Chattooga River

The Chattooga is a free-flowing, federally protected freestone that drops out of the southern Blue Ridge and runs the Georgia/South Carolina line through some of the wildest country left in the Southeast. It was one of the original eight rivers named to the National Wild & Scenic system in 1974, and the protection shows: no dams, no development inside a quarter-mile corridor, and long reaches you can only reach on foot. Most people know it as the whitewater river from Deliverance, but the upper third — from Ellicott Rock down through Burrells Ford to the Highway 28 bridge — is a genuine three-trout fishery holding wild and stocked rainbows, browns, and native brook trout in tight pocket water and long, clear pools.

It fishes like a classic Appalachian freestone: small-to-medium water, wade-only, technical in the flats and forgiving in the pockets. Above the Burrells Ford bridge nothing is stocked — it's managed as wild-trout water, and the browns there get selective and spooky in low, clear summer flows (a 9-foot 5-weight, 9-foot leaders, and 5X-6X is the standard rig). Below Burrells Ford the state trucks and even helicopter-stocks fish, and the 2.2-mile delayed-harvest reach above the Highway 28 bridge is the most accessible, most productive stretch from November through mid-May, when it's catch-and-release and loaded. This is nymph water for most of the year — Pheasant Tails, Hare's Ears, small stones, egg and worm patterns under an indicator — with real dry-fly windows on the spring hatches and fall BWOs.

Summer is the honest weak spot: the lower reaches warm into the 70s, the river fills with paddlers and swimmers, and trout fishing on the mainstem falls off; that's when you hike into the shaded upper wild water, fish terrestrials at dawn, or switch to warmwater bass and redbreast sunfish down in the big whitewater below Highway 28 (Sections III-IV, the Deliverance water). Getting there is half the character — access is a string of Forest Service roads and trailheads (Burrells Ford, the Highway 28/Russell Bridge, Sandy Ford), and from most of them you walk. There's real solitude here for a river this well known, precisely because the whitewater crowds are downstream and the trout water asks for boots. Note the near-Clayton USGS gauge sits well below the trout reaches, near Earls Ford — it's the standard whole-river flow reference anglers use, not a reading of the water right at Burrells Ford. This is a boundary water: a fishing license from either Georgia or South Carolina is valid on the shared reach.