Where: Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee
When: year-round
If you like: the sporting life, the outdoors and sports
Why you should go: Blue lining for brook trout, says Mark Taylor of the conservation nonprofit Trout Unlimited, offers the best of all worlds. “It’s a combination of exploring and hiking and fishing,” he says. “Just study a map, look for the little blue lines above two or three thousand feet, and take off.” But brookies aren’t necessarily easy to find. The region’s only native trout species was once common all over the Southeast, but competition from introduced game fish like brown and rainbow trout, coupled with widespread habitat degradation, has cut into their numbers. Today organizations like Trout Unlimited are hard at work removing invasive trout species and improving stream habitat across the brook trout’s range. “They’re hardy, resilient little fish,” Taylor says. “If the habitat is there, they can recover.”
As the waterways of Western North Carolina—brook trout mecca—reckon with the devastating floods of Hurricane Helene, Tennessee offers ample opportunities to chase the speckled fish. To catch one (and release it back where you found it), Taylor says there’s no better place than the picturesque, high-elevation streams in Great Smoky Mountains National Park between April and October.
G&G tip: Taylor likes to use TroutRoutes to guide his angling and wandering. The downloadable app has mapped 50,000 streams across the country, and it clues you in to public access points, fishing regulations, and even stream heights and flow rates.
