The hundreds of miles of trout streams in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park are an angler's paradise. Although you might get some arguments on the matter from folks in Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York, a solid case can be made for the park waters providing the finest fishing for wild trout east of the Rockies.

There hasn't been a trout stocked in park streams for many decades, which means that every trout swimming in them was born and raised there. They may not be "natives" in the sense of having always been residents of the park (both rainbows and browns are imports), but they are wild, many generations removed from any thought of concrete hatchery walls or pelletized food.

You can find excellent fishing in almost every park stream, but for a variety of reasons, with accessibility leading the pack, some of these waters are quite "technical" in nature. "Technical," incidentally, is a convenient term trout fishermen adopt to explain why they have trouble catching fish. Another problem is popularity, with Hazel Creek being a prime example. Although quite remote, Hazel Creek has received so much attention in print and holds such a special place in the minds of local anglers, it can at times resemble opening day on heavily stocked state waters. That is to say, as I once heard an old-timer put it, "It's so crowded you better tote your own rock if you want one to stand on."

By way of sharp and welcome contrast, at least to folks like yours truly who think the perfect trout-fishing day is one when they never see another angler, there are plenty of destinations on the North Carolina side of the park that let you get away from the crowds. Let's take a detailed look at five of them, with information not only on how to get there but other matters, such as stream size, nature of the fishing you can expect, and the like.

LEFT FORK OF DEEP CREEK
If getting "back of beyond" is your cup of angling tea, then give some thought to fishing the Left Fork of Deep Creek. You won't find trails leading to it in any of the guidebooks or hiking manuals, nor will you find much information about the area in park literature. The reason is simple: There are no maintained trails on the Left Fork. It's about as remote, other than the headwaters of Raven Fork, as you can get in the park. It wasn't by accident that the great hero of the Cherokees, who fought against removal to Oklahoma, Tsali, sought refuge here after killing one of the troopers sent by Andrew Jackson.

Yet once you wade the waters of Left Fork, you will be enchanted. For starters, the stream, although averaging only 15 or 20 feet wide (less as you work your way toward its headwaters hard under the towering peak that is Clingmans Dome), is amazingly wide open. That's because once a year or so, tremendous downpours that might almost be categorized as cloudbursts scour the stream and keep vegetation pushed well back from its banks. As a result, the fisherman has easy casting rather that the dabbling or bow-and-arrow casts typically found on headwaters.