BirdTrout

Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina

279,592 acres of public ground in Swain, Haywood counties, managed by National Park Service. 135 named streams run through it, of which 17 are designated trout water — 52.4 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 NC Wildlife Resources Commission's own classification of the stream, not a measurement, except at the gauge dots, which read live. Grey is water NC Wildlife Resources Commission has not typed.

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.

Getting on it

Open to the public without a permit, as PAD-US records it. State licence and season rules still apply.

This unit is 4 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 National Park Service's to say.

Trout streams on this ground

Every named stream whose reaches touch this unit, longest first. 20 of them have a page of their own and are linked; the rest are in the app. The class column is NC Wildlife Resources Commission's designation of that stream, over the reaches it has classified. "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

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 the North Carolina mountains, 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.

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 North Carolina 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.

• Lower Little Tennessee
• Pigeon
• Tuckasegee
• Upper Little Tennessee

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.

• William H Silver Game Land 16.0 mi
• Needmore Game Land 17.1 mi
• Nantahala National Forest 27.3 mi
• Cold Mountain Game Land 30.7 mi
• Middle Prong Wilderness 31.7 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.

• Nantahala fly fishing trip 14.3 mi
• Pisgah fly fishing trip 41.9 mi