Maine

Maine is the last place in the contiguous United States where an angler can climb into a floatplane, land on a remote pond no road reaches, and catch native brook trout that have never seen a hatchery truck. The state's North Woods encompass millions of acres of boreal forest, peat bogs, and cold-water drainages that drain into rivers and lakes holding some of the finest wild salmonid fishing left in America. For the angler willing to accept the remoteness — the portages, the black flies, the floatplane logistics — Maine delivers a fishing experience that belongs to another era.

The Rangeley Lakes Region in western Maine occupies a unique place in the history of American fly fishing. Rangeley Lake, Mooselookmeguntic, and the connected chain of waters were famous in the nineteenth century as the finest brook trout and landlocked salmon fishery in New England, drawing wealthy sportsmen from Boston and New York on overnight trains. The brook trout that evolved in this system were a distinct subspecies of exceptional size — specimens of six and seven pounds were once common — and while those days of surplus are long past, the region still produces wild brook trout and landlocked salmon in water that retains its austere, northern beauty. Theodore Gordon, Carrie Stevens, and the earliest American dry fly innovators all drew inspiration from these waters.

The Penobscot River system drains the central wilderness and once supported the largest Atlantic salmon runs on the East Coast. While commercial and dam-related pressures collapsed those runs in the twentieth century, the West Branch of the Penobscot below Ripogenus Dam is now one of Maine's finest wild trout rivers — a boulder-strewn tailwater below a dramatic gorge that holds wild brook trout and holdover rainbow trout of exceptional size. The Kennebec, Androscoggin, and Aroostook drainages in the north provide additional wild trout and landlocked salmon water, much of it accessible only by canoe or floatplane.

The remote sporting camps that have operated in Maine's backcountry for over a century are inseparable from the fly fishing culture here. These operations — fly-in or road-access only, offering meals, guides, and canoes — preserve a way of fishing that has vanished from most of the country. Early mornings in a canoe, casting dry flies to rising brook trout in a mist-covered pond, with loons calling on the far shore, represents one of the most elemental fly fishing experiences available anywhere in North America.