Alabama may not be known for its trout-fishing opportunities, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have them. In fact, you can catch rainbow trout in the Sipsey Fork tailwater year-round. And, while “Rainbows” and “Alabama” aren’t generally thought of as having too much to do with one another, to Brandon Jackson, owner of the Riverside Fly Shop in Jasper and guide on the Sipsey Fork tailwater, this uncommon pairing of words means a lot.

The story goes that in the 1960s, lake trout that lived in Lewis Smith Lake in the north-central area of the state started showing up below the lake’s enormous earthen dam in the chilly tailwater section of the Sipsey Fork, a 40- to 75-foot-wide feeder river of the Black Warrior watershed. Apparently the occasional lake trout would pass through the dam and into the tailwater and, because of the...