The Sandy is Portland's home steelhead river — close enough to fish before work, glacial off the flanks of Mount Hood, and free-flowing again since Marmot Dam came out in 2007. It carries both winter and summer steelhead in a hatchery-and-wild mix, with salmon through the season, and it's where a lot of city anglers serve their swung-fly apprenticeship. Being glacier-fed it has a temperament: it bumps up fast on rain and can run milky-gray in summer when the high snow melts, so the read here is always the hydrograph plus the color — the prize is the falling water as it clears back to a fishable green. Keep the hatchery-versus-wild distinction clear, because the wild fish are ESA-listed and belong back in the water, and check the rules, which shift by run and reach. For a river inside a metro area it fishes with surprising wildness.
- Glacial