Montana · Kokanee and Chinook salmon
Can you keep a kokanee and chinook salmon in Montana?
Yes, with limits
Western District
Open year-roundSize
No size limit stated
total length
Daily bag
20
per person per day, both species combined
Possession
40
total you may hold
No minimum size, twenty a day, forty in possession.
Central District
Open year-roundSize
No size limit stated
total length
Daily bag
10
per person per day, both species combined
Possession
10
total you may hold
No minimum size, half the Western District bag.
What we left out on purpose
- Bighorn Lake (a separate water from the Bighorn River this site tracks) carries its own sauger/walleye numbers (6 combined daily, only 3 may be sauger) — not modelled here since this site follows the river, not the lake.
- Gallatin River carries a boat-fishing closure between the Yellowstone National Park boundary and the East Gallatin River, and a fixed general season (third Saturday in May – November 30) on the stretch from Porcupine Creek Road to the West Fork — gear/access rules rather than size or bag numbers, not modelled in this schema.
- The Madison River's Lyons-Bridge-to-Ennis-Bridge stretch is actually two adjoining catch-and-release segments (Lyons–Varney and Varney–Ennis) with a near-identical but not byte-for-byte identical rule (one restricts all trout, the other only rainbow). This site's tracked coordinate sits almost exactly at Varney Bridge, the boundary between them — both are described together rather than forcing a guess about which side of the bridge the coordinate falls on.
- Channel catfish, shovelnose sturgeon, tiger muskie and walleye/sauger are not modelled for these six waters because none of the six carries its own number for them and none is a species this site's water reports actually target.
- Montana's hundreds of further named-water exceptions beyond the six waters this site tracks are not modelled — the same restraint used for Colorado's, Kansas's, Michigan's and Minnesota's named-water exceptions.
Other species in Montana
Where to try today
- Bighorn River 7/10 · Good
- Bitterroot River 7/10 · Good
- Flathead Lake 6/10 · Decent
- Gallatin River 8/10 · Good
- Madison River 8/10 · Good