The State Parks With The Best Fishing

National parks get the postcards, but state parks quietly hide some of the best fishing water in the country, and they let you actually keep what you catch. The trick is knowing where the fish are stacked up and what is waiting on the end of your line. These eight state parks deliver on both counts, from trophy walleye and saltwater tarpon to wild trout you have to hike for, plus a bison audience and a few thousand alligators thrown in at no extra charge. Grab a license and a landing net.

Custer State Park, South Dakota

Custer's five mountain lakes, including granite-ringed Sylvan Lake and popular Legion Lake, sit high and cold in the Black Hills, which is exactly what rainbow, brown, and brook trout like. The water is clear enough to watch your quarry decide whether to humor you. The real draw here is the setting, because Custer is home to a free-roaming herd of well over a thousand bison. There is a specific thrill in landing a trout and turning around to find a two-thousand-pound animal has wandered up to supervise. Just remember who has the right of way.

Pymatuning State Park, Pennsylvania

Pymatuning is built around a 17,000-acre reservoir straddling the Pennsylvania-Ohio line, one of the largest lakes in either state, and anglers come for the heavy hitters: walleye, muskellunge, and both largemouth and smallmouth bass, with crappie for good measure. Musky here are the classic "fish of ten thousand casts," which is a polite way of saying bring snacks. And then there is Pymatuning's genuinely famous party trick, the Linesville spillway, where carp gather so thick that ducks literally walk across their backs to grab bread. You did not misread that. It is a bucket-list oddity that happens to sit on top of a serious fishery.

Myakka River State Park, Florida

One of Florida's oldest and largest parks, Myakka wraps around a slow, tea-colored Wild and Scenic river winding through prairie and wetland. Cast from the bank or drift it by canoe and you are into largemouth bass, bluegill, and catfish in genuinely fishy numbers. There is one detail worth internalizing before you wade in, though: the Myakka is absolutely loaded with alligators. You are not the only one fishing this river, and the other anglers have better teeth. Keep your stringer close, keep your fingers closer, and enjoy some of the best freshwater action in the state.

Bahia Honda State Park, Florida

Time for saltwater. Down in the Middle Keys, Bahia Honda gives shore-bound and small-boat anglers a shot at the holy trinity of flats fishing: bonefish, tarpon, and permit, the three species that make up the coveted "flats grand slam." The clear, shallow water is perfect for sight-fishing, which sounds romantic until you realize the fish can see you just as well and are far less impressed. If the flats humble you, the old Bahia Honda bridge and the channels serve up snapper and barracuda that are a lot less picky. It is arguably the best pure fishing address on this entire list.

Baxter State Park, Maine

Baxter is the wilderness pick, a vast, roadless park in the shadow of Mount Katahdin where the fishing is a reward for effort. Its remote backcountry ponds hold wild, native brook trout that have never seen a hatchery truck, along with landlocked salmon, and reaching the best water often means a hike and a canoe. The fish are not enormous. A hand-length wild brookie is a trophy here. But catching a native trout in cold, clear, silent water miles from the nearest road is the kind of thing anglers spend the other fifty-one weeks of the year daydreaming about. Purists consider this hallowed ground.

Itasca State Park, Minnesota

Itasca is where the mighty Mississippi begins as a stream shallow enough to walk across, which is a fun place to stand while you fish. The park holds more than a hundred lakes, headlined by Lake Itasca, and they are stuffed with classic northern species: walleye, northern pike, crappie, and bass. This is quintessential Minnesota fishing, the kind where a still morning, a quiet lake, and a cooler of walleye fillets counts as a perfect day. Landing a fish at the literal source of North America's greatest river is a bragging right that never really expires.

Bear Lake State Park, Utah and Idaho

Straddling the Utah-Idaho line, Bear Lake glows an improbable turquoise thanks to limestone suspended in the water, earning it the nickname "Caribbean of the Rockies." Beneath that postcard surface swim Bonneville cutthroat trout, lake trout, and whitefish. But the truly weird prize is the Bonneville cisco, a small fish found nowhere else on Earth, which runs in a frenzy every January. The local move is to wade into the freezing shallows in waders and scoop them out with dip nets, which is either the most fun you can have in a Rocky Mountain winter or a cry for help, depending on your tolerance for cold water.

Adirondack Park, New York

We will end with the giant. Adirondack Park is the largest park in the contiguous United States, and it is essentially one enormous fishing playground, with around three thousand lakes and ponds and some thirty thousand miles of rivers and streams. The species list reads like a wish list: brook trout, lake trout, landlocked salmon, smallmouth bass, and northern pike, spread across everything from roadside lakes to ponds you have to paddle into. You could fish a different body of water here every single day and run out of years before you run out of water. If variety is what you are after, nothing else comes close.