The Best Time to Fish for Northern Pike in the West is Now

As long as you exclude the raucous topwater bite of early June, the best northern pike action in the West is late, just before and just after ice covers low-elevation reservoirs. It’s a season of opportunity for cool-water predators that know skinny times are ahead, and they’ll hit a variety of baits and hardware as long as you know where to put them.

In the event that early-winter pike don’t bite your offerings, don’t give them the choice. Spearing in shallow water, sometimes through perilously thin ice, can be the ticket to the biggest, sow-bellied, shoreline-cruising pike in any given body of water.

If December is a month of opportunity, it’s also one of uncertainty. If a windless cold snap hits the Northern Rockies, the best pike waters in the region could have a cover of 4- to 6-inch ice—too thick to boat across but too thin to support a spearshack-towing ATV. But, if December stays balmy and the ice stays away, it might be worth dragging your boat out of storage and navigating slick launches for one last shot at open-water pike. Happily, shore-fishing can be very productive for these predatory fish as they come shallow for food.

Here are the three go-to methods for scoring on big pike that are moving widely as they feed in preparation of a long Rocky Mountain winter.

DEAD-BAIT PRESENTATIONS

Even the most basic way to catch pike, by appealing to their scavenging instincts and presenting them with dead meat, has a couple variations depending on the conditions.

In open water, suspending a frozen smelt or a big hunk of cut bait under a bobber is a proven tactic, and it can work in both reservoirs and rivers. File this particular tactic away for ice-off, because it’s an even better way to catch pike that are cruising widely, looking to put on calories for the spring spawn.

In both seasons, it’s a shoreline game. Target transition zones, where deeper water shallows out around islands, submerged humps and main-lake points. The mouths of tributaries can also be good spots for pike looking to prey on the edge of thermoclines and wherever clear water changes to murky.

Any dead bait will do. Frozen smelt is a favorite of Great Lakes and Dakota pikers because they often marinate the bait in saltwater so it emits a savory smell. Cut bait, specifically the belly meat of smelt, pikeminnows and suckers, is also a good enticement, but dead perch and even live minnows (where legal) are effective. The key is to keep your bait in place. In open water I like to suspend baits 6 to 8 feet below a large bobber that will rock and roll with any wave action. I like to fish wide-gap trebles (the VMC 8527 is my go-to dead-bait pike hook) that are large enough to hold a good meal but small enough to let a big pike swallow without spitting the hook.

When my bobber goes down, I open my bail and let the fish run. Big pike often grab a bigger bait without swallowing, then swim a distance before they reorient the bait and swallow. I’ve lost a number of good pike because I set the hook too soon.

Bait-fishing is equally good once the early ice thickens enough to host worry-free angling. Rig your tip-ups with the same smelt and cut baits that you’d hang under a bobber, and let them soak for hours and even overnight. One reason tip-ups are so reliably effective on big northerns is their free-spooling exploits this run-then-eat habit. Tip-ups spooled with about 70 yards of Dacron line give fish the time to swim away with the bait before they stop and inhale the hook.

HARDWARE OPTIONS

This tactic also has variations depending on the physical state of water in the West. If it’s iced over, bring a selection of 3- and 4-inch jigging spoons and work them to mimic a wounded baitfish. If it’s open, slow-roll spinnerbaits or big muskie-sized spinners. In the first case, the action is better in the clear water under the ice, but my preference is to cast big hardware along edges of wind-strafed points or any place you can find that edge of water temperature or clarity.

In both cases, retrieve as slowly as you can to keep your hardware off the bottom. While pike, with a lower metabolism than many of the prey species they pursue, will often slash aggressively at hardware, they spend much more time waiting and watching before they pounce. This is why the boatside figure-8 retrieve is so effective. You can do the same with big Mepps Muskie Killers and bucktail spinnerbaits.

If you have to make long casts in open water or need to get deep through the ice, large paddletail swimbaits are killer on cold-water pike. I like the 5-inch Z-Man DieZel MinnowZ and SwimmerZ in colors that match local forage fish. While swimbaits are more frequently cast and retrieved, I’ve had great luck vertically jigging with them.

SPEARING TACTICS

This last technique, spearing pike out of a darkhouse shack, is decidedly a hard-water play. It’s also one for gamblers—at least until the ice thickens in mid-January. But every year, a few hardy spearers take some of the biggest pike in the West in the first weeks of ice cover.

If late-winter spearing has all the specialized gear and logistics of a military campaign because the ice is thick enough to support side-by-sides to haul it all, early spearing is all about going light. A hand-pulled sled with a clamshell shelter is all you need, as long as you can deploy your spear in the tight quarters. Many early pikers use a simple carpenter’s hand saw to open the ice.

The early action is generally oriented to shorelines and the shallow bays of larger lakes. Pike are cruising the shallows, looking for either stranded bait fish or dead fish that have succumbed to the sudden cooling water. I like to set up on the flats that drop into deeper water, with my shack situated over an 8-foot bottom that is adjacent to some sort of structure—either sunken rocks or a main-lake point.

Because the water is generally very clear at ice-on, I trade my realistic spearing decoy for one with tons of color and flash. I work my decoy aggressively, trying to get the attention of cruising pike. Of course, if water clarity brings pike in from long distances, it also puts a premium on your own stealth. No sudden movements. No leakage of light into your darkhouse shelter. You won’t have much time to throw your spear when pike cruise through, so staying focused and ready is the key to December pike spearing.

The reward of stealth and spearers’ willingness to pack gear across five inches of clear ice is fast action on good-sized pike. If you’re like me, you’ll throw at every pike that comes through your hole for the first hour. But then you realize that, just like with deer hunting, if you spear those juveniles, you’ll never have the chance to see what’s behind them. Often it’s those mature, sow-belly pike that serve as sweepers, coming behind the eager kids to take on the larger prey. You’ll see plenty of other fish, too, from pods of shoreline-cruising walleyes to trout, carp and various flavors of suckers.

If the ice gets thicker and safer as December turns to January, the pike action slows as those bigger fish head to deeper water where temperatures are more constant and they don’t have to exert as much energy to conserve precious calories. But the early spearing season isn’t for everyone. You need to be able to read not only ice quantity—or thickness—but also ice quality. You want to trust clear ice. Steer clear of cloudy ice or ice pocked with gas or air bubbles.

Plan to walk into the best December spearing waters, dragging a light sled, but wear a floatation vest, make sure you tell folks where you’ll be spearing, and don’t take chances on marginal ice. A big December pike is a great trophy, but it’s not worth risking your life and health on ice that can’t hold you and your gear.

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• This article was featured in the Deccember 2025 issue of Game & Fish magazine. Click to subscribe.

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