Gauley River

The Gauley below Summersville Dam is a made fishery, and it doesn't pretend otherwise. Summersville is a rock-fill Army Corps flood-control dam, and the water it pushes out of the bottom of a 2,700-acre lake runs cold — around 55°F even at the height of August, when everything else in southern West Virginia is bathtub-warm. That cold slug is the whole reason trout live here. WVDNR leans into it hard: hatchery crews stock the tailwater every two weeks from March through May, drop a helicopter load of roughly 1,500 pounds of rainbows into the gorge in June where the stock trucks can't reach, and come back for a fall stocking once the summer crowds thin. Rainbow is the backbone; the state's signature golden rainbows and a few browns round out the mix. It fishes as a put-and-take-plus-holdover tailwater, not a wild-trout stream — you're throwing eggs, San Juan worms, attractor nymphs, small midges and Blue-Winged Olives, and stripping little streamers for stockers that have gotten a few weeks of current on them.

The practical character is dominated by one number: the dam release. Through the summer the Corps runs the tailwater at roughly 100-200 CFS on a run-of-river basis, outflow tracking inflow, and at that flow you can wade and rock-hop the pockets and pools directly below the dam. The cold, fishable water is short — trout hold from the dam down through the power-plant tailrace and gorge to about Carnifex Ferry Battlefield State Park, a few river miles, before the river warms and turns into a smallmouth and walleye river. Access is a workout: the good water is down in a gorge, and reaching it below the dam-side lots means hiking, scrambling, and wading over slick boulders. This is not a beginner's wade. One quirk worth knowing before you check the gauge — USGS 03189600 below the dam stopped computing discharge in 2003, so it streams gage height (stage) only; the real "flow" number anglers watch is the dam release off the Summersville Lake reservoir tile, not a USGS CFS reading.

Then there's the thing that makes the Gauley the Gauley. Every fall — the Friday after Labor Day through mid-October, roughly six weekends — the Corps opens Summersville for Gauley Season, sending ~2,400-2,800 CFS of Class IV-V whitewater down the Upper and Lower Gauley for one of the premier big-water raft and kayak runs on the continent. Those scheduled releases blow the trout fishing out completely on release days: you cannot wade or reasonably fish the tailwater at 2,800 CFS, and the famous Upper and Lower Gauley are whitewater reaches, not trout water. The fishable trout window and the whitewater schedule are the same calendar read in reverse — check the USACE release schedule, fish the low-flow weekdays and the shoulder days between release weekends, and stay off it when the river is running raft flows.