Mokelumne River

The Mokelumne is really two trout rivers wearing one name, split by a pair of East Bay MUD reservoirs in the Mother Lode gold country an hour-plus east of Sacramento. Upstream, the Electra reach below the Electra Powerhouse is a foothill freestone canyon — pocket water and boulder gardens between Highway 49 and the head of Pardee Reservoir. It holds wild rainbows and browns (plus the odd kokanee that drops down out of Pardee), gets almost no hatchery stocking, and in 2018 the 37 miles from Salt Springs Dam to Pardee earned California Wild & Scenic status. It's a wade-and-scramble summer game: small dries and nymphs worked on foot off Electra Road, best from June once flows settle.

Downstream of the second dam, the Lower Mokelumne below Camanche is a cold tailwater a few miles east of Lodi that CDFW has managed as a steelhead fishery since the 1998 Central Valley steelhead ESA listing. It still kicks out plenty of resident rainbows in the 12–16" class, plus a genuine winter/spring run of steelhead and a fall Chinook push out of the Mokelumne River Fish Hatchery. Much of the eight-mile run below Camanche Dam threads private land, so a drift boat out of the Mokelumne River Day Use Area — at the base of the dam, by the hatchery — is the standard approach; wade access exists near the hatchery boat launch but it's tight. The lower river fishes well for trout in a roughly 250–600 CFS window and switches to a swung-fly and egg program from about 700–1,200 CFS in winter.

A note on flow: this page does not yet carry a live flow reading. The trout water has no adapter-ready stream gauge — the old USGS stations below Camanche and in the Electra canyon are discontinued (metadata only), and the nearest live gauge sits 30-plus miles downstream in the Delta, which isn't the fishery. Flow below Camanche tracks EBMUD's scheduled reservoir releases entirely — guides literally tell you to check the district's release page rather than a gauge. Until we wire the Camanche outflow signal, check EBMUD's Mokelumne release info or CDEC's Camanche reservoir data directly before you go.