BirdTrout

Walnut Creek, Pennsylvania

22 mapped river miles, draining 17 square miles, in the Lake Erie Tributaries basin watershed. 1 USGS gauge report water temperature on it, and this page reads it.

Open in BirdTrout →

Public land — where the bank is open to walk and fish

USGS gauge — live water temperature

Water temperature — the colour of the river, and of every dot on it

58 64 70

50°F and colder is cold, through cold-transitional and cool, to warm above 70°F — the same four bands, breaking at 58, 64 and 70°F, that the app paints. Grey is water nobody has measured.

Water temperature right now

Live from the USGS — every pill above is live, so the numbers you are reading are the latest continuous readings at each gauge. Provisional and unreviewed, as all real-time data is. If that fetch cannot happen — you are offline, or the USGS is down — the pills fall back to the last value we cached, 30 September 2026, 14:04 UTC.

Thermal classification

Each gauge carries a July mean built from its own daily record — 8 Julys, 2019–2026, measured rather than modelled. A July mean is what decides which of the four bands a stretch of water belongs to, because July is when a trout river either holds or does not.

Every gauge sits at the bottom of its segment, so each number is the warm end and the water above it runs colder. ±2.48 °F on the fit.

The lake run

The Walnut Creek is a Lake Erie tributary with 21.3 miles of run corridor on it — salmon, steelhead and lake-run brown trout, on their own calendar and under their own rules. Run timing, species and access on the Walnut Creek →

Questions about this river

• Walnut Creek fishing report — what it reads right now
• When to fish Walnut Creek — hatches, seasons and temperature
• How to get to Walnut Creek — access, parking and public land
• Walnut Creek fishing regulations — season, size and gear by reach

PA DEP classification

PA DEP classifies this water as Cold Water Fishes. The management tier on those reaches is Cold Water Fishes. This is a designation of the fishery, not the season and creel rules — those change yearly and live with the agency.

Fishable reaches

River miles are measured above the mouth, along the mapped mainstem. The reach breaks are the gauges, which is also how the temperature model divides the river.

2 mapped access sites on the mainstem: 1 walk-in, 1 boat or canoe launches. Source: PA DEP.

USGS gauges

Every gauge on the mainstem, upstream first. Links go to the USGS monitoring-location page for the site.

• Walnut Creek Upstream Pool, near Erie, Pa — 04213152 · RM 2.0
  246 July days of record across 8 Julys (2019–2026) · 9 cfs at last read

Public land on the river

6 units of public or open-access land touch this river, 189 acres in total. Acreage is the whole unit, not the part beside the water.

Species

PA DEP designates this as trout water — Cold Water Fishes — without naming the species. No fish survey or stocking record for this water is in the files this site reads.

Historical July mean

The measured record behind every temperature band on this page: the mean of the daily means for July, at each gauge, over the years USGS has one.

Tributaries and watershed

1 named stream meets this one. Confluence miles are above the mouth; the longest twelve are listed.

• Bear Run 4.4 mi · RM 3.0

Walnut Creek sits in HUC 8 04120101, the Lake Erie Tributaries basin, and drains 17 square miles, Strahler order 3 at the mouth. 31 NHD reaches carry the name for 22.0 miles in total — more than the 21.9 miles of drawn mainstem, because NHD counts side channels and braids as their own reaches.

Other water nearby

The closest 6 rivers on this site, straight-line from the middle of this one — not drive time.

• East Branch LeBoeuf Creek 2.6 mi
• Elk Creek 3.1 mi
• Sixmile Creek 5.6 mi
• Sevenmile Creek 6.0 mi
• Trout Run 6.1 mi
• LeBoeuf Creek 10.9 mi