The Strawberry below Soldier Creek Dam is one of Utah's quiet gems — a tailwater that pours out of the bottom of the Strawberry Reservoir complex and meanders down through high sage-and-meadow country toward the Pinnacles. The reach from the dam down to Red Creek is special-regulation, artificial-only water, and it grows fat, wild browns and cutthroat in numbers that surprise people who've only ever heard about the Green and the Provo. It's a small, intimate river — undercut meander banks, deep slow corners, weed-lined runs — that fishes like a spring creek as much as a tailwater: drag-free drifts, fine tippet, careful approach to fish you can sometimes see working the surface film. Cold, stable releases keep it fishing through the seasons, but at this elevation winter is real. The headache is honest flow data: the only reach gauge that ever sat below the dam has been dark since the 1990s, so we're reading a downstream proxy — take the cfs as a steer on release trend, not gospel on the water at your feet.

• Mixed

• Aquatic life: Impaired
• Recreation: Impaired