Housatonic River

The Housatonic through Connecticut's northwest hills is the closest thing New England has to a Western trout river. Below the Falls Village powerhouse it spreads out wide and runs over ledges and car-sized boulders through Cornwall and Housatonic Meadows — big enough to float a drift boat, which almost no other Connecticut trout water is. The heart of it is the upper Trout Management Area: 10-plus catch-and-release miles from the Route 7/112 bridge below Falls Village down to the Route 4 bridge at Cornwall Bridge, with the bottom three miles from the Dun Rollin Pool down restricted to fly-fishing only. Wild and holdover brown trout and rainbow trout hold in the pocket water and long runs, and the hatches are genuinely diverse — Hendricksons and grannoms to start, then March Browns, Sulphurs, Cahills, and a caddis calendar that runs from Little Black Caddis in April straight through the cinnamon and tan sedges of summer, plus a couple of oddballs (the Alder Fly and the Housatonic Quill / White Fly) you won't see on many other rivers.

Here's the honest catch, and it's the whole story on this river: temperature. The Housy is a freestone, not a bottom-release tailwater, and by midsummer it warms into the low-to-mid 70s — lethal-stress water for trout. So this is a spring-and-fall trout game. May through mid-June is prime, when the hatches peak and the water is still cold; the fishing comes back in September and holds into November. Through the July and August heat the trout fishing shuts down and smallmouth bass take over — and the bass fishing here is excellent, from the Massachusetts line all the way down past Gaylordsville to New Milford, where the river runs on as a warmwater smallmouth and northern pike fishery. Connecticut DEEP takes the thermal problem seriously enough to close the cold-water refuges: from June 15 to September 15 all fishing is prohibited within 100 feet of posted signs at the mouths of cold tributaries like Kent Falls Brook and Macedonia Brook, where heat-stressed trout stack up. Those closures are the real deal, not a formality — fishing a refuge when the river is warm kills the fish you're targeting.

Access is easy and the setting is as much of the draw as the fishing. Route 7 shadows the river the whole way, Housatonic Meadows State Park has streamside campsites and the West Cornwall covered bridge sits just upstream, and the towns — Cornwall, West Cornwall, Kent, Sharon — are postcard New England. FirstLight Power runs the upstream flow: the Falls Village station (run-of-river since a 2010 conversion) and, farther down, the Bulls Bridge plant, which diverts water into a 2.5-mile power canal above Gaylordsville. Neither is a flood-control or storage dam, so the river bounces on rain rather than on scheduled releases — the gauge tells you as much as the forecast, and FirstLight posts flood notifications on big water. A second, shorter catch-and-release TMA runs the three miles from Bulls Bridge down to the Route 7 bridge at Gaylordsville — the Bulls Bridge Trout and Bass Management Area, catch-and-release year-round for both trout and smallmouth.