We absolutely love fishing small rivers inside national parks so when we realized the “prongs” of Little River we’d be fishing were inside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP), we were excited.  What made it even more exciting was having James and Janice Kelley join us in Townsend, TN for our time in and around the park.

We met our guide, Chad Williams, of The Smoky Mountain Angler at the “Y” just inside GSMNP.  We’d already “wadered up”so after talking about our day, we headed up toward Tremont, and a prong of the Little River.   When Chad picked a good spot for us both to pull over, we parked the cars and hiked across a bridge to some holes just downstream.

Given that we were wade fishing a small stream, we were spread out on the river, sometimes out of sight of one another.  Chad did a great job of finding good looking water for each of us and within a short time, we were all catching beautiful, small, wild rainbow trout.  We would “creek stomp” to another hole, usually upstream, and more often than not hook into at least one more of these native fish.

After a great morning of catching Little River little rainbows, we headed to the main prong of the river to see if we could hook into something a bit bigger.  We scrambled down steep hillsides, did a bit of bushwhacking, and carefully navigated slippery boulders in the river, but, never could find that “big one”.  Barb and I hooked into a few, but James lived up to his fly fishing nickname, “Hot Stick” as he continued to catch several small rainbows in each hole he explored.   After a great day stompin’ around in the “prongs” of the Little, we headed back to the campground to meet up with Janice and head to the steakhouse.