BirdTrout

Betsie-Platte Watershed, Michigan

829 miles of mapped stream across 796 square miles of drainage in Benzie, Manistee counties, in 56 named streams. Michigan designates 289 of those miles as trout water, on 45 streams.

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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

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. On this map the colour is MDNR's classification of the valley segment, not a measurement, except at the gauge dots, which read live. Grey is water MDNR has not typed.

The watershed in numbers

HUC8 04060104 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

Cold, cool and warm water

MDNR's Valley Segment Ecological Classification, which types the valley segment rather than measuring the water. It covers 6% of this basin's stream miles (49.3 of 829); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

• Cold 36.0 mi (73%)
• Cold-transitional 1.4 mi (3%)
• Cool 11.9 mi (24%)

37.4 of the 49.3 typed miles in this basin — 76% — are cold or cold-transitional water. The dominant class is cold.

There is no elevation model behind this page, so it carries no elevation range. MDNR's gradient class is the field that answers the same question, and over the typed miles it reads: high 30.5 mi, very low 9.9 mi, low 6.5 mi, medium 2.4 mi.

What makes this watershed distinctive

Every named stream in the basin

All 56 of them, longest first. 33 have a page of their own and are linked; the rest are in the app. Thermal class is MDNR's, over the reaches it has typed. "Now" is the live USGS reading where a gauge stands in that stream.

Public land in the watershed

178,289 acres in 268 units, which is 35.0% of the 509,364 acres the basin covers. Private inholdings carried in the same source file are excluded, here and on the map.

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.

• Pere Marquette State Forest - Traverse City Unit 299,541 ac
• Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore 57,879 ac
• Sleeping Bear Dunes Wilderness 33,751 ac
• Arcadia Dunes: The C.S. Mott Nature Preserve 3,525 ac
• Betsie Valley State Trail 3,033 ac
• Leelanau State Park 1,545 ac
• Platte River Fish Hatchery 1,523 ac
• Interlochen to Kaleva Trail 1,180 ac
• Palmer Woods 1,057 ac
• Lake DuBonnet Flooding State Wildlife Management Area 1,038 ac
• Betsie River State Game Area 716 ac
• Misty Acres: The Borwell Preserve 616 ac

Species present

Recorded by MDNR at 1 survey station in this basin, or in its stocking record. The temperature ranges are our own species table and are the same numbers the app's picker uses.

Best time to fish

The hatch calendar for northern lower Michigan, 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.

53 insects are recorded from northern lower Michigan. 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.

• Boardman-Charlevoix 04060105
• Manistee 04060103
• Pere Marquette-White 04060101

Plan a weekend around it

The weekend this basin adds up to — the biggest water in it, what is hatching when, the public land in range and a three-day plan.

• Betsie-Platte fly fishing trip