If you want to catch fish all winter long, then the White River, down in north Arkansas, is a good place to be.

It is full of trout; both rainbows and browns, and it isn’t lined by elbow-to-elbow trout fishermen as the trout parks in Missouri often are.

Trout are not native to the Ozarks. They began to show up here way back there a hundred or more years ago, when someone figured out they could live in Ozark springs, and then brought them in from western states. When they dammed the White River in several locations back 60 years or so ago, they drew water from the bottom of the deep lakes which the dams created, and it was so cold down there that only trout could survive those cold temperatures on any kind of large scale.

But rainbow trout would not reproduce in those outflows, so they had to raise them in hatcheries and release them by the thousands for fishermen to catch. For grizzled old outdoor veterans like me who grew up on quiet and secluded Ozark streams where smallmouth bass were kings, trout made a poor substitute.

And when you can catch three- or four-pound smallmouth on lures in a wild natural setting, the idea of dragging cheese and corn along trying to hook a 12-inch rainbow trout seemed akin to hunting chipmunks when you had grown up in the bear woods.

But if you are a fly-fisherman, or if you can adapt to light spinning gear and cast small lures with light line, you can get to where it ain’t half bad, fishing for chipmunks. Rainbow trout are good to eat, and you can get off by yourself somewhere on the White in the winter and have fun catching them.

Still, it made things a whole lot more interesting when brown trout once stocked in the White began to reproduce and grow to sizes above 10 pounds in very little time. Fishermen began to get the idea, keep the stocked rainbows to eat and turn back the browns to grow and reproduce.

Now you can visit the White in the winter when it isn’t crowded at all, take some heavy gear out there and cast a six-inch lure, and likely catch a half dozen browns in a morning, some of them hefty enough to make you think you’ve tied into a supersized smallmouth bass.

I have some good friends at Gaston’s Resort on the White River, and I enjoy going to see them on occasion. Manager Ron Branaman told me last week that he saw an eight-pound rainbow trout taken from the White this past month, which is just an unheard-of size for rainbows.

It must have wandered downriver quite aways from the catch-and-release area just below Bull Shoals dam where rainbows have a chance to get bigger now. But shucks, it wasn’t long ago that I caught an eight-pound brown trout just downstream from Gaston’s, and as browns go, it wasn’t even a big one.

There are some 20- to 30-pound brown trout in the White right now, and they are growing, and reproducing. The spawning season for brown trout begins in December and runs through all of January.

Ron told me there is a new lure which fishermen are using this winter that is absolutely a killer trout lure, especially on the rainbows. It is a floating trout bait, a pink artificial worm called a nitro crawler, made with some type of pheromone technology, and it is now outselling the stuff they call power bait, which has been the top lure for years.

If you are ever in the area of Lakeview, Ark., where Bull Shoals Dam is located, visit with Ron at Gaston’s resort and he can tell you all about trout fishing. You might ask him if he knows anything about smallmouth, and tell him that the only real fishing in the Ozarks is smallmouth fishing, but you might be willing to try rainbows if you could find some that could outfight a perch.

Don’t tell him I said that however!

I tell people to stop by Gaston’s even if they don’t intend to fish, because they have a restaurant there overlooking the river, which is a veritable Ozark fishing museum. I have never seen so much old-time fishing and hunting gear from the Ozarks assembled in one place.

Sometime this winter when all the hunting seasons are over, I will go down there and write another column about catching a big brown trout in the cold, but I will probably not say anything about catching a limit of rainbows 12 to 15 inches long on light tackles to eat.

The latter isn’t all that hard to do, and it doesn’t have a thing to do with fishing ability or being a grizzled old Ozark river fisherman like me.

Address correspondence to Larry Dablemont, Box 22, Bolivar, Mo., 65613. Send e-mail to lightninridge@alltel.net, check the Web site www.larrydablemont.com, or call (417) 777-5227.