Blue Lining the Smokies

The thing about the fog is, you almost always find the mayflies hatching through it. That’s one bit of streamcraft I’ve picked up deep inside the backcountry of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, chasing closely guarded browns and ancient brook trout. Most blue-liners—anglers who seek out little-known or overlooked fisheries, guided only by the fine blue lines on a topographic map—pursue solitude more than large fish. In the Smokies, you can have both.

With more than 11 million visitors each year, Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most popular national park in the country. Most anglers fishing the park’s streams catch 6- to 9-inch rainbow trout, vestiges of stockings discontinued in the 1970s. What they do not catch (and usually are not aware of) are the Smokies’ large browns and native resident brookies. With abundant hatches and predictable fish behavior, you’d think the fishing would be easy, but it isn’t. Mountain anglers are tacticians of the short rod and the short cast due to the tangled rhododendron forests in Tennessee and North Carolina, which are stapled together by the Smokies. However, these challenges are not without reward. If you start down those cobalt-ink paths, it may well be a long, long while before you shake loose of their grip.

Brookie Ban Lifted

The National Park Service recently discontinued a 30-year experimental moratorium on brook-trout fishing in most zones within the park, providing anglers with the chance to cast to brook trout that have never seen a fly (legally) in almost 150 miles of water. “There just wasn’t any point,” says head park biologist Steve Moore. “There’s up to 70 percent natural mortality anyway, and with the catch-and-release ethic, I sometimes think we’ve created too many people afraid to enjoy this special resource. Heck, we have a five-fish limit up there, and we’d have to kill more than 50 percent of the fish in the river a year to even make a difference.”

Brook trout are a relic south of the Mason-Dixon Line. In the last Ice Age, glaciation and lower worldwide temperatures forced brook trout, a member of the char family, to migrate south. When temperatures warmed, the trout found thermal refuge in the mountains, where a combination of elevation and the region’s massive boreal forest kept water temperatures low and the trout safe. When European settlers crossed the Appalachians, the first thing they did was begin cutting this forest, freeing up soil to run into the water and opening patches where sunlight could shine through. By the early 19th century, most of the Eastern boreal forest was gone, including in the Smokies, which were hit hard by logging.

Faded sepia photos taken during this clearing-off period show stringers full of 16- to 20-inch brook trout caught in places where smallmouth are found today. Those fish, which grew large at lower altitudes, disappeared with their habitat, and today the average brookie in the Smokies is 6 to 8 inches. The settlers also introduced rainbow and brown trout, which outcompeted the brookies at lower elevations. Today brook trout are found in the Smokies only at high elevations, above natural barriers. “We’ve got an ongoing restoration project,” says park biologist Matt Culp, “and one of our required criteria for restoration is a natural barrier to keep out the nonnative fish.”

To find native brookies, obtain a National Park Service map from 2005 or earlier and look for red-lined streams, which at the time indicated streams closed to fishing. Barring that, check with a local fly shop or simply try your luck on any stream above 3,500 feet. (For suggested day hikes, see “Where to Go,” page 54.) One of the best ways to access these areas, and potentially locate some of the best fishing, is to follow the Appalachian Trail (AT) across the spine of the mountains. This legendary trail, which splits Tennessee from North Carolina, runs all the way from Georgia to Maine, coincidentally tracing the hereditary range of the brook trout throughout its length.

Brook trout make their home in steep, narrow creeks with lots of waterfalls. On a typical day, you climb as much as you walk, pausing to cast as you crest each boulder and discover new pools. Because the rhododendron is so thick, and due to the long angling moratorium, many of the best creeks lack fishing trails, so your only option is to proceed directly upstream, casting back over water you’ve already fished. Casts are never more than 10 feet and usually amount to dapping.

Small-Stream Tactics

My education in catching Smokies brook trout came, as the best experiences usually do, from happenstance. I had started fishing down Road Prong, a newly opened brookie stream on the slopes of Clingman’s Dome, when I encountered an angler named Hans who was fishing his way back upstream. Hans, of Scandinavian origin, explained to me why I hadn’t caught a trout on my way down. “The fish here, they are spooky, yes? You have to do all those things you laugh at when you read them in magazines to catch them, okay?” He gestured to the tilesetter’s knee pads he was wearing. “Stay low, ya? Take one of these.” He handed me an oversized yellow Stimulator that could have been used in a Western Salmonfly hatch.

“The brookies, they don’t care about the size at all, only the drag. You have to be able to see your fly to keep it clear.” Hans and I then worked our way back up the mountain. He would approach a pool on his knees, squeezing the water out of his fly in pinched fingers, then with “no false casting, no!” he would lay the fly right behind a rock, hovering it for a brief moment with the tip of his rod so it didn’t shoot out from the lie. He managed to score more than a dozen fish in the half mile of water I had just sloshed through.

As I gave him a lift back down the mountain, Hans expanded on his fishing technique: “I look for the high streams, and I fish them tight. No false casts; it spooks them. They are 30 years without people, yes, but still they are spooky. You have to stay low, dry the fly, make sure not to drag. Do that, and you can’t stop catching fish.”