Androscoggin River

The upper Androscoggin drains the entire Rangeley Lakes chain — Mooselookmeguntic, Richardson, and Umbagog stacked up behind it — and runs out of Errol Dam in New Hampshire as a genuine tailwater before turning east into Maine at Gilead and rolling down past Bethel. That lake-fed pedigree is the whole story: the fertile flowages upstream pump out oversized bug hatches and grow fast fish, and landlocked salmon spill down out of the lakes and stack up below the dams. You get four gamefish in one river here — wild and holdover brook, brown, and rainbow trout plus landlocked salmon — which is unusual for the Northeast.

A border note that shapes how you read this page: the marquee fly-fishing-only water and the controlling flow gauge both sit on the New Hampshire side, directly below Errol Dam, while the trout reach Troutline weights here runs downstream across the state line into Maine at Gilead and Bethel. New Hampshire isn't a Troutline state yet, so this page is built around the Maine (Bethel) water — but the gauge you watch (USGS at Errol) and the best wading water are in NH.

It fishes as two different rivers depending on where you stand. The fly-only reach below Errol Dam down to Bragg Bay is the best wading and the most reliable salmon and trout water on the system — Route 16 shadows it the whole way with pull-offs, bridges, and Mollidgewock State Park camping. Below that the river slides through Pontook Reservoir, picks up a second dam, and the Maine reach from Gilead through Bethel is a mix of long riffles, pocket water, and slow flats you can wade at low flow or float in a drift boat. The catch is the water management: this is a working hydro river run by Brookfield, and flow swings hard. Pontook runs roughly 500 CFS on weekdays and jumps to about 2,200 CFS on weekends from Memorial Day through September for whitewater boating — so the river you waded Thursday can be blown out for fishing Saturday. Check the Errol gauge before you commit.

Below Bethel the trout fishery dissipates as the water warms and the river turns to smallmouth bass and northern pike toward Rumford and Jay. The trout are concentrated up top — the border down to Bethel — and the cool tributaries (the Wild River at Gilead, the Bear River) hold brook trout and pull the temperature down where they enter. One honest limitation for this page: none of the mainstem gauges report water temperature, so there's no live water-temp read here — the river warms below Bethel in midsummer and the trout push up toward Gilead and the tributary mouths, so fish early and late and target the upper water in a heat wave.