Lees Ferry is the trout water at the bottom of Glen Canyon Dam — a fifteen-mile ribbon of cold, clear green river running between thousand-foot sandstone walls before the whole thing tips over into the Grand Canyon. It's a wild rainbow fishery, and a strange, wonderful place to fish: you can wade the gravel bars near the ferry or run a boat up to the dam, and the trout eat midges and scuds all year because the water comes off the bottom of Lake Powell at a steady cold temperature no matter what the desert is doing overhead. Watch the release, not the weather — the river breathes with the dam.
Lees Ferry is a trout fishery that has no business existing, which is exactly what makes it wonderful — fifteen miles of cold, clear water running out of Glen Canyon Dam through the bottom of a sandstone gorge in the Arizona desert, where before the dam the Colorado ran warm and red with silt. The cold bottom release, a constant forty-six to fifty degrees, turned it into a blue-ribbon rainbow trout river, the fish now wild and self-sustaining, holding over bright gravel bars and in the glassy runs beneath thousand-foot walls of Navajo sandstone. It's the only place in more than two hundred and sixty miles where the Colorado isn't pinned between sheer cliffs. The bed is clean gravel and cobble; the water is gin-clear and cold. Wading the bars is good and a boat from the dam opens the rest. It is surreal, gorgeous, desert trout fishing.
Wading: Cold clear water, fluctuating dam releases
- Sandstone
- Partly confined
- Pool riffle