BirdTrout

Brule River Watershed, Wisconsin

323 miles of mapped stream across 1,052 square miles of drainage in Florence, Forest, Vilas counties, in 32 named streams. Wisconsin designates 146 of those miles as trout water, on 26 streams.

Open in BirdTrout
Map key
Public land — where the bank is open to walk and fish
USGS gauge — live water temperature
Water temperature — the colour of every stream in the basin

50°F and colder is cold, through cold-transitional and cool, to warm above 70°F — the same four bands the app paints. On this map the colour is Wisconsin DNR's own classification of the stream, not a measurement, except at the gauge dots, which read live. Grey is water Wisconsin DNR has not typed.

The watershed in numbers

HUC8 04030106 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

323 mi
of mapped stream
709 NHD reaches
1,052 sq mi
drainage area
673,271 acres
78,117 ac
public land
11.6% of the basin · 4 units

Cold, cool and warm water

WDNR's trout stream classification, which types the stream by the trout population it supports rather than by measuring the water — every reach it calls Class I, II or III carries WDNR's own cold designation. It covers 48% of this basin's stream miles (155.9 of 323); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

155.9 of the 155.9 typed miles in this basin — 100% — are cold or cold-transitional water. Every typed reach carries the same class, which is as likely to be the coverage as the water: Wisconsin DNR has typed 48% of it.

What makes this watershed distinctive

This is the other Brule — the Wisconsin-Michigan border river in Florence, Forest and Vilas counties, not the Bois Brule on the Lake Superior shore. The Brule River runs 58.7 miles through the basin at Class I and II, which is most of the 146 designated miles here; Brule Creek adds 14.1, Elvoy Creek 12.7 and Montagne Creek 7.5 carrying all three classes. There are only 32 named streams among 323 mapped miles, 26 of them designated, and every one of the 156 miles WDNR has typed here is coldwater. Public ground is 78,117 acres out of 1,052 square miles, and 77,180 of those acres are Nicolet National Forest, with the Florence County Forest holding 937 more. No gauge in the basin holds a July temperature record.

Every named stream in the basin

All 32 of them, longest first. 14 have a page of their own and are linked; the rest are in the app. The class column is Wisconsin DNR's designation of that stream. "Now" is the live USGS reading where a gauge stands in that stream.

Stream Miles Class Now Designation
Brule River 58.7 Cold — Class I, Class II
Brule Creek 14.1 Cold — Class I, Class II
Elvoy Creek 12.7 Cold — Class I, Class II
Pendleton Creek 9.9 untyped — —
Allen Creek 9.9 Cold — Class II
Montagne Creek 7.5 Cold — Class I, Class II, Class III
Fisher Creek 7.5 Cold — Class I, Class III
Gaspardo Creek 6.2 Cold — Class II
Wisconsin Creek 5.9 Cold — Class II
Alvin Creek 5.7 Cold — Class II
Iron River 5.4 untyped — —
Riley Creek 4.8 Cold — Class I
Olson Creek 4.5 Cold — Class II
West Allen Creek 4.0 Cold — Class II
Kentuck Creek 3.7 Cold — Class II
Duck Creek 3.6 Cold — Class II
LeRoy Creek 3.5 Cold — Class II
Huff Creek 3.4 Cold — Class I, Class II, Class III
McGoverns Creek 3.2 Cold — Class II
Little Smoky Creek 3.1 Cold — Class II, Class III
Jungle Creek 2.1 untyped — —
Lambert Creek 2.0 untyped — —
Chuks Creek 2.0 Cold — Class II
Charlie Otto Creek 1.9 Cold — Class II
Wilson Creek 1.6 Cold — Class I
East Fork LeRoy Creek 1.6 Cold — Class II
Seventeen Creek 1.2 untyped — —
Armstrong Creek 1.1 Cold — Class II
Camp Lake Creek 1.0 Cold — Class I
Paint River 0.9 untyped — —
Hagerman Creek 0.8 Cold — Class II
Bass Creek 0.8 Cold — Class II

Public land in the watershed

78,117 acres in 4 units, which is 11.6% of the 673,271 acres the basin covers. Private inholdings carried in the same source file are excluded, here and on the map.

Managing agency Acres Share Units
US Forest Service 77,180 99% 2
County forest 937 1% 1
Wisconsin DNR 0 0% 1

The biggest named blocks of it, each with its own page — the streams on that ground, what is open to hunt on it, and where the access sites are.

Best time to fish

The hatch calendar for northern Wisconsin, which is the region this basin's centre falls in — the same regions the app's hatch panel uses. It is a regional record, not a survey of this watershed: nobody has counted insects basin by basin. Year-round records (midges, scuds, sculpins) are left out; they are true every month and they are not what a calendar is for.

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

42 insects are recorded from northern Wisconsin. Each links to its own page, with the flies that imitate it.

Neighbouring watersheds

The subbasins that share a boundary with this one and carry coldwater streams.