Fishing The Lake Runs

Note - An edited version of this piece appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of The Drake Magazine

I love autumn.  In my part of the world, it’s the time of year when maddening summer crowds finally dissipate and air temperatures turn from scorching to crisp. Foliage displays rich, light hues reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell New England Thanksgiving painting.  Mountain bike trails are cool – if not downright cold – even in those open spaces devoid of vegetation.  Wildlife is robust and easily sighted as they make their fall migration.  Football takes on more importance (I don’t guide on weekends), and there is a sense of anticipation for the approaching winter in ski towns like mine. 

More than anything else, its my favorite time of the year to be on the water. 

            Although many rivers I fish regularly are at their best this time of year, I try and get off them as much as possible.  Shoveling these waters for a half dozen months gets boring.  By the end of September, my focus is on lakes, the streams that feed them, and the horny, pissed off, confrontation-seeking brown trout that will make their annual spawning run out of their stillwater environs. 

            I tired of chasing hatches and opening day and ice-out on famed waters years ago.  “They’re like VIP events for god’s sake,” a friend of mine once observed, “Like all we are doing is fishing to be seen by others.”  Chasing lake-run browns doesn’t feel that way.  It gives me stoke in ways that salmon flies on the South Fork of the Snake, gray drakes on the upper Green, and opening day on the Ranch section of the Henry’s Fork just don’t anymore.  I still might fish these “events”.  I just don’t do it on a day off.

            Time of year draws me to lake-run browns.  So does the legwork involved. Most of the time you are marching several miles, and, depending where you fish, you are in prime bear country.  Bruins, sows, and their growing cubs are looking to eat damn near anything, and they are ready to defend their meal as if their life depends on it (and it does when winter hibernation is right around the corner).  If you are fishing in a national park, bear spray is a necessity.  Anywhere else, a .44 mag is a solid choice. 

But the sheer complexity of lake-run browns is the real draw.  No one knows what the trigger is.  Some say its water temperature.  Others say its subtle changes in pH.  Others contend it’s moon phase or the shifting angle of the sun as Earth tilts past equinox.  And each specific run differs in terms of abundance, tempo, and timing.  It can be a hair-pulling experience to time each correctly.  Much of the time, you don’t.

Lake-run browns are the classic Churchillian “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”.  I can hit the Madison River in Yellowstone National Park as early as mid-September and experience a mess of fish in every riffle pool.  Yet I could return a month later – obviously assuming the waves of brown trout coming out of Hebgen Lake are spent – and find even more stacked up.  Old timers in the town of West Yellowstone will tell you there are still fish moving up in November.

            Only a couple hours drive from the Maddy, you’d be hard-pressed to find browns moving out of the Park’s Lewis Lake in mid-September.  Immediately after equinox, however, fish have loaded up at the mouth of the short, four-mile long river feeding it from upstream.  Like a light switch, they move up in pods – some as small as half dozen, others close to a 100 or more – over the next 30-plus days.  Just as their run reaches a crescendo, a few hundred or so of their brethren on the other side of the lake move a short distance downstream into Lewis River proper to begin their orgy.  I’m hitting these browns much closer to Halloween than Columbus Day.  It’s a short push by these fish to the gravel beds where their nest will be established.  Those of us who target them are wading the extensive lake flats to avoid fishing the actual spawn.  This water feels is knee-deep in most places.  In others parts, you’d be best served using a boat.

Brown trout in the Lewis River system have a conduit downstream to the Snake River.  But these fish never make it that far to spawn.  Instead, the Snake is being fed browns coming up from Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park.  The spawning behavior of Jackson Lake brown trout is otherworldly, at least in the Rocky Mountain west.  They move up the Snake River and as deep into Yellowstone National Park as Hebgen fish on the Madison, yet it happens much, much later. Sure, I have seen a few dozen several miles upstream as early as the second week of October.  Nonetheless, the true surge occurs in November.  That’s about as late of a run as I know of.  It’s also super-fast - measured in a couple of weeks instead of a month or more.  If you wait too long and your timing is off, you could easily miss it and find fish already on their beds.  If you hit it right, you’ll have a shit-eating grin on your face the entire day.

Fishing for migrating brown trout in North America has probably been around since they were first brought here from Europe well over a century ago.  And for just as long, there have been those who question the act.  Some claim that these hormonally charged fish are too easy a target.  Others contend they are fragile creatures performing energy-draining acts.  Hooking into them just drains energy further.

            Most of these folks are sincerely inquisitive.  Others are opinionated assholes. I tell both that those of us who fish for lake-run browns are not targeting them while they are in the act of spawning.  We are fishing for them during the migration.  We fish for steelhead and salmon in the exact same way.  I guided hundreds of guests in Tierra del Fuego for sea-run browns that perform the same act. 

Lake-run browns have my respect.  I release each back into cold, oxygen rich water where they regain their faculties and resume their upstream migration.  Other than stabbing them in the face with a sharp piece of metal – like all fly fishers do no matter the species - I treat them with extreme care, and no less so than all the other fish I have targeted throughout my lifetime.