Fly Fishing on the Upper West Fork outside of Alpine, AZ

Well… I admit it: I am routinely turned on by the best fly fishing in the White Mountains region. Our designated broker Bob Pollock at Greer Land & Investments is a legendary Greer area fly fisherman with over 25 years of experience. Also, my wife Wendy Krueger has been guiding fly fishing in the Alpine and Greer area for the past 9 seasons. Between the two of them, they’ve covered as much of the water around us as anyone else…

I greatly enjoy fly fishing, but I usually favor the Yellowstone, Gallatin, and Madison rivers in Montana. I like dry fly fishing in big water with plenty of room for my backcast. Unfortunately, outside of Lees Ferry on the Colorado River, there are very few areas in Arizona that really get me excited about fishing. Sure, I’m okay with spending the day on the Lower Black River, south of Wildcat Crossing, wet fly fishing for brown trout, but I’d rather have surface strikes and lots of them. When I feel the urge to reel in a few hookjaw brown trout on a Moosehair Caddis, I head to the Upper West Fork of the Black River.

Directions: From Alpine, take US 191 (formerly US666) north of town 1 mile and turn onto Big Lake Road or Forest Road 249. Travel west approximately 16 miles past Sierra Blanca Ranch, then Three Forks area to Forest Road 249E. Continue traveling west past the Indian Springs trailhead, around the back of Big Lake past South Cove, down a large hill to the Forest Road 116 junction. Turn left (west again) on Forest Road 116 will drop into the drainage with an old cabin on your right, continue another 1/3 mile and there will be a Ramada Forest Service parking area. Directly south 100 yards is the Thompson Trail trailhead and the Upper West Fork of the Black River.

There is a culvert right up the road which is fine for a line drop, but I like to go straight south on the trail. After 1/4 mile there will be a fish barrier to protect Apache trout, you cannot fish in this area, go another 1/3 mile and there will be another fish barrier, you can start fishing below this area. Everyone likes to fish a little differently, my style is to walk as far back as I feel like that day, then start fishing upstream against the current.

I usually walk for 45 minutes on the trail which is about 3 miles. The first 1.5 miles of the hike is quite wooded along the river, there will be a small meadow that opens up, then the meadow opens up to a larger meadow. Continue south along the Thompson Trail, which is actually an old railroad grade, about halfway across the big meadow the trail will drop off (probably the location of an old bridge). Walk through the depression and after a few hundred meters you will notice the trail veers to the west, start to cross-country walk directly through the meadow heading southeast. It will travel downhill a bit and lean towards the obvious bottom of the meadow.

There is a great place to camp and have a picnic where the meadow ends and this is where I usually set up my rod. If I’m traveling alone, I carry a gun, an old Montana custom. I usually focus so much on the water that I can walk around and scare a bear or a cougar… (although I have had no experience with those critters in this area myself). If it has been raining heavily, especially during the monsoon, the pools are quite cloudy. These are good for some casts, but I’ve had much better luck casting directly upstream, usually around the corners on my side of the stream, and getting my dry fly to float blindly along the river’s edge. I routinely catch good brown trout this way using a variety of flies including jumpers. I usually fish the entire large and small meadow in about 2 hours and catch and release quite a few fish.

If you want to fish this area successfully, you must be an early riser. I like to be in the water around 6 in the morning. This means that I leave Alpine around 4:30 am in the summer, drive for 45 minutes, and then walk for 45 minutes. I have tried fishing the area later in the morning and later in the afternoon with limited success. I figure if your goal is to catch fish you should be there when they are feeding.

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