Bighorn River

Cold tailwater, big trout, dense hatches — the Bighorn standard.

The Bighorn flows out of Yellowtail Dam at the foot of Bighorn Lake (Bighorn Canyon NRA) and runs north through the Crow Indian Reservation before joining the Yellowstone near Custer, MT. The fishable trout water is the roughly 13 cold, biologically rich miles from Afterbay Dam downstream through Bighorn Fishing Access Site to Two Leggins.

The river was a marginal warm-water fishery before the dam came online in the mid-1960s. Cold bottom-draw releases turned it into one of the densest trout-per-mile fisheries in the country and one of the most-floated trout rivers in Montana.