Shoshone River

The Shoshone is Cody's home water and the eastern doorstep to Yellowstone, but it isn't one river — it's three stitched together by Buffalo Bill Reservoir. The North Fork runs down the Wapiti Valley alongside the North Fork Highway, a classic Rocky Mountain freestone of big-water pocket runs and riffles with cutthroat, rainbows, and cutbows that average around 16 inches. The South Fork is the quieter, smaller-fish cousin — a ranch-valley freestone where 8–12 inch cutthroat and rainbows dominate and the upper reaches toward the wilderness fish best. Below Buffalo Bill Dam runs the payoff water: the Lower Shoshone tailwater that Cody guides call the 'Lo-Sho,' a canyon-and-town stretch with an estimated 5,000–8,000 trout per mile — browns, rainbows, and cutthroat that average 14–16 inches but run to genuinely large, with fish in the 20s and the occasional report of something pushing 30.

Here's the honest catch on the tailwater, and it's a big one: it's an irrigation-season river. From roughly May into September, releases from Buffalo Bill Dam for downstream irrigation push flows past 1,000–1,700+ CFS, and the canyon runs high, off-color, and mostly unwadeable — nymphing high water is the only play if you're out there at all. The Lo-Sho's real season is October through April/May, when the dam drops to winter flows, the water clears, and you can wade or float to a genuinely dense trout population that eats midges, BWOs, and streamers all winter. If you're planning a summer Cody trip, the North Fork (and to a lesser extent the South Fork) is your trout water; the tailwater is a shoulder-season and winter fishery, and summer reports routinely flag high water temps and heavy moss on the lower river.

Access is easy by western standards. The North Fork runs right along US-14/16/20 with Shoshone National Forest and WGFD access, though much of the Wapiti Valley bottom is private — over 25 miles of the North Fork sits in national forest. The tailwater has good bank access off the Lower Dam Road (Hayden Arch Bridge Road) and where Highways 14 and 120 cross near Cody, running the roughly 15-mile instream-flow segment from the base of the dam down to the Corbett diversion. Cody itself has real fly shops, an airport (COD) with daily service, and everything a trip needs, and Yellowstone's East Entrance is about an hour up the North Fork Highway — so the river doubles as a warm-up or wind-down for a park trip.