The Bear River Above Evanston Is Finally Fishing Like a River Again
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
For four years, anyone who fished the Bear River north of town was fishing around a scar. A concrete diversion dam sat roughly 15 miles upstream, eroding, useless since the city switched its water source in the 1980s, and blocking native cutthroat from moving through water they'd used for thousands of years. In September 2022, crews buried that dam and rerouted the river around it. What almost nobody talks about is the part that came after: federal biologists predicted the disturbed reach would need a few years to settle before it read as a normal river again instead of a construction zone with fish in it. Do the math from a September 2022 burial and this fall is close to the end of that window. If you haven't fished that stretch since before the dam came out, you're not fishing the same water you remember, and you're also not fishing the half-settled version anglers dealt with in 2023 and 2024. You're fishing something closer to what it's supposed to be.
That's the thing worth knowing before the leaves turn. Everything else about fall fishing around Evanston, the reservoirs, the ponds, the license rules, sits downstream of that one fact.
The dam's story starts with a fish study. Between 2011 and 2014, Trout Unlimited tagged Bear River cutthroat trout with radio telemetry and tracked them moving up to 45 miles to spawn. The tracking data pointed straight at the old Evanston diversion dam as the wall stopping that migration. The dam had already gone obsolete for people. The city drilled wells in 2020 for the last households pulling water from it, which meant nothing stood in the way of removing it except money and permitting.
Money showed up through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Trout Unlimited, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the City of Evanston, private landowners, and local construction contractors worked the project together, and the result reconnected more than 15 miles of stream and rebuilt roughly 800 feet of river channel and fish passage right at the old dam site. It was one of the first infrastructure-law fish passage projects completed anywhere in the country.
"The Bear River is the homeland of the Shoshone, it's an ecological hotspot," said Mike Mazur, a fishery biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The dam wasn't the only barrier addressed. The same regional partnership, working through the Western Native Trout Initiative, has spent the years since fixing smaller diversions that locals would recognize by name if they've ever irrigated near the river: the Almy Ditch, the S.P. Ditch and Sims Creek Slough diversion, the Booth Diversion. Across the whole three-state Bear River watershed, that broader effort has removed 24 dams and push-up structures and reopened something like 144 miles of stream between 2018 and 2026. The Evanston dam was the headline project locally. The ditch work is why the river above town keeps working the way it's supposed to instead of getting re-blocked a mile downstream.
Here's the detail that gets skipped in most retellings of the dam story. Burying a dam and re-channeling a river doesn't produce a finished product on day one. The bed has to find its own grade, the banks have to stop sloughing, the gravel has to sort itself into the runs and riffles fish actually want. USFWS said as much back in February 2023, framing the settling process as a matter of years, not months.
Four fishing seasons have passed since the burial. That's not a guess, it's simple arithmetic from a fixed date. What it means practically is that the reach anglers fish this September is the least disturbed version of the restored river to date, closer to whatever its long-term character turns out to be than any fall since the project wrapped. Cottonwoods and willows that were bare dirt in 2022 have had time to take root and start doing the bank-holding work they're supposed to do. That's a small, unglamorous fact, but it's the difference between a river that's still healing and one that's settled into a shape worth learning.
The restored reach isn't the only water in play, and most people mix in a few spots depending on the day and how much driving they want to do.
| Spot | Distance from town | What it is | Fall notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bear River, restored reach north of town | About 12 to 15 miles via Highway 89 through the town of Bear River, WY | Wading river, no float | Newly settled channel, native Bonneville cutthroat, some access roads want four-wheel drive |
| Bear River State Park | In town, 601 Bear River Dr | River access plus stocked water | Easiest cast in town, good for an evening after work |
| Sulphur Creek Reservoir | About 12 miles southeast | 233-acre reservoir | Rainbow, cutthroat, and walleye; the same water hosts the Lions Club's winter ice derby |
| Woodruff Narrows Reservoir | North of town | Reservoir | Quieter option, historically inconsistent by local report |
| Kingfisher Bend Ranch | Private land near Evanston | Private river frontage plus a stocked pond | Guide bookings available, license needed for the river but not the pond |
Access on the restored stretch is on foot only past the parking areas, and the road over Hanks Hill toward the Bear River public access area is one where locals genuinely mean it when they say bring a truck. It's a walking river, not a float, with firm meadow gravel in most stretches and soft banks wherever the willows crowd the bank.
Flow drives everything on this river more than the calendar does. Spring runoff pushes the Bear River high and off-color from snowmelt into roughly mid-April, and it typically doesn't settle into a fishable range until sometime between early June and mid-July. From there it holds in a fifty to two hundred cfs window that wades and fishes well straight through fall, right up until ice starts forming. The USGS gage at Evanston sits inside this exact reach, so the flow number on a phone screen is a direct read on the water in front of you, not a rough estimate from somewhere downstream.
A few rules are worth knowing before a fall trip, since the Bear River drainage runs under different regulations than most Wyoming water:
Fall on this water is really a stretch of borrowed time before the reservoirs take over the story. Sulphur Creek Reservoir turns from a summer boat-and-bank spot into the site of the Lions Club's annual ice fishing derby once the ice sets up, a tradition that's run there for years and still shows up on the Evanston Chamber's event calendar every winter. Locals already know that switch is coming. It's part of why fall on the river feels like the last good stretch before everyone starts drilling holes instead of wading gravel bars.
None of this changes the basic shape of a season here. It just means this particular fall carries a little more weight than the last three did, because the river finally had enough time to become itself again.
If you already call Evanston home, you've probably got an opinion about which stretch fishes best right now. If you're still looking for a house close enough to walk to one, Britany Erickson knows the roads, the access points, and the neighborhoods near all of it. Text or call her at (307) 799-8096 to talk about your next move.
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