Yellowstone Lake

Yellowstone Lake is the largest high-elevation lake in North America — 87,000 acres of cold, clear water at 7,733 feet in the heart of Yellowstone National Park. It is also the center of one of the most important native fish restoration efforts in American conservation history: the ongoing battle to restore Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout after the catastrophic illegal introduction of Lake Trout in the 1980s devastated cutthroat populations throughout the park. The lake's Yellowstone Cutthroat are the subspecies that the park was essentially built to protect — wild, native fish that spawned in the dozens of tributary streams each spring and fed bears, eagles, ospreys, and otters throughout the watershed. Lake trout, which eat juvenile cutthroat and spawn in deep water inaccessible to netting, reduced cutthroat numbers by over 90% before NPS intervention began in the late 1990s. Intensive suppression of lake trout by NPS netting — over 3 million lake trout removed since 1994 — has led to a measurable cutthroat recovery that continues each year. Fishing at Yellowstone Lake today is genuinely meaningful conservation participation. Anglers are encouraged to kill all lake trout caught (no size limit, no possession limit — the park wants them out) while practicing catch-and-release for all cutthroat. The combination of fishing in one of America's most spectacular natural settings and directly contributing to native species recovery makes Yellowstone Lake a bucket-list destination for conservation-minded fly fishers. The fishing is best from ice-out (mid-June to early July depending on the year) through September, when cutthroat cruise the shallows near tributary mouths and along the sandy beaches of the West Thumb and Fishing Bridge areas.