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BOW River (Alberta, Canada)

Location: The river runs right through Calgary, Alberta. Calgary is a city of some 1.1 million people with full airline service, auto rentals, and all other accommodations for the visiting fly fisher and family.

Many anglers consider the Bow the go-to river in western Canada. Over the years, the Bow has received a great deal of recognition from Lefty Kreh and other fly-fishing celebrities, who praised its hard-fighting trout, the size of those trout, and the lack of crowds.

The Bow River begins its journey from glacier-fed Bow Lake in Banff National Park, then heads south and east, cutting through the Alberta Rockies, and then onto the Great Plains, where it meets the Oldman River and forms the South Saskatchewan River. It then continues north and east, eventually ending up in Hudson’s Bay.

From a trout-fishing perspective, the stretch of river that gets the nod from anglers is the 40 miles located in and below Calgary, referred to as the Lower Bow. Above Calgary, the river is a victim of fluctuating flows from a number of hydro dams—this, coupled with cold water and low nutrients, results in low trout population and slow growth rates below the Banff town site. At the western edge of Calgary, the river enters the Bearspaw Reservoir, which stabilizes the flow and forms the tailwater. As the river winds through the city, it picks up nutrients from Calgary’s sewage treatment plants. In this stretch it becomes a very

healthy trout river loaded with browns and rainbows and diverse aquatic insect life that gets the trout looking up.