The fall of the river on this page starts at twenty-one hundred metres and runs to sea level. The first fifty kilometres are alpine: confined bedrock headwater, short gravel floodplains, a gorge, and two flat shelves where the water sits in Guthega and Island Bend pondages, then a longer one for Lake Jindabyne. Below the Jindabyne wall the river drops onto the Monaro and eases: gravel floodplain and occasional confinement past Dalgety at around seven hundred and forty metres, then a series of bedrock gorges from the hundred-and-twenty-kilometre mark that steepen toward Burnt Hut Crossing and beyond. From there to Willis on the border, at about two hundred and twenty metres, the river is confined gorge on sand and gravel, and it stays that way through the Victorian national park to McKillop Bridge before the profile flattens out across the Orbost floodplain to Jarrahmond, Orbost and the sea.

The bank survey from space walks the same line. Woodland with a fifth of it dense timber for the alpine fifty kilometres; open woodland and native grass, with almost no dense cover, for the two hundred and fifty kilometres of Monaro and border country; then a switch to closed forest, half to two-thirds of the corridor, through the Victorian gorge; and finally cultivation taking more than half the bank across the Orbost flats. The Eucumbene, Thredbo, Mowamba, Gungarlin and Jacobs rivers feed it from the Kosciuszko side, and the Delegate and Maclaughlin come in across the border country. The Eucumbene has its own pages.

Brown trout and rainbow trout in the alpine and Monaro reaches, both in the survey record from the 1980s and 1990s, and neither stocked into the river. The upper river’s fish are wild. The survey record below the border is a different cast: congolli in numbers through the 1990s and 2000s, estuary perch, eels, flathead gudgeon, and the small fish of the Gippsland lowlands, which is a lowland river and an estuary being honest about themselves. The alpine and Monaro trout water is what this page is written for.

What the trout eat changes with the height. Caddis and mayfly in the alpine pocket water and the Monaro glides alike, evening for the caddis and daytime for the mayfly on the flatter water around Dalgety. From Christmas the grasshoppers off the tussock along the Monaro reaches, in numbers that make a hopper the afternoon fly.

Read the river’s year on this page for the alpine river. Above Island Bend the melt lifts the river from August, peaks in October at eight times the summer median, and is gone by December. From then until the April frosts the upper river sits in its typical range and the pocket water between the pondages is small wild trout fishing at its best. The high country closes itself in winter: snow, slush and a river you cannot stand in.

The Monaro river below Jindabyne runs to the dam’s calendar rather than the sky’s, and its gauges at Dalgety Weir and Burnt Hut Crossing read water temperature as well as flow. Summer afternoons on the open tableland can push that water into the twenties; fish early, keep fish wet, and read the temperature under Conditions before you drive. Spring and autumn are the pick down here.

The gorge and the estuary are other trips altogether, and a wet week in the mountains puts the gorge out of reach for days. If the forecast is wet, wait.

On the alpine river, small-stream fishing: a four weight, a dry-dropper with a Royal Wulff or a Stimulator you can see in broken light over a tungsten Pheasant Tail, one cast per pocket and a step upstream. The fish are in the soft water beside the current and the tails of the plunge pools.

Below Jindabyne the river is broader and you cover water. Work the heads and tails of pools, the inside edge of bends and any current break that offers depth close to food, with a Hare’s Ear or a Woolly Bugger when it is pushing or carrying colour, and a parachute Adams or a hopper along the tussock banks when it is low and clear. If the river is pushing hard after a release, the useful water often shrinks to the edges, and that is where you fish.

Inside Kosciuszko the upper river is reached from the Guthega and Island Bend roads and the tracks off them, and it is alpine country at every step: weather that arrives fast and from the south, snow possible in any month, a long way from help. Below Jindabyne the river crosses mixed Monaro grazing country and public land, and NSW DPIRD’s angler access points along the river are listed further down this page; a point the authority has checked is not a right to cross a paddock. Dalgety is the town on the river. Below Burnt Hut Crossing the gorge is wilderness, and across the border Snowy River National Park is canoe and walking country with no roads to the water between Willis and McKillop Bridge.

Do not infer access from the mapped river line. Confirm land tenure, track conditions and current park alerts before setting out, and read the nearest gauge before wading a river whose flow a dam can change while the sky is clear.

The Snowy crosses New South Wales and Victoria, and the rules change at the border and with the water. NSW trout limits are keyed to a classification, artificial fly and lure water, spawning stream or general trout water, and the season, size and bag differ under each. No water-specific classification has been confirmed for these reaches, so take the limit and season from the current NSW freshwater synopsis and the trout closure notification for the NSW reaches, and from the current Victorian recreational fishing guide for the river below Willis. The estuary at Marlo carries Victoria’s saltwater rules on top.