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Pere Marquette River Lake Run — Salmon, Steelhead, Brown Trout

Peak run · Chinook salmon as of 1 October 2026

59.5 miles of run water on the Pere Marquette River, from Lake Michigan up to the end of the mainstem. 4 species run it, on windows curated from MDNR guidance.

Open this river in the app
The run corridor The mouth The end of the mainstem The piers — 9%
The pale water is where chinook were holding on 2026-09-30 — 91% 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 Pere Marquette is undammed from Lake Michigan to its headwaters — a National Wild and Scenic river, and the reason it is known is that a fish can run the whole thing. NID lists nothing on the mainstem; the only structure in the basin is Foster Lake Dam (MI00668) on a tributary to the Big South Branch. Because there is no water where the run stops, no upstream zone is drawn: 110 NHD reaches run pierheads to 1.85, river mouth to 7.42, and lower river all the way to 59.51.

All four windows carry the estimator's dates, which are the same on every river it models. Chinook run 15 Aug – 31 Oct, peak 15 Aug – 15 Oct; coho 1 Sep – 30 Nov, peak 15 Sep – 15 Nov; steelhead 1 Oct – 31 Dec on the fall side, with the spring run peaking March through April; lake-run browns 20 Oct – 31 Jan, peak 1 Nov – 15 Jan. Eight state boating access sites are recorded in the corridor, from Loomis Street up to The Forks.

The questions about this river

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

What runs the Pere Marquette 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

No barrier inside the run. The corridor runs to the end of the mainstem, which is a claim from the National Inventory of Dams rather than a gap in the data — the NID lists no structure on this river.

No barrier. The Pere Marquette is undammed from Lake Michigan to its headwaters — it is a National Wild and Scenic river and the reason it is famous is that a fish can run the whole thing. NID lists nothing on the mainstem; the only structure in the basin is Foster Lake Dam (MI00668) on a tributary to the Big South Branch. There is no water where the run stops, so no upstream zone is drawn.

The run water, mouth to ceiling

ZoneWhat it isRiver miles
Pier the pierheads and the harbour mouth 0.0–1.9
Mouth the river mouth 1.9–7.4
Lower the lower river 7.4–59.5

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 Pere Marquette River on the live map →
The Pere Marquette 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.

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