This is the top thirteen kilometres or so of the river, from the source on the snow plains to the Snowy Mountains Highway bridge at Kiandra. The bank survey on the whole-river page draws it plainly: native grass and heath along most of this stretch, patches of snow gum along the rest, and the highest, most open ground the river ever sees. The fall is gentle. The river winds across its plain in pools and undercut bends rather than dropping, and the gradient only picks up as it approaches the old township.

Gravel bed, clear water, banks you can see over. In a dry summer it shrinks to a chain of pools joined by trickles and the fish concentrate in the deeper bends. After a storm it colours for a day and clears.

Brown trout and rainbow trout, born here or walked up a long way. Expect small fish and be pleased by a good one. The forage is what falls in: grasshoppers through the warm months in numbers that matter, beetles and ants on the wind, and the small mayfly and caddis of any alpine creek. A fish holding under a tussock bank in February is waiting for a hopper. Give it one.

Summer. The melt keeps this water high and cold well into November and the snow can sit on the plain into October, so the season here is really December to April. From Christmas the dry-fly fishing comes into its own, and it holds until the frosts start to bite in April. By May the fish are thinking about other things and by the June long weekend the law has closed the river.

Fish it through the middle of the day when the wind allows. This is not a river that rewards the dawn start; it rewards the warm afternoon when the hoppers are moving and the trout are looking up.

A three or four weight, a long leader and one fly. You are casting to fish you can see, or to the one spot in the bend where a fish must be, and the cast is short. Keep low, keep the sun behind you where you can, and walk upstream. A Royal Wulff or an Adams fished parachute-style in a size fourteen covers the search fishing; switch to a hopper when you see one land on the water and get eaten.

If the fish will not look up, a small tungsten Pheasant Tail under the dry, dropped a foot below it, fishes the deeper bends; the dry-dropper page has the rig. Do not go heavier than that. The creek is not deep enough to need it, and a heavy nymph in thin water is a stone.

The discipline is in the approach, not the cast. Trout in a creek this open see everything. Move slowly. Cast from further back than feels natural. When you spook one, and you will, sit down for a minute before you move on so the next pool does not get the same news.

The Snowy Mountains Highway runs beside this stretch and crosses it at Kiandra, and the bridge is the obvious way in. The angler access points NSW DPIRD has checked along here carry the plain names they were given: Kiandra Bridge, Upstream of Kiandra Bridge, Sawyers Hill, Gooandra Track, and a highway pull-off further up. Two of them are called Locked Gate and They Put In A Gate, which tells you what to expect and whose land you are on. The pins are on the whole-river page.

All of this is inside Kosciuszko National Park. The highway is open in summer and can close in snow. There is no shelter on the plain: carry a shell and a warm layer in January, because a southerly change at fourteen hundred metres is not a rain shower. If the cloud drops onto the plain, walk back to the road before you lose it.

NSW DPIRD classifies the whole Eucumbene above the dam wall of Lake Eucumbene, including this stretch and every creek that feeds it, as artificial fly and lure water and as a trout spawning stream. In practice that means fly or lure only, a small daily bag through the open season, a tighter one-fish limit once the run is on, and a full closure later still, until the following spring.

Those are the shape of the rules, not the day. Check the current NSW trout fishing closure notification before you fish; the dates move with the public holidays.