BirdTrout

Manistee River Watershed, Michigan

1,924 miles of mapped stream across 1,950 square miles of drainage in Crawford, Kalkaska, Lake, Manistee, Missaukee, Osceola, Wexford counties, in 113 named streams. Michigan designates 930 of those miles as trout water, on 107 streams. The 5 mainstem gauges with a July record read between 61.9 and 70.3°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 04060103 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 18% of this basin's stream miles (341.3 of 1,924); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

• Cold 203.7 mi (60%)
• Cold-transitional 104.1 mi (31%)
• Cool 28.4 mi (8%)
• Warm 5.1 mi (1%)

307.8 of the 341.3 typed miles in this basin — 90% — 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 139.9 mi, medium 100.4 mi, low 73.9 mi, very low 27.2 mi.

What makes this watershed distinctive

Every named stream in the basin

All 113 of them, longest first. 87 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

442,898 acres in 170 units, which is 35.5% of the 1,247,879 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
• Au Sable State Forest - Grayling Unit 265,737 ac
• Cadillac State Forest Area 229,599 ac
• Manistee National Forest 213,869 ac
• Manistee National Forest - Cadillac Ranger District 39,914 ac
• Little Manistee, Michigan Wild And Scenic River Study Area 9,762 ac
• Pine, Michigan Wild and Scenic River 5,385 ac
• Kirtland Warbler Unit Manistee 5,302 ac
• Big M Recreation Area 4,932 ac
• Forest Reserve 4,246 ac
• Manistee River State Game Area 4,033 ac

Species present

Recorded by MDNR at 6 survey stations 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
• Boardman-Charlevoix 04060105
• Muskegon 04060102
• Pere Marquette-White 04060101

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.

• Manistee fly fishing trip