BirdTrout

Ontonagon Watershed, Michigan

3,408 miles of mapped stream across 1,388 square miles of drainage, in 184 named streams. Michigan designates 1,011 of those miles as trout water, on 134 streams. The 1 mainstem gauge with a July record read 70.7°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 04020102 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 8% of this basin's stream miles (258.3 of 3,408); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

• Cold 58.6 mi (23%)
• Cold-transitional 44.0 mi (17%)
• Cool 132.0 mi (51%)
• Warm 23.7 mi (9%)

102.6 of the 258.3 typed miles in this basin — 40% — 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: high 168.0 mi, medium 59.6 mi, low 18.6 mi, very low 12.1 mi.

What makes this watershed distinctive

Every named stream in the basin

All 184 of them, longest first. 67 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

193,405 acres in 78 units, which is 21.8% of the 888,550 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.

• Ottawa National Forest 322,359 ac
• Baraga State Forest Area 160,872 ac
• Ontonagon, Michigan Wild and Scenic River 34,412 ac
• Sylvania Wilderness 13,867 ac
• Ontonagon Wild And Scenic River 5,252 ac
• Norwich Plains Revised Roadless Area Roadless Area 4,361 ac
• University of Notre Dame Environmental Research Center 2,591 ac
• Ontonagon, Michigan Wild And Scenic River Study Area 2,093 ac
• Paynesville Purchase Unit 1,753 ac
• Military Hill Purchase Unit 1,619 ac
• South Ewen Purchase Unit 1,576 ac
• Lake Gogebic State Park 368 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.

• Black-Presque Isle 04020101
• Brule 04030106
• Keweenaw Peninsula 04020103
• Sturgeon 04020104

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.

• Ontonagon fly fishing trip