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Platte River Lake Run — Salmon, Steelhead, Brown Trout

Peak run · Chinook salmon as of 1 October 2026

17.3 miles of run water on the Platte River, from Lake Michigan up to Platte River Weir. 4 species run it, on windows curated from MDNR guidance.

Open this river in the app
The run corridor The mouth Platte River Weir — the run stops here 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 Platte is a short Lake Michigan corridor — 17.3 miles across 21 NHD reaches — and it ends at a structure built for the purpose. The EGLE Michigan Dam Inventory lists the Platte River Weir on the Platte River, and that weir is the ceiling of the run. The Platte is where Michigan's coho programme began, and the weir at Honor is still the state's egg take, which is a distinction none of its neighbours carry. Below it the corridor divides into pierheads and harbour mouth to river mile 1.72, the river mouth to 3.75, the lower river to 8.33, and an upstream zone from 8.28 to the ceiling.

The dated windows here are the staging estimator's statewide set rather than a Platte measurement. Chinook run 15 Aug – 31 Oct, coho 1 Sep – 30 Nov, steelhead 1 Oct – 31 Dec with a spring run peaking March into April, and lake-run browns 20 Oct – 31 Jan, staying after the salmon have gone.

The questions about this river

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

What runs the Platte 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

Platte River Weir 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 'Platte River Weir', River 'Platte River'

The run water, mouth to ceiling

ZoneWhat it isRiver miles
Pier the pierheads and the harbour mouth 0.0–1.7
Mouth the river mouth 1.7–3.8
Lower the lower river 3.7–8.3
Upstream above the first holding water, up to the ceiling 8.3–17.3

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 Platte River on the live map →
The Platte 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