The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, one of the most visited and celebrated parks in North America for its beauty, wildlife diversity, and accommodation to tourism, also has over 700 miles of fishable trout water…that’s alot of ground to cover, especially when salivating over the healthy reproducing populations of brook, brown and rainbow trout that dwell there, sometimes in trophy proportion.

The lavish but diminuitive native Appalachian Brook trout occupy the higher elevation small streams (>3000ft), while larger bruiser brown trout prefer the lower elevation larger creeks and rivers.  The all-American Rainbow trout can be found anywhere in between and usually more than willing to take a fly presented in a proper manner.

The serious angler can make an attempt to catch all three species in one day, the Smoky Mountain “Triple Crown”.  The wild trout of the Smokies are a wary bunch, often spooking at the slightest mistake by an angler.

Catching these fish requires a delicate combination of accuracy, stealth, and alert senses, requiring one to call upon the primordial instincts of our ancestors.  Approaching these trout sometimes seems more like hunting than fishing.  The fish themselves can range from an emblazened 4 inch brook trout in full fall spawning colors to bomber brown trout busting the 20 inch mark wide open.

Years of scouting and successful angling has given Stone’s Throw Adventures Staff Guide Russell Woods a savvy for the waters of these hills that borders on the primal, combining traditional flyfishing skill with an uncanny natural instinct to approaching these babbling brooks that leaves his salmonid quarry unaware of his presence until that stretch the end of his line.

With his tutelage and a little hiking, your scrapbook can be a few pages thicker with some of the most beautiful trout taken from some of the most beautiful pristine water you’ll ever see.