Water Users and Blue Point
The Lower Salt leaves Saguaro Lake at Stewart Mountain Dam and runs through Tonto National Forest to Granite Reef Dam, with the Bush Highway alongside the whole way. Water Users Recreation Site is the first access below the dam and the coldest water; Blue Point, at the Bush Highway bridge by the sheriff's station, is the busiest and one of the regular stocking sites. Parking at all of the Forest Service sites needs a Tonto Pass. There is no Usery Pass Road access to the river; Usery Pass is the road to the Bush Highway from Mesa.
Pebble Beach, Goldfield and Coon Bluff
The middle sites, Pebble Beach, Goldfield and Coon Bluff, are the summer tubing corridor and the water where the Salt River wild horses cross. In winter, when the dam cuts back and the river is a clear stream, this is walk-and-wade water and the AZGFD trucks sometimes stock here. In summer at 1,000 cfs plus it is a float for bass, shared with hundreds of tubers on weekends.
Phon D Sutton and Granite Reef
The Verde River joins at Phon D Sutton and the combined flow runs down to Granite Reef Diversion Dam, where the Salt is taken into the Phoenix canals and the riverbed goes dry below. Phon D Sutton and Granite Reef are stocked when the flow from the dam is low and the weather is cool; they are also good bass water at the bottom of the river.
Rainbow trout
The Salt has no wild trout. Arizona Game and Fish stocks catchable rainbows from late October through spring, roughly every other week, once Salt River Project cuts winter releases to a trickle and the water cools. Most of them are stocker size and the summer heat kills what is left, though a few holdover fish survive near the dam. Zebra midges, pheasant tails, eggs and small buggers fished near the stocking points are the standard approach, and the AZGFD stocking schedule tells you where the last load went.
Bass and warmwater fish
Largemouth bass are the summer fish, caught from tubes and kayaks on poppers and streamers during the high irrigation releases, most of them small. Brown trout turn up occasionally in reports but the fishery AZGFD manages here is stocked rainbows, and there is no wild trout population to protect.
Season and regulations
The river runs backwards from a mountain trout stream: Salt River Project releases about 1,000 cfs or more all summer for irrigation, then drops the dam to somewhere between 10 and 40 cfs from fall until spring, and the trout are stocked into the low water. This page treats 10 to 300 cfs at the gauge below Stewart Mountain Dam as trout conditions; when the summer release is running the river is bass and tubing water, not a trout stream.
An Arizona fishing license is required and the statewide trout limit applies; there are no special gear rules on the Lower Salt. A Tonto Pass is required to park at the recreation sites, and the AZGFD stocking schedule is published in advance. Check the current Arizona Game and Fish regulations before you go.