BirdTrout

Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife And Fish Refuge, Minnesota

20,288 acres of public ground in Houston, Wabasha, Winona counties, managed by US Fish and Wildlife Service. 15 named streams run through it, of which 12 are designated trout water — 99.6 miles of it.

Open in BirdTrout
Map key
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

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 nothing at all: Minnesota DNR publishes no thermal classification, so every stream on this map draws grey. The gauge dots are the one exception and they read live. Grey is every stream here, for the reason above.

The unit in numbers

Assembled from PAD-US 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.

20,288 ac
public ground
31.7 square miles · 104 separate blocks
US Fish and Wildlife Service
managing agency
National Wildlife Refuge
15
named streams on it
346.1 miles · 12 designated trout
Restricted access
public access
as recorded in the ownership file

Getting on it

Entry is limited — a permit, a season or a posted restriction applies. Check with the managing agency before you go.

This unit is 104 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 US Fish and Wildlife Service's to say.

Trout streams on this ground

Every named stream whose reaches touch this unit, longest first. 7 of them have a page of their own and are linked; the rest are in the app. The class column is Minnesota DNR's designation of that stream, over the reaches it has classified. "Now" is the live USGS reading where a gauge stands in that stream.

Stream Miles Class Now Designation
Root River 84.9 untyped — Designated trout stream
Zumbro River 55.8 untyped — Designated trout stream
Mississippi River 44.2 untyped — —
Winnebago Creek 24.0 untyped — Designated trout stream
Garvin Brook 21.6 untyped — Designated trout stream
Pine Creek 21.4 untyped — Designated trout stream
Whitewater River 18.3 untyped — Designated trout stream
East Indian Creek 16.5 untyped — Designated trout stream
Gilmore Creek 13.8 untyped — Designated trout stream
Cedar Creek 12.0 untyped — Designated trout stream
Big Trout Creek 11.6 untyped — Designated trout stream
Pleasant Valley Creek 10.6 untyped — Designated trout stream
Crooked Creek 9.9 untyped — Designated trout stream
Trempealeau River 1.4 untyped — —
Zumbro River 0.1 untyped — —

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

No public access site we have on record stands on this unit. We hold no trail or campground data at all, so what is here is what the state publishes as launches and walk-in access, and none of it falls on this ground.

When to come

The hatch calendar for southeast Minnesota, 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.

December

Nothing seasonal on the water.

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 Minnesota 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.

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.