BirdTrout

Tacoosh-Whitefish Watershed, Michigan

750 miles of mapped stream across 642 square miles of drainage, in 46 named streams. Michigan designates 381 of those miles as trout water, on 43 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 04030111 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

750 mi
of mapped stream
2,035 NHD reaches
642 sq mi
drainage area
411,056 acres
102,291 ac
public land
24.9% of the basin · 62 units

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 (57.3 of 750); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

12.2 of the 57.3 typed miles in this basin — 21% — 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 44.2 mi, low 8.1 mi, high 5.0 mi.

What makes this watershed distinctive

43 of the 46 named streams in this basin are designated trout water, across 381 of its 750.3 mapped stream miles — very nearly all of the named water — yet no stream here holds a Blue Ribbon designation. MDNR has typed only 8% of the network, and the 57.3 miles it covers divide 25.6 cool, 19.4 warm, 8.1 cold-transitional and 4.1 cold, which is a thin sample to draw a basin from and the page says so rather than implying otherwise. The Rapid River, longest here at 35.9 miles, types warm and carries Type 4 water; the West Branch Whitefish River, 32.2 miles, types cool and does the same. Werners Creek, 21.2 miles of Type 2 water, is untyped. Public ground is 102,292 acres, 24.9% of the basin, mostly state land with 21,543 acres of national forest beside it.

Every named stream in the basin

All 46 of them, longest first. 28 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
Rapid River 35.9 Warm — Type 1, Type 2, Type 4
West Branch Whitefish River 32.2 Cool — Type 1, Type 2, Type 4
Days River 30.0 Cool — Type 1, Type 2
Werners Creek 21.2 untyped — Type 2
Tacoosh River 20.1 Cool — Type 1, Type 2, Type 4
Haymeadow Creek 17.7 Cold-transitional — Type 2
East Branch Whitefish River 16.6 Cold — Type 1, Type 2, Type 4
Dexter Creek 16.0 Cool — Type 2
Chippeny Creek 12.0 Cool — Type 2
Whitefish River 11.9 Warm — Type 1, Type 2, Type 4
Scott Creek 11.8 Cool — Type 2
South Mino-kwe Creek 11.4 untyped — Type 2
Deer Creek 11.2 Warm — Type 2
Inman Creek 9.8 Cool — Type 2
Sucker Creek 9.4 Warm — Type 2
Bills Creek 8.4 Cold-transitional — Type 1, Type 2, Type 4
McMaster Creek 8.1 untyped — Type 2
Portage Creek 6.6 untyped — —
Elm Creek 6.5 Warm — Type 2
Huber Creek 6.4 untyped — Type 2
Black George Creek 6.1 Cool — Type 2
Pole Creek 6.1 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Spring Creek 5.9 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Deadhorse Creek 5.8 Warm — Type 2
Laraby Creek 5.2 untyped — Type 2
Casey Creek 5.2 Cool — Type 2
Davies Creek 5.1 untyped — Type 2
Baker Creek 4.9 Cool — Type 2
Hayes Creek 4.5 Cool — Type 2
Dry Creek 4.4 untyped — Type 2
Dillabough Creek 4.2 untyped — Type 2, Type 4
Boudreau Creek 4.2 Warm — Type 2
Mud Creek 4.1 Warm — Type 2
North Branch Deer Creek 4.0 untyped — Type 2
Willow Creek 3.7 Cool — —
Little West Branch Whitefish River 3.3 Cool — Type 2
West Branch Days River 2.0 untyped — —
McAfee Creek 1.9 untyped — Type 2
Ten Dollar Creek 1.8 untyped — Type 2
Ferguson Creek 1.7 Cool — Type 2
Shki-kwe Creek 1.5 untyped — Type 2
Misery Creek 1.2 untyped — Type 2
Berg Creek 1.0 untyped — Type 2
Cherry Creek 1.0 untyped — Type 2
Squirrel Creek 0.9 untyped — Type 2
Weber Creek 0.5 untyped — Type 2

Public land in the watershed

102,291 acres in 62 units, which is 24.9% of the 411,056 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 74,629 73% 15
US Forest Service 21,543 21% 2
Northern Research Station 2,143 2% 1
Local Government land 1,943 2% 24
Designation overlay 927 1% 1
Other State Land 477 0% 2
City and township land 193 0% 5
City of Gladstone 184 0% 5

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.