BirdTrout

St. Louis River Watershed, Minnesota

775 miles of mapped stream across 2,935 square miles of drainage in St. Louis, Carlton, Itasca, Aitkin, Lake counties, in 40 named streams. Minnesota designates 168 of those miles as trout water, on 28 streams. The 4 mainstem gauges with a July record read between 67.2 and 75.2°F in July.

Open in BirdTrout →

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 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 04010201 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 775); 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 40 of them, longest first. 24 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.

Public land in the watershed

0 acres in 10 units. 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.

• Cloquet Valley 50,551 ac
• Gichigami Ziibi WMA 894 ac
• Miscellaneous 143,744 ac
• Nemadji 90,138 ac
• Riverlands 22,693 ac
• Superior National Forest 2,440,608 ac
• Cloquet Valley State Forest 39,747 ac
• Jay Cooke State Park 7,834 ac
• Little Otter Creek State Aquatic Management Area (Carlton) 218 ac
• Otter Creek State Aquatic Management Area (Carlton) 377 ac

Best time to fish

The hatch calendar for northern Wisconsin, across the state line — no insect records in this dataset are filed under Minnesota, or this basin's centre falls on the far side of the border, so these are the nearest ones — 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 northern Wisconsin, across the state line. 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.

• Beartrap-Nemadji 04010301
• Beaver-Lester 04010102
• Cloquet 04010202
• Little Fork 09030005
• Rainy Headwaters 09030001