Vermont

Vermont's trout fishing is a freestone story — cold, rain-and-snowmelt rivers that run big and off-color in the spring, drop into shape by June, and warm through the summer, so the honest season is spring and fall with early mornings in the heat. The signature water is the Battenkill in the southwest, the river Orvis was built on. It's a low-fertility, gin-clear freestone through Manchester and Arlington full of wild browns and native brook trout that have humbled generations of good anglers — famously technical, sparse hatches, and a river where a careful drift matters more than fly choice. Its own Arlington gauge went dark years ago, so anglers read flows off the downstream Battenville station across the New York line.

Central and northern Vermont hold the state's bigger rivers. The White River is the longest free-flowing river in Vermont — no dams from the Green Mountains at Rochester all the way to the Connecticut at White River Junction — a wild-and-stocked freestone that fishes beautifully in spring and turns to smallmouth in the summer heat. North of the Winooski divide, the Winooski itself runs from Montpelier and Waterbury down through the Champlain Valley to Lake Champlain: browns and rainbows up top, a genuine smallmouth and carp fishery in the lower river, and an urban-access story most anglers overlook. The Lamoille, farther north through Johnson and Jeffersonville, is the underrated one — quiet wild-brown water broken by a handful of run-of-river hydro dams. Vermont Fish & Wildlife sets the statewide trout regulations and the special catch-and-release and artificial-only sections that govern a few of these waters.