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Kalamazoo River Lake Run — Salmon, Steelhead, Brown Trout

Peak run · Chinook salmon as of 1 October 2026

36.4 miles of run water on the Kalamazoo River, from Lake Michigan up to Allegan City Dam. 5 species run it, on windows curated from MDNR guidance.

Open this river in the app
The run corridor The mouth Allegan City Dam — the run stops here The mouth — 50% The piers — 23% Lower river — 23%
The pale water is where chinook were holding on 2026-09-30 — 2% of the run was still out on Lake Michigan, which this picture does not reach. That day's gauge and lake readings were measured. Drawn 1 October 2026, north up, and it is a map of the river rather than of the lake it runs from.

The Kalamazoo's run corridor is 36.4 miles over 31 NHD reaches, ending at the Allegan City Dam as recorded in the EGLE Michigan Dam Inventory. The pierheads and harbour mouth take the first 2.62 miles, the river mouth reaches 7.56, the lower river runs to 26.11, and from there to 36.37 the water sits above the first holding water and below the ceiling. Eight state boating access sites lie in the corridor, including Allegan Dam East, Hacklander, Lake Allegan West and Swan Creek Pond.

The windows here carry the estimator's dates rather than months, the same set it uses on all sixteen rivers it models: chinook 15 Aug – 31 Oct, coho 1 Sep – 30 Nov, steelhead 1 Oct – 31 Dec, and lake- run brown trout 20 Oct – 31 Jan, peaking 1 Nov – 15 Jan. Lake sturgeon set the Kalamazoo apart from most of this shore, spawning on the gravel immediately below the Allegan City Dam from April into June and peaking in May, keyed to temperature rather than date — starting around 55°F and finished above about 64°F. The fishery is catch-and-release; possession is closed on this water for a state- threatened species.

The questions about this river

One page each, answered from the same records as this one.

What runs the Kalamazoo River

Each window is calendar guidance curated from the state's own run-timing prose, not a regulation and not an observation. The stage beside it is this site's reading of that window against 1 October 2026. This river is one of the sixteen the staging estimator models, so the window is shown in the estimator's dated form. Those dates are one statewide set, the same on all sixteen rivers, and no more river-specific than the months they restate — what the estimator adds here is the daily staging read, not a sharper calendar.

The ceiling

Allegan City Dam is where the run stops. Everything above it is upstream of the fishery — a fish cannot pass it, so the water above holds resident trout and not run fish, whatever the calendar says.

EGLE Michigan Dam Inventory, DamName 'Allegan City Dam', River 'Kalamazoo River'

The run water, mouth to ceiling

ZoneWhat it isRiver miles
Pier the pierheads and the harbour mouth 0.0–2.6
Mouth the river mouth 2.6–7.6
Lower the lower river 7.6–26.1
Upstream above the first holding water, up to the ceiling 26.1–36.4

River miles from the harbour mouth, walked up the NHDPlus HR mainstem. Fish arrive at the bottom of this table and work up it as the river cools and rises.

Access

State boating access sites inside the corridor's box, from the MDNR Boating Access Sites record. A ramp is not a wade-in — these are where a boat and a car go, and the bank between them is a question for the public land layer on the live map.

Open the Kalamazoo River on the live map →
The Kalamazoo River river page — gauges, temperature and regulations by reach →

Regulations

Great Lakes tributary rules are their own rules: seasons, gear and possession on run water differ from the inland trout regulations, and they differ by river and often by reach. Michigan's regulation summary is here, and the state's own guide is the regulation.

Lake sturgeon is a Michigan state-threatened species. Possession is closed on this water and the fishery is catch-and-release. The MDNR rehabilitation strategy and the Fishing Guide are the rules; this page is not.

Tackle

General guidance by species, not by river — there is no record of what a given river fishes best with, and a page that invented one would be worse than a page that says so.

Nearby run rivers

The next corridors up and down this shore, nearest first.

The rest of the run

Open the lake-run map →Every run river, with where the fish are holding today.Or get BirdTrout on the App Store