Green River, Utah

A Section, Dam to Little Hole

The first seven miles below Flaming Gorge Dam are the water people mean when they say the Green. Releases come out of the dam cold and clear year-round, so this stretch fishes in January as readily as July, and the fish are concentrated, visible and educated. A maintained foot trail runs the north bank (river left) the entire way from the dam to Little Hole and continues about three miles into the B section, which makes this one of the few blue-ribbon tailwaters in the West you can fish top to bottom without a boat.

Boats launch at the Spillway ramp below the dam in Dutch John and take out at Little Hole. The float is short enough to be a half day, and in summer the ramp queue at the dam is the bottleneck, not the fishing. Wading anglers walk up from Little Hole or down from the dam, and the stretch around the second and third mile markers gets the most pressure because it is the easiest reach from both ends.

B Section, Little Hole to Indian Crossing

Below Little Hole the walk-in trail peters out and the river becomes a float. The B section runs about nine miles through Red Canyon to the Indian Crossing takeout at the top of Browns Park. Red Creek enters roughly four miles down and makes the biggest rapid between the dam and the Colorado line; below it the gradient eases into grassy banks and islands. Pressure drops off immediately because there is no road access, and brown trout become a bigger part of the catch.

This is a full-day float. There are no road-accessible takeouts between Little Hole and Indian Crossing, only float-in campsites, so anglers commit to the whole section when they launch.

C Section, Browns Park

From Indian Crossing down through Browns Park to the Colorado line the river slows, warms with distance from the dam, and braids through cottonwood bottoms on BLM land and the Browns Park National Wildlife Refuge. Trout numbers are well below the upper sections, but this is brown trout water and the fish run larger on average. Water temperature matters here in late summer, and the flow and temperature readings on this page are the way to judge it before driving down. Swallow Canyon is the usual takeout.

Rainbow Trout

Rainbows dominate the A section and are the fish most anglers come for. They hold in the clear water along the drop-offs and in the seams below every riffle, and they see enough flies that sizes 18 through 22 on light tippet are the standard rather than the exception. Midges and Baetis carry the fishing for most of the year; the cicada hatch from May into early summer is the one time the same fish will eat a size 8 dry fly on the surface, and Tricos take over on late summer mornings.

Brown and cutthroat trout

Browns are present the length of the river and become the majority of the catch as you move down through the B and C sections. They are the streamer fish on the Green, worked along the canyon walls of the upper B section and through the deeper bends of Browns Park, and they are the fish that show up in the fall when the rainbows have gone quiet.

Cutthroat are a smaller part of the fishery, most often encountered in the A section. Utah DWR maintains the rainbow and cutthroat populations with stocking while the browns are self-sustaining, and cutthroat and cut-bow hybrids turn up regularly enough to be worth knowing about, particularly on Baetis patterns during the spring and fall hatches.

Season and regulations

The Green fishes year-round below the dam. Bureau of Reclamation releases set the flow: local shops call 800 to 2,000 cfs the wading range for the A and B sections, with the easiest wading below about 1,200 cfs, and the river floats from 800 cfs up through spring bypass releases above 8,000 cfs. The 800 to 2,000 cfs range is what this page compares the Greendale gauge against. Expect a high-flow period in May, a smallmouth bass spike flow in June and double-peak power fluctuations through summer.

From Flaming Gorge Dam downstream to the Colorado state line, including Gorge Creek at Little Hole, the Green is artificial flies and lures only with a limit of 3 trout: 2 under 15 inches and 1 over 22 inches, and every trout from 15 to 22 inches must be released immediately. Fishing from a motorized boat is closed on this reach. Burbot, northern pike, smallmouth bass and walleye have no limit and must be killed, not released. Check the current Utah Division of Wildlife Resources fishing guidebook before you go.