The lower Salt below Stewart Mountain Dam is the desert's odd surprise — a trout fishery on the edge of metropolitan Phoenix, kept honest by cold water sliding out from the bottom of Saguaro Lake. It is unapologetically a put-and-take winter affair: Arizona Game and Fish stock rainbows through the cool months, the tubers and the heat take over by late spring, and the trout fishing is a seasonal thing built around the release and the stocking truck rather than a wild population. None of which stops it being a genuinely useful winter option close to a big city. Read the dam release first — the lower Salt is a managed river that rises and falls with irrigation and power demand, not with the sky — and fish the stocked-trout reaches with small nymphs, eggs and the usual tailwater fare while the water's cold. Come summer, it belongs to the inner tubes.
- Mixed