BirdTrout

Cedar-Ford Watershed, Michigan

1,043 miles of mapped stream across 1,019 square miles of drainage, in 83 named streams. Michigan designates 536 of those miles as trout water, on 49 streams. The 1 mainstem gauge with a July record read 73.4°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 04030109 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 21% of this basin's stream miles (219.2 of 1,043); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

• Cold 7.5 mi (3%)
• Cold-transitional 2.4 mi (1%)
• Cool 156.2 mi (71%)
• Warm 53.1 mi (24%)

9.9 of the 219.2 typed miles in this basin — 5% — 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 134.7 mi, low 54.1 mi, very low 24.3 mi, high 6.1 mi.

What makes this watershed distinctive

Every named stream in the basin

All 83 of them, longest first. 25 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

166,655 acres in 59 units, which is 25.5% of the 652,300 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.

• Crystal Falls State Forest Area 315,554 ac
• Escanaba River State Forest - Escanaba Unit 143,926 ac
• Genes Pond Flooding State Wildlife Management Area 3,454 ac
• MNRTF Parcel 3,420 ac
• Hayward Lake to North Lake Floodings State Wildlife Management Area 3,185 ac
• Delta County Forest 1,278 ac
• J.W. Wells State Park 718 ac
• Deer Habitat 675 ac
• Portage Marsh State Wildlife Management Area 219 ac
• Peterson Pond Flooding State Wildlife Management Area 216 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.

• Escanaba 04030110
• Menominee 04030108
• Michigamme 04030107
• Tacoosh-Whitefish 04030111

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.

• Cedar-Ford fly fishing trip