The Black River emerges from the Adirondack woods at Kayuta Lake, another reservoir built to hold water for the barge canal. Neither the Kayuta nor the other impoundments on the Black release stored water; they're run-of-the-river dams that usually allow whatever water comes in to spill into the river below. A heavy rain will swell it quickly to 1,000 cubic feet per second (cfs), but in the summer it will drop back down to a fishable 400 cfs in just a couple of days. The Black can get low and warm in midsummer. But the variety of habitat, from pocketwater to deep pools to dependable tributaries, provides refuge for fish at such times as well as during bitter winters. Therefore, as on the West Canada, the Black's trout grow large.

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And while its basin is similar to the West Canada's, the Black seems to clean the snowpack out of its watershed more efficiently. While the West Canada is roaring below a spilling reservoir in May, the Black is settling down, warming up, and hosting fine hatches of Quill Gordons, Hendricksons, Cahills, and other typical Eastern hatches, including large Green Drakes.

The Black, too, hosts a much-anticipated White Fly hatch, but on the day I went there to fish it, they were nowhere to be seen. The trip was not a bust, however. Instead of Ephorons, I was treated to a first-rate hatch of Blue-winged Olives.

From Kayuta Lake's outlet near Forestport to Hawkinsville, the tannin-stained water of the Black runs mostly as Adirondack pocketwater--dramatic fields of angular, dishwasher-sized gray boulders where the water's depth can drop from three inches to three feet in a single footstep. Big trout live in these pockets. This is the kind of water that inspired Wulff's hairwing flies and Fran Betters's Haystack and Usual.

At Boonville, the river begins to show the form it holds as it flows 50 miles to the northwest on its way to Watertown and Lake Ontario. Here the flat pools begin. There are only a few miles of trout habitat before the water becomes too warm. Beautiful trout live here in long, deep pools where you have all the room you need to cast, but tricky microcurrents bedevil your drift. The flies on the water are plain to see, for fisherman and fish alike. It's perfect water for an old-fashioned, match-the-hatch showdown between dry-fly angler and rising trout.

The effects of acid rain begin to lessen at the point where pocketwater gives way to flats. This is where most of the river's wild trout live, according to Frank Flack, a NYDEC fisheries biologist. Unlike West Canada Creek, the Black River has several good-size tributaries where fish spawn. "Almost every tributary produces wild trout," Flack says.

Even so, the stocking truck comes every spring, just to make sure there are enough trout for everyone. Like West Canada Creek, but unlike most New York trout streams, the Black is so big that even the most voracious fish-killers would be hard-pressed to clean it out. There is no catch-and-release section, nor is there any clamor for one. The stocked rainbows are killed or wander away, but the browns stay and grow big. It is common to catch richly colored 15-inch trout, and there are some brutes much bigger than that.

The Black has plenty of access from local roads east of and parallel to New York 12.