BirdTrout

Escanaba Watershed, Michigan

882 miles of mapped stream across 928 square miles of drainage, in 58 named streams. Michigan designates 516 of those miles as trout water, on 56 streams. The 3 mainstem gauges with a July record read between 66.8 and 70.8°F in July.

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 04030110 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

882 mi
of mapped stream
1,312 NHD reaches
928 sq mi
drainage area
593,650 acres
66.8–70.8°F
July water temperature at the gauges
3 mainstem gauges, mean 68.3°F
242,100 ac
public land
40.8% of the basin · 59 units

Cold, cool and warm water

MDNR's Valley Segment Ecological Classification, which types the valley segment rather than measuring the water. It covers 30% of this basin's stream miles (264.5 of 882); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

60.8 of the 264.5 typed miles in this basin — 23% — 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 149.2 mi, low 63.9 mi, high 43.6 mi, very low 7.8 mi.

What makes this watershed distinctive

56 of the 58 named streams in this basin are designated trout water, across 515.9 of its 881.6 mapped stream miles — very nearly all of the named water. The Escanaba River and its Middle and West branches account for 134.9 miles between them and MDNR types all three cool. That is the basin's dominant class by a wide margin: of 264.5 typed miles, 182.3 are cool, against 32.7 cold, 28.1 cold-transitional and 21.5 warm. Coverage is 30% of the basin's stream miles, among the better sampled on this map. Green Creek, 17.9 miles, is the longest cold water here. Bear Creek and the Black River carry Blue Ribbon designations. Public land is 242,100 acres and 40.8% of the ground, and it is state land almost entirely — 231,314 acres of the total. No gauge in the basin holds a July record, and MDNR has no survey station here, so classification and designation are what this page knows.

Every named stream in the basin

All 58 of them, longest first. 47 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.

Stream Miles Class Now Designation
Middle Branch Escanaba River 53.4 Cool 55.9°F Type 2
Escanaba River 52.2 Cool 63.5°F Type 2
West Branch Escanaba River 29.3 Cool — Type 2
Hunters Brook 18.7 Cool — Type 2
Black River Blue Ribbon 18.6 Cool — Type 2
Green Creek 17.9 Cold — Type 2
Bryan Creek 16.0 untyped — Type 2
Sawmill Creek 15.0 Cool — Type 2
East Branch Escanaba River 14.8 Cool — Type 2
Little West Branch Escanaba River 13.3 untyped — Type 2
Flat Rock Creek 12.6 Cold — Type 2
Bobs Creek 12.5 Cool — Type 2
West Branch Middle Branch Escanaba River 12.1 untyped — Type 2
Chandler Brook 12.1 untyped — Type 2
Big Brook 10.8 Cold — Type 2
Schwartz Creek 10.5 untyped — Type 2
McGregor Creek 9.6 untyped — Type 2
Bass Creek 8.3 untyped — Type 2
Camp Eleven Creek 8.3 Cold — Type 2
Poplar Creek 8.3 Cold — Type 2
Goose Lake Outlet 8.2 Cool — Type 2
Warner Creek 7.4 Cold — Type 2
Halfway Creek 7.0 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Bruce Creek 7.0 Cool — Type 2
Nookomis kabekong 6.5 untyped — Type 2
Wild West Creek 6.4 untyped — Type 2
Schweitzer Creek 6.3 Cool — Type 2
Second River 6.2 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Klippel Creek 6.1 Cool — Type 2
Bear Creek Blue Ribbon 5.8 Cold — Type 2
Reno Creek 5.8 Cool — Type 2
Flopper Creek 5.8 Cold — Type 2
Little Brook 5.5 untyped — Type 2
Ely Creek 5.5 Cool — Type 2
Summer Meadow Creek 5.5 Warm — —
Chynes Creek 5.4 Cool — Type 2
Mud Creek 5.3 Warm — Type 2
O'Neal Creek 5.2 Warm — Type 2
Miller Creek 4.9 Warm — Type 2
Bichler Creek 4.6 Cool — Type 2
Lone Pine Creek 4.5 untyped — Type 2
Wilson Creek 4.2 untyped — Type 2
Brown Creek 4.1 untyped — Type 2
Fifteen Creek 4.0 Cool — Type 2
Cady Creek 3.8 untyped — Type 2
Gleason Creek 3.7 untyped — Type 2
Bell Creek 3.6 untyped — Type 2
Koops Creek 3.5 untyped — Type 2
Indian Creek 3.4 Warm — —
Swimming Hole Creek 3.2 untyped — Type 2
Mosquito Creek 2.7 untyped — Type 2
Lindsey Creek 2.0 untyped — Type 2
Rocky Creek 1.9 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Silver Creek 1.5 Cool — Type 2
Powell Lake Outlet 1.3 untyped — Type 2
Clear Creek 0.9 Cold — Type 2
Uncle Tom Creek 0.9 untyped — Type 2
Leisner Creek 0.7 untyped — Type 2

Public land in the watershed

242,100 acres in 59 units, which is 40.8% of the 593,650 acres the basin covers. Private inholdings carried in the same source file are excluded, here and on the map.

Managing agency Acres Share Units
Michigan DNR 231,314 96% 36
Joint city-county land 9,551 4% 1
Local Government land 408 0% 11
Delta Conservation District 355 0% 1
City and township land 347 0% 3
Land trusts and conservancies 81 0% 1
Forsyth Township 36 0% 2
City of Gladstone 7 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.

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.