Smith River

The Smith is the trip you plan a year ahead of and might never draw. It's a 59-mile limestone-canyon float between one put-in — Camp Baker — and one take-out — Eden Bridge, with no road access and no bailout in between, which is exactly why anglers fixate on it. Montana FWP rations the whole thing through a February lottery: for the 2024 season roughly 12,400 applications competed for about 868 resident and 111 nonresident private permits, and only nine launches leave Camp Baker per day. Nonresidents are capped at 10% of permits and there's a separate Super Permit lottery that lets one winner launch any date they choose. Win a permit and you're floating four days through 400-foot cliff walls for wild rainbows and browns; don't win, and the realistic option is booking one of the handful of licensed outfitters who hold commercial launches.

It fishes like a big freestone that's really a tailwater-of-nothing — flows ride the snowmelt curve and the irrigation calendar, not a dam. The float window is essentially mid-April through mid-July, and water is the whole game: drift boats get sketchy below about 350 cfs, rafts below 250, canoes below 150, so late July and August usually go too skinny to float and too warm to fish hard. The fishing is classic Montana searching — big attractor dries and hopper-droppers pounded against the banks and structure, with genuine hatch windows layered on top: Blue-Winged Olives in the shoulders, a salmonfly and golden-stone stretch from roughly mid-May into early July if your dates line up, then PMDs and caddis. It's rarely technical; the challenge is timing your one launch to catch decent flow, cool water, and a hatch at the same time.

This is a wilderness-logistics fishery, not a pull-over-and-wade one. There is functionally no public bank access between Camp Baker and Eden — the upper river above Camp Baker (White Sulphur Springs down through the meadows) runs almost entirely through private ranchland and doesn't fish as a public option. Bring a groover: FWP pulled the pit toilets along the river in spring 2024, though there's now a SCAT machine at the Eden Bridge take-out. Nearest services are White Sulphur Springs on the put-in side and Great Falls on the take-out side; most anglers stage out of Great Falls, Helena, or White Sulphur Springs.