BirdTrout

Boardman-Charlevoix Watershed, Michigan

2,009 miles of mapped stream across 1,668 square miles of drainage in Antrim, Charlevoix, Emmet, Grand Traverse, Kalkaska, Leelanau counties, in 155 named streams. Michigan designates 714 of those miles as trout water, on 132 streams.

Open in BirdTrout →

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 04060105 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 9% of this basin's stream miles (190.2 of 2,009); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

• Cold 151.9 mi (80%)
• Cold-transitional 10.1 mi (5%)
• Cool 28.1 mi (15%)

162.0 of the 190.2 typed miles in this basin — 85% — 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 119.0 mi, medium 34.9 mi, very low 23.3 mi, low 12.9 mi.

What makes this watershed distinctive

Every named stream in the basin

All 155 of them, longest first. 102 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

235,299 acres in 696 units, which is 22.0% of the 1,067,758 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.

• Mackinaw State Forest - Gaylord Unit 311,362 ac
• Pere Marquette State Forest - Traverse City Unit 299,541 ac
• Wilderness State Park 10,324 ac
• Hardwood State Forest Wilderness Area 5,188 ac
• Skegemog Lake Wildlife Area 3,412 ac
• Sand Lakes Quiet Area 3,016 ac
• French Farm Flooding State Wildlife Management Area 2,947 ac
• Fisherman's Island State Park 2,782 ac
• Skegemog Lake State Wildlife Management Area 2,073 ac
• Wilderness 1,825 ac
• Brown Bridge Quiet Area 1,786 ac
• Jordan River Natural Area 1,570 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.

• Au Sable 04070007
• Betsie-Platte 04060104
• Cheboygan 04070004
• Lone Lake-Ocqueoc 04070003
• Manistee 04060103

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.

• Boardman-Charlevoix fly fishing trip