the pike river

The Pike River is located halfway between Kenosha and Racine Wisconsin and most easily accessed from the highway E exit from I94. It very well could be the most finicky river in southeast Wisconsin. It is one of the few tribs in the state that doesn't actually flow into a harbor, its mouth empties straight into Lake Michigan. To make matters worse, the river has the tendency to silt its mouth completely shut, its not uncommon for the city to dredge the mouth open every fall to "induce" a run of fish. It's a smaller river and tends to quickly process rain. That means the water is quick to spike up the flows and it doesn't take long for the flows to drop back down to a normal level. Those reasons alone make predicting runs of salmon and trout from the big lake hard as hell to predict. Throw in the fact that there are no dams, it makes anticipating where fish are holding extremely difficult. With good flows there is no limit to how far the fish can run. You can fish a section of river with out the presence of a single fish and then move a mile in either direction and hit the mother load.

For some, those could be reasons to not consider this as a viable opportunity for lake run salmon and trout. For me, these are the reasons I love this river so much. It offers anglers the solitude that is lost on many of the other high traffic rivers locally. When the conditions are poor, this is hands down the most challenging river around. When everything seems to come together perfectly, there is no better experience.