BirdTrout
Little Fork River Watershed, Minnesota
393 miles of mapped stream across 1,874 square miles of drainage in St. Louis, Koochiching, Itasca counties, in 18 named streams. Minnesota designates 71 of those miles as trout water, on 6 streams.
Open in BirdTrout50°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 nothing at all: Minnesota DNR publishes no thermal classification, so every stream on this map draws grey. The gauge dots are the one exception and they read live. Grey is every stream here, for the reason above.
The watershed in numbers
HUC8 09030005 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
Minnesota publishes neither a thermal class nor a fishery tier. What it publishes is a listing under Minnesota Rules Chapter 6264 — a land-use protection covering timber harvest and watershed permits — which says the state protects this water, not how cold it runs. It covers 0% of this basin's stream miles (0.0 of 393); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.
Minnesota publishes no thermal classification of any stream in the state, so this page has no cold/cool/warm breakdown and none can be inferred: Chapter 6264 is a land-use statute and reading a temperature out of it would be this site inventing one. The live map colours Minnesota water from an air-temperature model at the moment you open it; the Chapter 6264 listings below are MN DNR's own and are the harder fact.
Every named stream in the basin
All 18 of them, longest first. 2 have a page of their own and are linked; the rest are in the app. The class column is Minnesota DNR's designation of that stream. It is not a temperature: this state publishes none, so every row reads untyped in the thermal column. "Now" is the live USGS reading where a gauge stands in that stream.
| Stream | Miles | Class | Now | Designation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Valley River | 25.8 | untyped | — | Designated trout stream |
| Sturgeon River | 20.2 | untyped | — | — |
| Rice River | 19.5 | untyped | — | — |
| Dark River | 18.9 | untyped | — | Designated trout stream |
| Johnson Creek | 15.2 | untyped | — | Designated trout stream |
| Lost River | 14.9 | untyped | — | Designated trout stream |
| Little Fork River | 13.4 | untyped | — | — |
| Stony Brook | 11.2 | untyped | — | Designated trout stream |
| Sand Creek | 9.5 | untyped | — | Designated trout stream |
| Sassas Creek | 6.7 | untyped | — | — |
| Watercress Creek | 4.9 | untyped | — | — |
| Timber Creek | 4.4 | untyped | — | — |
| Bear River Creek | 4.3 | untyped | — | — |
| Leander Creek | 4.1 | untyped | — | — |
| East Knuckey Creek | 1.9 | untyped | — | — |
| West Knuckey Creek | 1.8 | untyped | — | — |
| Bear River | 0.6 | untyped | — | — |
| Prairie Creek | 0.3 | untyped | — | — |
Public land in the watershed
0 acres in 8 units. Private inholdings carried in the same source file are excluded, here and on the map.
| Managing agency | Acres | Share | Units |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minnesota DNR | 0 | 0% | 7 |
| US Forest Service | 0 | 0% | 1 |
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.
- George Washington 95,497 ac
- Kabetogama 162,302 ac
- Koochiching 318,363 ac
- Miscellaneous 143,744 ac
- Peloquin WMA 323 ac
- Stony Brook Forest Recreation Area 24,024 ac
- Sturgeon River 56,702 ac
- Superior National Forest 2,440,608 ac
Neighbouring watersheds
The subbasins that share a boundary with this one and carry coldwater streams.