Wind River

The Wind is the first genuinely cold tributary on the Washington side above Bonneville Dam, and that one fact defines the whole fishery. Summer steelhead pushing up the warm mid-Columbia in June and July peel into the Wind looking for cold water and stack up. It's a small river — roughly 225 square miles of drainage off the south flank of the Cascades between Mount Adams and Mount St. Helens — that runs through Gifford Pinchot National Forest before it dumps into the Columbia at Carson. This is not a numbers game. The run is modest and every steelhead is wild. But it's one of the more storied swung-fly steelhead streams in the Gorge, and the water is built for it: basalt ledges, tight slots, and cliff-walled runs that a Scandi head and a skated dry were made for.

The Wind fishes like a steelhead river first and a trout stream a distant second. The signature game is dry-line swinging from July through September — a floating line, a light poly leader, and a waking or hitched fly (Purple Peril, a Steelhead Caddis, a foam skater) worked across the tailouts on warm afternoons. Single-hand 7- and 8-weights work, but most people fish a switch or short spey rod because the canyon quarters are tight. Shipherd Falls, about a mile up from the mouth, is the hinge of the system: a fish ladder built into the falls passes wild steelhead and Carson-hatchery spring chinook upstream, and that natural barrier is exactly why the upper basin holds a wild-only steelhead population. Below the falls you get bigger, mixed-species water and the spring chinook gear fishery near the Carson National Fish Hatchery; above it you're into smaller pool-and-boulder water with wild steelhead plus incidental redband and cutthroat.

Manage your expectations and check the pamphlet before you drive. The Wind is a Wild Steelhead Gene Bank — hatchery steelhead plants ended in the late 1990s — with selective-gear and wild-release rules, and WDFW does not hesitate to close the river mid-season on a weak return. It blows out fast and clears fast. Access looks easy on paper, since the Wind River Highway parallels most of the river with public turnouts, but the slopes down to the water are steep and the mud gets greasy after rain, so getting to a run is often the crux. There is no fly shop in Carson; the river is served from the Gorge Fly Shop across the Columbia in Hood River. When it's on — clear water, a warm afternoon, a fish that eats a skated fly on the swing — it's as good as small-water summer steelhead gets in the Gorge.