BirdTrout

Carp-Pine Watershed, Michigan

745 miles of mapped stream across 650 square miles of drainage, in 56 named streams. Michigan designates 369 of those miles as trout water, on 49 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 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 04200001 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

745 mi
of mapped stream
2,087 NHD reaches
650 sq mi
drainage area
415,708 acres
179,353 ac
public land
43.1% of the basin · 64 units

Cold, cool and warm water

MDNR's Valley Segment Ecological Classification, which types the valley segment rather than measuring the water. It covers 26% of this basin's stream miles (196.5 of 745); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

112.6 of the 196.5 typed miles in this basin — 57% — are cold or cold-transitional water. The dominant class is cool.

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: medium 108.3 mi, high 42.9 mi, low 31.5 mi, very low 13.9 mi.

What makes this watershed distinctive

Two rivers of almost identical length define this basin: the Pine at 44.2 miles and the Carp at 43.4, both typed cool, both carrying Type 4 water, and both Blue Ribbon — the Pine along with Bear Creek. 49 of the 56 named streams are designated trout water over 368.7 miles, a high proportion of the 745.3 miles mapped here. MDNR has typed 26% of that water and the 196.5 miles it covers divide 83.9 cool, 59.3 cold-transitional and 53.3 cold, with no warm water in the sample at all. The gradient over those miles runs mostly medium, 108.3 of them. Biscuit Creek, 19.8 miles with Type 2 designation, is untyped. Public ground is 179,353 acres and 43.1% of the basin, most of it national forest — 110,249 acres against 51,205 of state land. No gauge in the basin carries a July record, and MDNR holds no survey station here.

Every named stream in the basin

All 56 of them, longest first. None has a page of its own yet; all of them 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.

Stream Miles Class Now Designation
Pine River Blue Ribbon 44.2 Cool — Type 1, Type 2, Type 4
Carp River 43.4 Cool — Type 1, Type 2, Type 4
North Pine River 20.5 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Biscuit Creek 19.8 untyped — Type 2
Bear Creek Blue Ribbon 16.4 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Chub Creek 12.4 Cool — Type 2, Type 4
Black Creek 12.2 Cold — Type 2
North Branch Carp River 11.9 Cold-transitional — Type 2
South Branch Carp River 11.7 Cold — Type 2
Taylor Creek 8.7 Cold — Type 2
Albany Creek 7.9 Cold — Type 2, Type 4
Beaver Tail Creek 7.9 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Little Bear Creek 7.2 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Sweiger Creek 7.1 Cold — Type 2
Trout Brook 6.9 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Elmhirst Creek 6.5 Cold-transitional — Type 2, Type 4
Flat Creek 6.4 Cool — Type 1, Type 2
McKay Creek 6.3 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Rabbit Back Creek 6.2 Cool — Type 2
Flowers Creek 6.1 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Ozark Creek 6.1 untyped — Type 2
Blind Biscuit Creek 6.0 Cool — Type 2
Hemlock Creek 5.8 Cool — Type 2
Sullivan Creek 5.6 untyped — Type 2
Nunns Creek 5.5 Cool — Type 2
Martineau Creek 5.4 Cool — Type 2
Prey Creek 5.2 Cool — Type 2
Prentiss Creek 4.8 Cool — Type 2
Bissel Creek 4.6 Cold — Type 2
South Branch Black Creek 4.6 Cold — Type 2
Caribou Creek 4.2 untyped — —
Hoban Creek 4.0 Cool — Type 2
Pearson Creek 3.9 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Joe Straw Creek 3.5 Cool — —
Trout Creek 3.4 untyped — Type 2
Crooked Creek 3.4 Cold — Type 2
Red Creek 3.0 Cold — Type 2, Type 4
Rock Spring Creek 3.0 Cold-transitional — Type 2
McCloud Creek 2.5 Cold — Type 2
East Lake Branch Carp River 2.4 Cool — Type 2
Home Creek 2.4 Cold — Type 2
Schwesinger Creek 2.4 Cold-transitional — —
Summerby Creek 2.3 untyped — Type 2
Mackinac Creek 2.3 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Garden Hill Creek 2.1 Cold — Type 2
Steele Creek 2.1 Cold-transitional — —
Lumpson Creek 2.0 Cold — Type 2
Upper Farm Hill Creek 1.9 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Hiawatha Run 1.9 Cool — Type 2, Type 4
Spring Lake Creek 1.5 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Lower Farm Hill Creek 1.4 Cold-transitional — Type 2, Type 4
Foley Creek 1.4 Cool — —
Silver Creek 1.3 untyped — Type 2, Type 4
Kneebone Creek 1.3 untyped — —
Law Creek 1.0 Cold-transitional — —
Mud Creek 0.7 untyped — Type 2

Public land in the watershed

179,353 acres in 64 units, which is 43.1% of the 415,708 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 110,249 61% 5
Michigan DNR 51,205 29% 13
Designation overlay 12,819 7% 3
Land trusts and conservancies 1,781 1% 2
Local Government land 1,479 1% 21
The Nature Conservancy 804 0% 2
Little Traverse Conservancy 790 0% 6
City and township land 113 0% 2

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 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.

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

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.