Grand River Lake Run — Salmon, Steelhead, Brown Trout

Staging · Steelhead as of 1 October 2026, 1 day out

31.5 miles of run water on the Grand River, from Lake Erie up to Harpersfield Low Head Dam. 1 species run it, on windows curated from Ohio EPA guidance.

Open this river in the app

The run corridor The mouth Harpersfield Low Head Dam — the run stops here

The colour is this river's run stage today, read off Ohio EPA run-timing guidance. Where along the corridor the fish are is not modelled here — only the sixteen rivers the staging estimator covers carry that. Drawn 1 October 2026, north up, and it is a map of the river rather than of the lake it runs from.

31.5corridor miles
55NHD reaches
1species that run
Lake Eriethe lake they come from

The Grand runs 42.2 miles of corridor over 60 NHD reaches to a hard ceiling at the Sixth Street Dam. The pierheads and harbour mouth hold the first 3.08 miles, the river mouth reaches 13.22, the lower river runs to 33.81, and the last 8-odd miles above the first holding water climb to 42.19. Eight state boating access sites sit in that corridor, among them Pigeon Lake, Robinson, Bass River Recreation Area and Grand River Park.

The windows here are written out as dates rather than months, though they are the staging estimator's statewide set and not a Grand-specific reading: chinook 15 Aug – 31 Oct, coho 1 Sep – 30 Nov, steelhead 1 Oct – 31 Dec, and lake-run brown trout 20 Oct – 31 Jan with a peak of 1 Nov – 15 Jan. The Grand's distinguishing fish is lake sturgeon, spawning on the gravel immediately below the Sixth Street Dam in the middle of Grand Rapids from April into June, peaking in May. Temperature rather than the date is the trigger — the run starts around 55°F and is finished above about 64°F. It is catch-and-release only, a state-threatened species with the possession season closed on this water.

The questions about this river

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

What runs the Grand 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.

Steelhead — Oct–May Staging, 1 day out. Ohio's whole run fishery, and the only one in this app whose season is a regulation rather than a narrative. Ohio EPA designates these rivers Seasonal Salmonid Habitat, a use that by the rule's own words is 'in effect the months of October to May' with a different aquatic life use enforced from June to September — the state saying plainly that these are not salmonid waters in summer. The fish are the ODNR Division of Wildlife's: Little Manistee-strain steelhead yearlings stocked into six tributaries, of which the Rocky, the Chagrin, the Grand, the Ashtabula and the Vermilion are drawn here. Autumn rain brings them in and these are flashy rivers with almost no storage above them, so the water comes up and drops fast.

The ceiling

Harpersfield Low Head 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.

USACE NID OH00810 'Harpersfield Low Head Dam', River or Stream Name 'Grand River', Source Agency Ohio

The run water, mouth to ceiling

Zone	What it is	River miles
Pier	the pierheads and the harbour mouth	0.0–1.8
Mouth	the river mouth	1.8–3.6
Lower	the lower river	3.6–9.6
Upstream	above the first holding water, up to the ceiling	9.6–31.4

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

No state boating access site falls inside this corridor's box. That is the record saying nothing, not this page saying there is no way in — the public land layer on the live map is the better answer for a river fished from the bank.

Open the Grand River on the live map →
The Grand 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. Ohio'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.

Steelhead Float fishing: a long 10'6"–13' rod, 8–12 lb main line, spawn bags, beads or jigs under a slip float — the method that covers a run without wading it.

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