The Pere Marquette is the river everyone learns Great Lakes steelhead on — a flies-only blue-ribbon stretch with the first kings of the season in late August and a long steelhead run that starts in fall and rides right through to a April peak. Spring-fed enough to stay open in a cold snap, gravelly, and wadeable, it rewards a good dead-drift more than a strong arm.
The Pere Marquette holds a particular place in American fishing history — it's where the first brown trout in the United States were planted, in 1884, and where the Great Lakes salmon program later took hold. It runs through the sand country of western Michigan as a clear, cool, spring-fed river over sand and gravel, threading cedar swamp and forest with the cold, even flow that sand-country rivers keep. The famous Flies-Only water below the M-37 bridge is fly-fishing's home water here, fished hard for the steelhead and Chinook that run up from Lake Michigan and the resident browns that hold all year. The bed is shifting sand and gravel, the current steady, the log jams and cedar sweepers everywhere. Wading is comfortable on firm gravel where you can find it and treacherous in the soft sand where you can't. It is history and cold water and big migratory fish in quiet Michigan woods.
Wading: Soft sand pockets and log jams
- Sand gravel
- Unconfined
- Pool riffle