BirdTrout

Bluestone River, West Virginia

13.5 mapped river miles, draining 446 square miles, in the Middle New 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, 14:07 UTC.

Thermal classification

Nobody has classified this water's temperature.WV DEP publishes no temperature classification for this water. What it publishes is the Category B-2 trout water designation below — WV DEP's finding under 47 CSR 2 that a stream sustains a year-round trout population, which is a statement about the fishery rather than about the temperature it runs at. It is the state saying this water is worth recording; it is not the state saying the water is cold. So the bands below are drawn grey rather than coloured, and grey here means unmeasured, not warm. The one temperature on this page is the live reading from the nearest USGS gauge, 0.0 miles away.

Each gauge carries a July mean built from its own daily record — 7 Julys, 2020–2026, 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. ±None °F on the fit.

Questions about this river

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

WV DEP classification

WV DEP classifies this water as Trout waters — whole assessment unit. 47 CSR 2 defines trout waters as water that sustains a year-round trout population, and excludes by name water stocked every year that does not hold trout over — so this is a finding about a wild or holdover fishery rather than about the stocking truck. It is not the season and creel rules — those are WVDNR's, change yearly, and live with that agency.

WV DEP water quality standards, 47 CSR 2 →

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.

0 mapped access sites on the mainstem: 0 walk-in, 0 boat or canoe launches.

USGS gauges

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

• Bluestone River near Pipestem, Wv — 03179000 · RM 0.0
  217 July days of record across 7 Julys (2020–2026) · 81 cfs at last read

Public land on the river

3 units of public or open-access land touch this river, 7,368 acres in total. Acreage is the whole unit, not the part beside the water.

Species

WV DEP designates this as trout water — Trout waters — whole assessment unit — 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.

Hatches on this water

56 insects are recorded from the Virginia mountains, across the state line. No insect records in this dataset are filed under West Virginia, so these are the nearest ones — the same landscape and the same water, on the other side of the border, and not a survey of this stream or even of this state. Open the river in the app and the hatch panel will narrow it to the ones whose temperature window today's reading is inside.

And 42 more — the year-round records, mostly: midges, scuds and sculpins, which are in the water every day and are therefore never the news.

Tributaries and watershed

7 named streams meet this one. Confluence miles are above the mouth; the longest twelve are listed.

• Brush Creek 24.4 mi · RM 13.4
• Laurel Creek 20.8 mi · RM 9.7
• Mountain Creek 9.2 mi · RM 4.8
• Indian Branch 6.9 mi · RM 10.7
• Double Cabin Branch 2.4 mi · RM 11.0
• White Oak Creek 2.2 mi · RM 12.7
• Bee Branch 1.3 mi · RM 7.0

Bluestone River sits in HUC 8 05050002, the Middle New basin, and drains 446 square miles, Strahler order 6 at the mouth. 74 NHD reaches carry the name for 32.4 miles in total — more than the 13.5 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.

• Mountain Creek 3.3 mi
• Camp Creek 3.7 mi
• Suck Creek 3.9 mi
• Laurel Creek 4.0 mi
• Marsh Fork 4.1 mi
• Mash Fork 4.5 mi