West Virginia

West Virginia is the East's most underrated trout state, and the Monongahela National Forest is why. The high Alleghenies wring rain and snow out of Atlantic storms, and the runoff feeds a dense network of cold, tannin-stained freestone rivers that hold native brook trout in their headwaters and wild and stocked rainbows and browns lower down. The Cranberry and the Williams are the marquee names — big, boulder-strewn wild-trout rivers deep in the national forest, both with roadless catch-and-release backcountry reaches you reach by bike or on foot. Shavers Fork, the trout arm of the Cheat River system, runs off the highest ground in the state; its remote upper reach near Cheat Bridge is brook trout water you can still reach by the Durbin scenic railroad, while the lower river near Parsons is a bigger stocked freestone. This is wade fishing in tight quarters — small flies, light tippet, and a lot of walking to get away from the stocking-truck crowds.

The other side of West Virginia trout fishing is the tailwater below Summersville Dam, where the Army Corps releases cold bottom water into the Gauley. The reach below the dam is stocked heavy and stays cold and clear well into summer, but it lives on the dam's release schedule — the same fall "Gauley Season" flows that make this one of the premier big-water whitewater runs in the country blow the trout fishing out, so the gauge matters as much as the calendar. West Virginia DNR sets the regulations: most streams are put-and-take stocked trout water fished hardest in spring, but the best fishing is on the special-regulation reaches — catch-and-release, artificial-lures-only stretches on the Cranberry, and the Delayed Harvest reaches on the Williams and lower Shavers Fork. Know the designation before you go; the wild and native fish are protected, and the backcountry water rewards the effort to reach it.