Upper Bear River: Mirror Lake Highway to the state line
The trout fishing on the Bear in Utah is in its headwaters. The river forms in the western Uinta Mountains where the Hayden Fork and Stillwater Fork meet, with the East Fork, West Fork and Mill Creek joining below, and flows north through Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest to the Wyoming line south of Evanston. Utah 150, the Mirror Lake Highway, runs beside the Hayden Fork and the upper main stem, and forest campgrounds and pull-offs give walk-in access to the whole reach. It is small, cold water that is not floatable.
The gauge on this page is the USGS station near the Utah-Wyoming state line at the bottom of that reach. Runoff runs high from May into early July; the wadeable window guides describe is roughly 30 to 150 cfs, and the river settles into it by mid summer.
Rich County: Woodruff and Randolph
After looping through Wyoming the Bear re-enters Utah in Rich County and slows through ranch country near Woodruff and Randolph on Utah 16, upstream of Woodruff Narrows Reservoir. The river here holds brown and rainbow trout and whitefish, but it is mostly private, low-gradient water, and access is limited to road crossings and any Walk-In Access parcels the Division of Wildlife Resources lists for the current year.
Cache Valley and the lower river
By the time the Bear comes back into Utah near Cornish and crosses Cache Valley to Cutler Reservoir, and on past Tremonton to the Great Salt Lake, it is a warmwater river. The state agency lists channel catfish, walleye, largemouth bass, perch and crappie for the Cache and Box Elder county reaches, and it stocks tiger muskie there, not trout. The Bear River does not feed Bear Lake naturally, and Logan Canyon is the Logan River, a different stream.
Bear River cutthroat
The native trout of the drainage is the Bear River cutthroat, a lineage that evolved separately after the river was captured from the Snake system and that the Utah Cutthroat Slam counts as its own species. They live in the upper river and its forks and take attractor dries readily. Brook trout are the most numerous fish in the upper reaches, and DWR stocks rainbows in the Summit County section in summer.
Brown trout
Browns are the fish of the lower, slower Rich County water and of the river in Wyoming, where the reach through Evanston is managed as a fishery in its own right. In the Utah headwaters they are an occasional catch in the deeper pools rather than the main target.
Season and regulations
Utah's fishing season is year-round. The Bear River has no waterbody-specific entry in the 2026 Utah Fishing Guidebook, so statewide rules apply: a combined limit of 4 trout, no gear restriction, and a Utah license for anglers 12 and older. Fishing across the line in Wyoming needs a Wyoming license. Check the current Utah Division of Wildlife Resources guidebook before you go.