Hoback Junction and the road east
Drive south from Jackson on US 189 for about 13 miles and you reach the roundabout at Hoback Junction, where the Hoback pours into the Snake just above the head of the Snake River Canyon. Take the exit for US 189/191 East and the highway follows the Hoback upstream through a tight, steep canyon. That road is the whole access plan for most visitors: the river sits beside the pavement, and you fish it from the pullouts on Bridger-Teton National Forest ground.
The river runs about 55 miles from the northern Wyoming Range, once went by the name Fall River, and carries the name of John Hoback, the mountain man who guided the Astor party through in 1811. No dam sits anywhere on it. Above the canyon it spreads across a marshy, braided flat called the Hoback Basin, where the hamlet of Bondurant sits, and higher still its largest tributary, the South Fork, comes in about nine miles below the source.
Canyon pocket water versus the Bondurant flats
Treat the river as two different fisheries. The canyon between the junction and the basin is fast, confined water where you hop from pullout to pullout and fish the softer edges behind boulders. Up in the Hoback Basin around Bondurant the channel braids through willows and meadow, slows down, and asks for a longer walk and a quieter approach.
The best side trip leaves the highway 11 miles east of the Hoback Junction roundabout. Turn left on Granite Creek Road, Forest Road 30500, and follow it roughly eight miles to Granite Creek Campground, which sits beside Granite Creek, a designated Wild and Scenic tributary, near the edge of the Gros Ventre Wilderness. The Forest Service puts the drive at 33 miles and about 48 minutes from town, and Granite Hot Springs pool is up the same road if the day ends cold.
What the 1917 gauge says about wading
USGS gauge 13019500 sits near the mouth and measures 563 square miles of drainage, nearly all of the river. Its record has holes: 1917 and 1918, 1944 through 1958, then nothing until it came back in 2022. Across those years the monthly means run near 200 cfs all winter, jump to 683 in April, and crest at 2,121 in May and 2,267 in June. July still averages 1,114.
No Jackson shop publishes a wading number for this gauge, so the ideal range on this page comes from the USGS record itself: 266 to 479 cfs, the span between the long-term October mean and the August mean. Inside it the canyon edges are wadeable and the fish are spread out. Well above it, in June and early July, stay on the bank. Recent years have run leaner than the old record: August 2025 averaged 270.5 cfs, the lowest August on file, while March 2026 averaged 557.1, the highest March. In late September 2026 the river read between 199 and 330 cfs.
No special-regulation water: plain Area 1 limits
Wyoming Game and Fish puts the entire Hoback drainage in Area 1 of the 2026 regulations, and the Area 1 exception list names no section of the Hoback, so the whole river from Bondurant to the Snake fishes under the general Area 1 stream rules. The trout creel is three per day on streams, with no more than one over 16 inches and no more than one cutthroat over 12 inches, and six total if you also fish lakes. Brook trout, lake trout and splake are counted separately. Whitefish carry a limit of 25. Live baitfish may not be used or possessed anywhere in Area 1.
The statewide season is open all year, 24 hours a day, unless a Commission rule says otherwise, and none does here. Anyone 14 or older needs a license: in 2026 a resident 12-month license is $27, a nonresident daily is $14, a nonresident five consecutive day license is $56, and the conservation stamp is $21.50. Note that the release rule for cutthroat from November 1 through March 31 applies to named Snake River reaches, not to the Hoback, so cutthroat you keep here count only against the Area 1 numbers above. The fine-spotted cutthroat in this river are the native trout of the Snake drainage, and releasing them costs you nothing.
Cold water in the dog days, drakes in September
When the Snake heats up, this is where to go. On July 31, 2026, with Game and Fish asking for a voluntary noon-to-sunrise break on the Snake and Flat Creek, Trout Unlimited's Snake River Headwaters scientist reported that the Buffalo Fork, Fish Creek and the Hoback were the coolest sites with real-time temperature data, still in the upper 50s and low 60s into early afternoon. Game and Fish suggests changing your handling once water passes 65 degrees, so carry a thermometer anyway.
Grand Teton Fly Fishing's Jackson Hole chart has pale morning duns, little yellow stones and terrestrials from July through September, gray drakes in July and August, and mahogany duns in September and October. WorldCast Anglers' walk-wade report of September 7, 2026, tagged to the Hoback, named terrestrials, Hecuba drakes and mahoganies as the flies that matter as summer winds down. Fine-spotted cutthroat will leave a hatch for a well-placed hopper, and when nothing is coming off, a streamer swung through the canyon slots is the other honest option.