Minnesota trout water comes in two kinds that could not look less alike. In the southeast corner, the driftless country holds hundreds of miles of limestone spring creeks winding through wooded bluffs and pasture, full of wild brown trout. On the North Shore of Lake Superior, short steep rivers drop off the sawtooth ridge into the lake, carrying steelhead and coaster brook trout upstream every spring.
In the southeast corner, the driftless country holds hundreds of miles of limestone spring creeks winding through wooded bluffs and pasture, full of wild brown trout.
The spring creeks are the everyday fishery. Streams like the Whitewater, the Root River, and Garvin Brook run clear and cold through valleys that the glaciers missed, and their wild browns feed on cress bugs, scuds, and a steady diet of small mayflies. Summer is terrestrial season, when a foam beetle twitched along an undercut bank gets eaten in broad daylight. These are intimate streams: knee-deep, meadow-lined, and best fished slowly.
The North Shore is a different sport. From April into May, steelhead enter rivers like the Baptism, the Knife, and the Cascade, running upstream past waterfalls as far as the first barrier. Fall brings another push of lake-run fish along with salmon. Inland, the northeastern counties hold brook trout in small bog-stained creeks and lake trout in deep border waters. A fly angler based in Duluth can fish all of it within an hour's drive.
The creeks fish best from April through September, with the early catch-and-release season offering uncrowded water before the general opener. North Shore steelhead run in April and May and again in the fall. Summer on the creeks means early mornings and grasshoppers.