With more than 11 million visitors each year, Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited park in the country, and most anglers visiting these woods catch 6- to 9-inch rainbow trout, vestiges of stockings discontinued in the 1970s. What most visitors 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 Great 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 the Where to Go sidebar.) 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.