The Upper Truckee is the biggest tributary feeding Lake Tahoe, and it spends its life pulling snowmelt down out of the mountains toward the south shore. Up high it runs as honest freestone pocket water; lower down it slows and meanders through meadow, the kind of slow, clear, grassy-banked water that turns confident anglers into careful ones. It holds wild and stocked rainbows and browns, and the character of the fishing changes entirely depending on which reach you stand in. The whole thing is governed by snow — blown out and cold through the spring melt, then dropping into shape through summer as the runoff fades. Get there when the river has cleared and settled, and you have meadow trout sipping in slow glides and pocket-water fish that hit before they think about it. Two rivers, really, wearing the same name.

• River
• Mixed