Two hours east of San Francisco, the Stanislaus River offers wild rainbow trout—as well as striped bass, salmon, steelhead, and smallmouth and largemouth bass—all in the scenic setting of the lower Sierra Nevada foothills.
The lower Stanislaus, or “lower Stan” as locals sometimes call it, consists of a 4-mile tailwater stretch below Goodwin Dam extending downstream through Goodwin Canyon to the small hamlet of Knights Ferry. This section provides the river’s best fly-fishing opportunities for rainbow trout, which feed on mayfly and caddis hatches through spring and summer, and gorge on eggs during seasonal returns of salmon. Below Knights Ferry, the water warms and the river widens, and largemouth and smallmouth bass, stripers, and shad all of which take flies join the mix.
Prior to extensive damming starting in the 1950s and ending in the late 1970s, a large population of spring-run Chinook salmon returned annually to the Stanislaus. When Goodwin Dam was completed in 1979, it blocked anadromous fish from their upstream spawning habitat, extirpating the upriver run.
However, within a decade, fisheries biologists discovered modest Chinook returns below the dam…