TROUT DREAMS
Our first national park is also among our fishiest. Yellowstone National Park’s location at the very headwaters of America’s empire of wild trout makes nearly any water here worth fishing as long as it’s wide and deep enough to twitch a Woolly Bugger.
The diversity of fishing inside the park is on par with its abundance. You can hike to high-mountain lakes where your only company is likely to be bears and ospreys, or you can join the masses on the most popular reaches of the Madison and Firehole rivers that flow along the parks’ busiest travel routes. You can cast big spoons for lake trout in Yellowstone Lake or drift tiny mayfly imitations on shallow beaver-dam ponds for hand-sized cutthroats.
The one thing you can’t do here is fish with lead. That means no lead split-shot sinkers, no lead-weighted nymphs and no leadhead jigs. Other regulations prohibit felt-soled wading boots, barbed hooks, treble hooks, bait of any kind and “inorganic baits” such as rubber worms or plastic twister tails and scented
