of choice for his summer trips on the Housatonic, start slowing down once the water cools, but northern pike wake up right around then.“ Trophy fishing,” he calls it,“ not a numbers game,” the kind of outing where landing one good fish rather than a bucket of them is the goal. And trout fishing, which his shop mostly sits out during the heat of summer because the water gets too warm to fish them responsibly, comes back online.“ Fall can be a great time for fishing,” he says.“ It’ s one of my favorite times, as long as we’ re having‘ normal weather,’ whatever that is these days.” After a wet summer like the one we’ ve had, there should be enough water running in our streams come Fall for good fishing.
RIVERS If your preference is a fly rod, the Housatonic is still the region’ s marquee water. Desmond runs most of his trips there, in drift boats, plus the Hoosic up in the North County and, when conditions call for it, the Farmington just over the Connecticut line. Desmond doesn’ t run trips on the Deerfield, but MassWildlife’ s Madden points to it as a genuine fall destination in its own right, along with the branches of the Westfield River, particularly the East Branch, which runs along Route 9 down through Chesterfield Gorge and is, in his description, simply a beautiful stretch of water to fish.
Both Madden and Desmond flagged the two Green Rivers in western Massachusetts. Madden mentioning the Green, which flows from Southern Vermont through North County and into the Deerfield, while Desmond specifically noted the one in Great Barrington as good water that a lot of people pass up in favor of the Housatonic. The trouble with many rivers, streams, and creeks is access.“ If all the rivers in Berkshire County were more accessible, you’ d find more people fishing them,” Desmond says. A fair amount of the best water sits behind private land, or requires a
difficult hike to reach, which keeps it quieter than it might otherwise be. That’ s good for you if you’ re willing to do the hiking; less so, if you’ re not.
Madden also names Konkapot Brook in the southern part of the county as one of our better cold-water fisheries. Berkshire County, he told me, has the best wild trout populations and the best trout water in the state, a product of the high-elevation, high-energy streams that stay cold enough through the summer to support them.
If you’ re newer to this sport, both gentlemen suggest avoiding the bigger rivers. The Housatonic’ s catch-and-release section is popular and interesting water, Madden says, but“ maybe not the place I would direct somebody who’ s fishing for the first time.” Desmond and his team enjoy teaching beginners, and he estimates a 98 percent catch rate among firsttimers he takes out. His approach is built around a guide managing the day and the expectations, not somebody wading in a cold current alone for the first time.
Let’ s make something beautiful.
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78 // BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE Fall 2026