fishing that rewards the drive is the walk-in: the West Fork above Call of the Canyon, several miles of wild-brown pocket water where the crowds thin out fast once you're past the first mile of maintained trail. There are no fly shops in Sedona itself; plan on sourcing flies from Flagstaff or online, and check the special-regulation boundaries before you fish, because this is one of the most tightly regulated trout streams in the state.