Chattahoochee River

The Chattahoochee below Buford Dam is the improbable thing: a genuine coldwater trout river running through the northern suburbs of a metro area of six million people. Buford Dam holds back Lake Sidney Lanier and pulls its releases off the bottom of the reservoir, so the water that comes out the other side stays in the 50s year-round even in an Atlanta July, when the air is 95 and the parking lots are melting. That cold ribbon carries stocked and holdover rainbows and a naturally reproducing population of brown trout — including the fish that produced Georgia's state-record brown, better than 20 pounds — for roughly 40-plus miles down through Gwinnett, Fulton, and Cobb counties before the coldwater gives out below Atlanta. It's the marquee urban tailwater of the Southeast, and Georgia's Wildlife Resources Division stocks it hard.

The catch, as with every tailwater, is the dam. Releases at Buford are on no fixed schedule — the Corps generates for power and downstream demand, and when the turbines spin up the river can come up several feet in minutes. You fish this river on the release, not the hatch: the wading windows open at low, stable flow and slam shut when generation starts. Call the Corps hotline (770-945-1466) or watch the Buford Dam and Norcross gauges before you wade the shoals, because people drown here. Between pulses the upper reaches wade well over gravel, granite, and shoal shelves; farther down (below Abbotts Bridge, and again in the McGinnis-to-Jones flats) it widens, slows, and turns into better float-boat water. Midges dominate the bug life — this is a fish-a-#20-zebra-midge-year-round tailwater — with sulphurs, BWOs, and caddis layered on top in spring.

Access is unusually good for a river this close to a city because most of the corridor is federal: the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area (CRNRA, a National Park Service unit) strings a chain of parks down the river — Bowman's Island, Settles Bridge, Abbotts Bridge, Medlock Bridge, Jones Bridge, Sope Creek — each with parking and river access. The trade-off is pressure: this is the most-fished trout water in Georgia, tubers and paddlers share the summer river, and the popular shoals see a lot of boots. But the regulations do real work here — a long artificial-only reach up top and a winter Delayed Harvest section down low — and if you time the release and walk away from the put-ins, the metro Hooch fishes far better than a river inside I-285 has any right to.