Two Pine Rivers, one gauge that matters
Michigan has more than one Pine River, and the state hub for this page lists gauges on several of them. USGS 04155500 near Midland is on a different river in the Saginaw basin. The trout river anglers mean when they say the Pine is the Manistee tributary through Lake, Wexford and Manistee counties, and its gauge is 04125460, Pine River at High School Bridge near Hoxeyville, on South 5 1/2 Road in South Branch Township, under two miles downstream of the M-37 crossing at Peterson Bridge. That is the number this page compares. The river itself was once called the South Branch Manistee; it forms where its North and East branches meet in northwest Osceola County, runs 53.6 miles and drops from about 1,100 feet to 685 at Tippy Dam Pond.
Why the rainbows are here
Hawkins Outfitters, which holds one of only two outfitter permits on the lower river, says the Pine has more rainbow trout than any other river in Lower Michigan and that the accepted explanation is steelhead trapped above Stronach Dam when it went in in 1918. The dam came out slowly, from 1997 to 2003, as part of the Tippy relicensing, and the study of the removal published in Transactions of the American Fisheries Society in 2010 reported brown and rainbow trout abundance more than doubling across the ten sampling sites between 1997 and 2007, with eight species that had lived only below the dam moving up into the freed river. Every trout is wild; DIY Fly Fishing says there are no hatchery fish, and the 2026 DNR stocking database has no Pine River entries. Groundwater keeps it cold, Hawkins puts the ceiling at 69 degrees, and the Forest Service's own description on Recreation.gov calls its gradient the fastest average flow of any river in lower Michigan. The clay banks are the price: Hawkins warns the Pine does not handle rain well and can blow out after a storm.
Lincoln Bridge to Low Bridge, and the permit you need to float it
The lower 26 miles, from Lincoln Bridge to the Section 16 line in T21N R13W, is a National Scenic River designated March 3, 1992. State-run landings from Briar Patch down to Lincoln Bridge need no permit. From Elm Flats to Low Bridge the landings are Forest Service, and from the Friday of Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day Monday every watercraft including tubes needs a permit: 60 private permits on weekdays and 100 on weekend days, $2 each plus a $6 transaction fee on Recreation.gov, available from January 1, with $5 day-use fees at Elm Flats, Dobson, Peterson and Low Bridge. The floats by the Pine River Association's table are Lincoln to Elm Flats 3.3 miles, Elm Flats to Dobson Bridge 6.3, Dobson to Peterson 6.2 and Peterson to Low Bridge 8. Camping inside the corridor is only at Peterson Bridge Campground on the south side of M-37; Lincoln Bridge has a campground above the corridor. Glass and foam are prohibited on the river and motorized launching is banned.
Jeff Currier, floating it with a local guide, found the upper river barely wide enough to turn a drift boat and noted that most of that water is fished on foot. Forest Service access sites are plowed in winter.
Fishing around the paddlers
A Forest Service visitor survey quoted by Pine River Paddlesports found 88 percent of people on the Pine came to paddle and 12 percent strictly to fish, which tells you how to plan July and August: Hawkins says early, late, and never on a weekend. The same shop is honest that this is not much of a bug river; its one insect worth planning around is the giant Pteronarcys stonefly in sizes 2 to 6, and it calls nymphing by far the best way to reach the rainbows in the fast water and wood. The Fly Shack's Pine River chart fills in the mayflies for the calm stretches: Hendricksons from late April to mid May, Sulphurs mid May to early July, Brown and Gray Drakes late May to mid June, Hexagenia mid June to mid July, Light Cahills mid June to mid August, Tricos from mid July, White Flies at the end of August, with olives from late April and caddis from mid May through the fall.
The High School Bridge number
No shop publishes a wading range for the Hoxeyville gauge, so the 200 to 320 cfs band here is the USGS record since 1952: monthly means of roughly 267 cfs in January, 359 in March, 438 in April, 326 in May, 280 in June, 243 in July, 239 in August, 240 in September and 260 in October. On a river this steep the difference between 240 and 400 is not academic; a summer reading near the monthly mean is a wade, and a post-storm spike off the clay is a day to fish somewhere with a sand bottom. The gauge reads below Peterson Bridge, so it includes the upper river and everything down through Dobson and Peterson but not the last miles above Low Bridge and the Tippy backwaters.
Type 2 from Elm Flats: 12-inch browns and a September 30 close
The 2026 Michigan Fishing Regulations list the Pine River from the Elm Flats Public Access Site to the confluence with the Tippy Dam backwaters as a Type 2 trout stream, identically under Lake, Manistee and Wexford counties. Type 2 means the season runs from the last Saturday in April through September 30 for both fishing and possession, minimum sizes of 10 inches for brook and rainbow trout and 12 for browns, and five fish with no more than three 15 inches or longer. All natural and artificial baits are legal; the Pine is on neither the gear restricted list nor the August-to-November single-hook list. Above Elm Flats the river is not listed, and the digest explains that Type 1 streams are generally not printed, so treat the upper river as Type 1: same season, 7-inch brook, 8-inch brown, 10-inch rainbow, five fish. Chumming is prohibited on every classified stream. After September 30 the whole trout river is closed until the next opener.