Fly Fishing North Tongue River - Burgess Junction

Fly fishing North Tongue River – Burgess Junction puts you on a small, clear high-meadow stream in the Bighorn National Forest of northeast Wyoming. Locals call it the North Fork. It threads open grass and willow margins near 7,900 feet at Burgess Junction, then runs roughly twenty-three miles down to its meeting with the South Tongue at about 7,000 feet, where the two forks form the Tongue River proper. This is genuinely small water — the drainage above the old stream gage covers barely thirty square miles — and the draw is the setting rather than the size.

Classed as a freestone and driven entirely by Bighorn snowmelt, it fishes more like a meadow spring creek than a tumbling mountain stream. Expect riffle-and-pool sequences separated by long glassy flats, gravel bars, and deeply undercut grass and willow banks that hide better fish than the water looks capable of holding. Beaver activity backs up slow, deep pools that hold some of the best trout in the system and demand the most careful presentations. The transitions matter most: where a riffle spills into a bend pool, where current presses against a cut bank. Lower down, before the confluence, the river tightens into a short canyon with steeper gradient and true pocket water.

Wyoming Game and Fish stocks Snake River cutthroat trout here and they have taken to the stream remarkably well, with fish reported to eighteen inches in a creek you can step across in places. Rainbow trout share the water, and a whirling-disease-resistant strain was introduced after the disease turned up in the drainage. Brown trout and brook trout round out the roster, the brookies most common in the smaller braids and beaver water, the browns where cover is heaviest. Most fishing runs to trout in the ten-to-fourteen-inch class, though the largest Snake River cutthroat sit tucked under the deepest banks.

Fly selection can stay simple; stealth is what matters on water this clear. Small attractor dries prospect the undercuts through the heart of the season, and a hopper-dropper covers the deeper bends and beaver flats. Early in the season, overcast days bring blue-winged olives and other small mayflies and get fish looking up. As the meadow grass dries and warms, terrestrials become the entire game — hoppers, ants, and beetles blown off the banks. Come fall, trout drop into the deeper slots and a small streamer swung tight to a cut bank can move the biggest Snake River cutthroat of the year.

There is no active gage on this reach. The old USGS station was discontinued decades ago, so the river's flow figures come from that historic record rather than any live reading — summer flows historically fell between roughly twenty-five and sixty cubic feet per second, within a broader working range of about twenty to eighty. Anglers judge conditions by eye and by season instead of a number. Wading is easy at summer levels: gravel and cobble underfoot, modest gradient, most stretches crossable, and many anglers simply wet-wade the meadows in the warm months. Early summer is the high-water period; the reliable window opens once runoff drops and holds into fall.

From Dayton, US-14 climbs west into the Bighorns about twenty-five miles to Burgess Junction. The highway over Granite Pass is maintained year round, but the Forest Service road along the water is unplowed and deep snowpack keeps the meadows shut down well past the calendar thaw. Forest Service Road 15 — Burgess Road — runs north about a mile to North Tongue Campground, the only developed campground on this fork, crossing the river just above it; Burgess Picnic Ground offers day use nearby. Prune Creek and Dead Swede sit on the South Tongue and Sibley Lake Campground is on a lake, so none are North Tongue access despite sometimes being listed that way. Nearly the whole drainage is national forest with numerous pull-offs, so you can park, walk, and fish. Dayton is the nearest town and Sheridan the nearest airport.