BirdTrout

Pere Marquette State Forest - Traverse City Unit, Michigan

299,541 acres of public ground in Kalkaska, Grand Traverse, Benzie, Manistee counties, managed by Michigan DNR. 74 named streams run through it, of which 69 are designated trout water — 776.2 miles of it.

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This unit — the ground this page is about

Other public land — state, federal and county ground around it

USGS gauge — a gauge, coloured by what it reads now

Water temperature — the colour of every stream on this ground

58 64 70

50°F and colder is cold, through cold-transitional and cool, to warm above 70°F — the same four bands the app paints. The colour is MDNR's classification of the valley segment, not a measurement, except at the gauge dots, which read live. Grey is water MDNR has not typed.

The unit in numbers

Assembled from MDNR and OSM ownership records, dissolved into one block: the section lines a state forest is surveyed in are not a fact about access, so they are not drawn and not counted twice.

Getting on it

Open to the public on foot without a permit, as the ownership file records it.

This unit is 293 separate blocks of ground rather than one, which is normal for public land held in surveyed sections: the blocks are not contiguous. The map above draws every one of them, and the ground between two of them belongs to somebody else. Boundaries, closures and anything posted on the ground are Michigan Department of Natural Resources's to say, and 517-284-6057 is where to ask.

Trout streams on this ground

Every named stream whose reaches touch this unit, longest first. 69 of them have a page of their own and are linked; the rest are in the app. Thermal class is MDNR's classification of the valley segment, over the reaches it has typed. "Now" is the live USGS reading where a gauge stands in that stream.

The miles are the whole stream's, not the miles inside this boundary: a river does not stop at a property line and neither does its page.

Hunting

This unit is not in the huntable public-land layer this app paints, so this page does not publish seasons for it. That is not the same as "hunting is closed here" — it means the layer the app draws from does not carry this ground, and the managing agency is the one to ask.

Access sites and amenities

14 more access sites stand on this unit. All of them are on the map in the app.

When to come

The hatch calendar for northern lower Michigan, which is the region this unit's centre falls in — the same regions the app's hatch panel uses. It is a regional record, not a survey of this ground: nobody has counted insects unit by unit. Year-round records (midges, scuds, sculpins) are left out.

What makes this unit distinctive

Regulations

Nothing on this page is a regulation. The fishing rules that apply to the water on this ground — the types, the seasons, the size limits and the gear restrictions — are on the Michigan fishing regulations page, built from the agency's own columns.

Watersheds it lies in

The subbasins this ground drains into. Each one has the whole basin's water on it.

• Au Sable
• Betsie-Platte
• Boardman-Charlevoix
• Manistee
• Muskegon

Public land nearby

The nearest other blocks of public ground, centre to centre. Public land does not tile a state the way watersheds do, so this is nearness rather than adjacency.

• Sand Lakes Quiet Area 4.7 mi
• Brown Bridge Quiet Area 5.8 mi
• East Creek Reserve 6.6 mi
• Headquarters Lake Impoundment State Wildlife Management Area 7.4 mi
• Skegemog Lake Wildlife Area 11.6 mi

Plan a weekend around it

The trip pages whose range reaches this ground — the water in the same drive, what is hatching, and a three-day plan built from it.

• Manistee fly fishing trip 9.5 mi
• Fly fishing near Traverse City 14.7 mi
• Fly fishing near Cadillac 22.8 mi