Sandy River

The Sandy is Portland's home steelhead river, and the emphasis is on steelhead, not trout. It starts on Reid Glacier high on Mt Hood's southwest flank and runs about 56 miles to the Columbia at Troutdale, and you can be standing in it 40 minutes after leaving downtown. It's an anadromous fishery first and a trout stream a distant second: wild winter steelhead, hatchery summer and winter fish out of Cedar Creek, spring Chinook in June, and a genuinely strong fall coho run. The defining event of the modern river was the 2007 removal of Marmot Dam, which turned it back into a free-flowing river for the first time since 1912 — anglers who've fished it a while will tell you it now blows out less and recovers faster, and the wild steelhead run is often cited as a Northwest recovery success story.

The word that does the most work here is glacial. From roughly late spring through fall the mainstem carries Mt Hood's glacial flour and runs milky — visibility drops and dry-fly trout fishing basically isn't a thing on the main channel in warm months. That's why the river fishes best for fly anglers in the cold season, when the glacier isn't melting and the water clears: winter steelhead January through March, when a two-hander and a swung fly (or the far more common bobber-and-jig gear rigs) come into their own. Most of the productive water is floated — Dodge Park to Oxbow to Dabney and Lewis & Clark — in drift boats and rafts, though there's good bank access at the parks. The lower river is swift Class I–II; the Dodge-to-Oxbow reach has a boulder-choked rapid just below the put-in that has hurt careless boaters, so it isn't a beginner float.

The single most important thing to understand before planning a trip is the regulatory line at the Salmon River confluence. ODFW closes the entire upper basin — the mainstem above the Salmon River mouth plus all the tributaries up there — to salmon and steelhead fishing to protect wild spawners. Everything you read about steelhead on the Sandy means the lower half of the basin, from the Salmon River down. Above that line you're looking at resident redband and cutthroat and whitefish in the mainstem, and the clearer tributaries — the Salmon and Zigzag — give up better trout water than the silty main channel. It's an urban river that manages to feel wild in the Oxbow old-growth, and it takes real pressure on winter weekends, so go midweek if you can.