The author poses with a nice trout taken from the Valley River. Photo by Jim Casada

When talk turns to trout fishing, most of us think of getting back of beyond where the only sound pollution you’ll hear comes from a distant airplane and where chances are pretty good you won’t see more than two or three other people in the course of an entire day. There’s plenty to be said for the solace of solitude and getting back of beyond, but similarly there’s undeniable appeal to being just a few minutes from a fine meal in a restaurant, a hot shower, and the comforts of a nice motel room. For those of the latter persuasion, devotees of fine angling but also individuals who like their amenities, there’s good news in the North Carolina high country. A bunch of small towns in the southwestern part of the Tar Heel State offer streams that literally flow through them or else are situated just a mile or two away, and in every instance they provide first-rate fishing.

I feel perfectly comfortable in saying this, because as a son of the Smokies who has devoted appreciable portions of all but the first six years of my life to marvelously misspent times astream, these are waters I have fished. Indeed, in a couple of cases they rank quite high on my overall list of places to go if my primary concern is catching a mess of fish for what my late mother liked to describe as “release to grease.” Equally interesting is the fact that in a couple of cases you won’t even find them on the list of designated mountain trout waters or part of the list of streams that receive periodic stockings of hatchery fish.

Aesthetically, the five streams covered below (or at least the urban portions of them) won’t win any awards, but otherwise, they just might offer you some real surprises. If you visit on opening day in the early spring on those that are stocked, there will be so much competition, you just might, as a friend of mine says, want to “carry your own rock to stand on.” Moreover, if you are counting on hatchery-raised fish to fill your creel, most of what that same confirmed curmudgeon variously describes as “dough bellies,” “soap heads,” and “finless wonders” (i.e., stocked trout) tend to be caught out pretty quickly. The good news, though, is that all these streams have solid populations of wild fish.

These stream-bred trout are anything but pushovers, and they will place as much or even more demand on your technical and tactical finesse as their brethren in more remote locations. Yet one of the streams (Deep Creek) produced the biggest wild rainbow I’ve ever caught in the southern Appalachians and another (Jonathan Creek) gave me a true rarity: a 100-trout day. Add to such considerations the possibility that in any of these waters you just might, should Dame Fortune see fit to select you as her favored stepson on a given day, tangle with a true bruiser of a brown trout. Enough of this whetting of the angling appetite though. Let’s get down to the real skinny with a close look at five “citified” trout streams.