BirdTrout

Black-Presque Isle Watershed, Michigan

2,095 miles of mapped stream across 1,011 square miles of drainage, in 193 named streams. Michigan designates 769 of those miles as trout water, on 132 streams. The 1 mainstem gauge with a July record read 72.0°F in July.

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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 04020101 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 17% of this basin's stream miles (365.7 of 2,095); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

• Cold 25.3 mi (7%)
• Cold-transitional 64.4 mi (18%)
• Cool 88.5 mi (24%)
• Warm 187.4 mi (51%)

89.7 of the 365.7 typed miles in this basin — 25% — are cold or cold-transitional water. The dominant class is warm.

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 326.1 mi, medium 35.0 mi, low 3.2 mi, very low 1.3 mi.

What makes this watershed distinctive

Every named stream in the basin

All 193 of them, longest first. 103 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

252,925 acres in 78 units, which is 39.1% of the 647,267 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.

• Ottawa National Forest 322,359 ac
• Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park 60,204 ac
• Gogebic County Forest 17,282 ac
• Presque Isle, Michigan Wild and Scenic River 9,175 ac
• Black, Michigan Wild and Scenic River 4,302 ac
• Presque Isle, Michigan Wild And Scenic River Study Area 4,066 ac
• University of Notre Dame Environmental Research Center 2,591 ac

Best time to fish

The hatch calendar for the Upper Peninsula, 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.

42 insects are recorded from the Upper Peninsula. 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.

• Ontonagon 04020102

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.

• Black-Presque Isle fly fishing trip