How I Find Small Creeks to Fish

“How do you find these small creeks?” I get that question a lot, and there are several answers.

1. Books

Take a look at the fly fishing guidebooks for your state or area. A lot of the waters covered will be larger streams and rivers that aren’t ideal for tenkara, but some of them will be smaller. And even if it is mostly large streams, you can always look into the smaller creeks that feed into those larger rivers.

2. Fly shops

Fly shop websites will often have condition reports on local waters. Many will also have a page dedicated to just describing what some of the local waters are. And of course, you can always just call fly shops and ask about small streams in the area.

3. Fish and Game and similar websites

In Idaho, where I live, the government body over fish and fishing is the Idaho Department of Fish and Game (IDFG). The IDFG has an excellent website called the Fishing Planner. It’s essentially a database of every body of water in the state, and it’s amazing. You can sort and filter by county, species of fish, etc. You can look up a creek (or lake, pond, etc.) by name, and for many of those water bodies, it’ll say what species are there. Montana has a couple of sites that are similar called the Fishing Guide Mapper and the Waterbody Search. Your state may or may not have sites like these.

These websites are also good for looking at stocking reports. See what creeks are being stocked or have been stocked in the past and then go fish those creeks.

Of course, not every state has helpful resources like those sites linked above. Utah, the state I used to live in, does not. But it does have a Utah Cutthroat Slam website, and there are several great tenkara creeks and rivers listed there as holding native cutthroat trout. Again, your state may have something similar.

4. Local anglers

Join tenkara Facebook groups and forums. Be on the lookout for people in your state or area. Message them and ask if they’d be willing to swap local intel. Not all of them will be—a lot of us like to keep our favorite creeks close to the vest—but you might get lucky.

5. Maps

Scouring maps is how I find the vast majority of streams I fish. First, let’s start with the maps themselves. I prefer to use the website CalTopo. It’s free online mapping. You can choose from a wide variety of base maps. When I’m browsing an area looking for streams, I usually use the standard Google Maps terrain map. I’ll also turn on the Public Lands option to see where private/public land boundaries are. Mostly I’m looking at national forests, which show up on the map with a green overlay, but BLM lands and national park lands are also good. State lands (blue overlay) are less good (i.e., they often have more restrictions and access issues), but they can also be promising.

Once I find a creek (in the form of a thin blue line) on public land that looks promising, I switch over to to the Google Maps satellite view there on CalTopo. If you can see the water, great! It’s big enough to fish. If you can’t see the water, it may be big enough to fish with a shorter rod, or it may be too small and crowded by brush and trees. You never can tell until you’re there.

If it looks like something I’d like to fish, I type its name into the aforementioned IDFG Fishing Planner to see if there are reported to be fish in it. I’ll also Google the creek’s name to see if it comes up anywhere. Usually the creeks I’m researching are relatively obscure, obscure enough to not appear in people’s fishing trip reports or videos. But often they come up in PDF fish survey reports. These reports are extremely valuable resources for figuring out whether streams have fish, the kinds of fish there, the densities of fish there, etc. The reports are also great for finding other creeks in the area.

If a creek looks good for one reason or another, I’ll mark it with a dot on a CalTopo map. I have several CalTopo maps saved for different regions of the country, each having lots of creeks marked.

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And that’s it. Some of the creeks I find through my own sleuthing turn out to be amazing. Others are complete busts. But that sense of exploration and of figuring it out for yourself is part of the fun. Good luck!