Sweet Streams: 5 Hot Rivers for Midwest Smallies

The Midwest boasts a wide variety of excellent river smallmouth fisheries.

These include the famed Menominee River along the border of Wisconsin and Michigan and the upper Mississippi River north of the Twin Cities, where smallmouth bass of lunker proportions are taken throughout the spring and early summer.

Larger rivers such as these are accessible to motorboats in many areas, though jet-driven vessels (either outboard or inboard) are appropriate in shallower sections.

In addition to these larger waters, there are many smaller rivers throughout the region that harbor excellent numbers of smallmouth bass. Although these streams generally don’t grow smallies as...