New York is defined by its waterways. The east-west hollow that carries the Erie Canal and the Mohawk River across the state was a crucial gateway to the West during the 19th century. Today, it's a sleepy land of old mill towns and rolling farms with creeks scattered everywhere and mountain lakes close by. My only complaint about the Black and the West Canada is that they distract me from other local waters.

Fulton Lake Chain. Ringed by low-rise, thickly forested mountains in the southwestern Adirondacks, they harbor everything from smallmouth bass and pike to lake trout, landlocked salmon, and native brookies. They are best fished in the quintessential Adirondack way--from a canoe.

Oriskany Creek. Flowing northward to the Mohawk through Oneida County, it holds nothing but wild trout in its upper reaches and wild and stocked fish in its lower half. Though small and easy to wade and cast, its riffles, runs, and pools offer better-than-average cover and sometimes large trout.

Chenango Canal. It doesn't look like Paradise Valley, Montana, but the former canal (abandoned in 1878) is a bona fide spring creek. It stays cool and offers tiny-fly fishing to good fish all summer. It's also weedy and straight as an arrow. Its brushy banks make casting tough, but you can always stand upstream of a rising fish and feed out line.

East and West branches of Fish Creek. When DeWitt Clinton crossed the state to map the route of the Erie Canal in 1810, he saw Atlantic salmon running up Fish Creek from Oneida Lake in prodigious numbers. They had colonized Oneida, Seneca, and Cayuga lakes from Lake Ontario, then the world's premier concentration of freshwater Atlantics. Today, they're gone, though efforts persist to restore them. Fish Creek's branches are now scenic and lightly used trout streams.