Lower Mountain Fork

About

Beavers Bend State Park, 1970 — Lower Mountain Fork. Long before the dam, the Mountain Fork flowed through Choctaw Nation territory. The Choctaw were relocated to southeastern Oklahoma via the Trail of Tears (1831–1833), the first of the Five Civilized Tribes to be removed, and McCurtain County remains within the Choctaw Nation to this day. The river's story is inseparable from that homeland.

The watershed's next chapter was written in timber. The Lower Mountain Fork watershed was logged from the 1830s through the 1920s to support the regional timber industry of 1850–1910 and the railroad expansion of 1860–1910. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators. The exhaustion of the old-growth stands in 1910, the start of state forestry conservation in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s together ended large-scale logging.

The transformation that defines the river today came from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps' Tulsa District completed Broken Bow Dam in 1968, creating Broken Bow Lake and the cold tailwater that would turn the Mountain Fork into Oklahoma's year-round trout stream. By 1970, when the dam was completed and the tailrace releases began flowing through every season, the state designated the Lower Mountain Fork a trout stream. The 1,332-acre Broken Bow Lake — named for a U.S. Army captain — created the surrounding Beavers Bend State Park, established in 1970, which sits at the confluence of the Mountain Fork and the Glover River. The trout-stocking program began that same year and has drawn anglers from across the country ever since.

On the water, the run divides cleanly. From the spillway to Presbyterian Falls is 4 miles of Class II–III — the best whitewater on the river. Below that, Presbyterian Falls to Beavers Bend is 8 miles of Class I–II trout water, the gentler stretch where the coldwater fishery is at its fullest. The gauge at 07339000 shows an average of roughly 480 CFS, with an optimal paddling window between 200 and 1,500 CFS across a Class I–III river.

Today the Lower Mountain Fork carries two designations that capture its dual character: it lies within Beavers Bend State Park and is recognized as an Oklahoma Blue Ribbon Trout Stream. As of 2024, the river is stocked with over 100,000 rainbow and brown trout annually, and Beavers Bend State Park is the most-visited state park in Oklahoma, drawing over a million visitors per year. Outfitters such as the Beavers Bend Fly Shop run guided trout trips and fly-fishing instruction, while Mountain Fork Outfitters handles kayak and canoe rentals and shuttles. What began as one of the most ambitious non-impoundment trout-stocking projects in the southern United States has held its distinction for more than fifty years — a warm-water stream engineered into the country's southernmost trout water.