BirdTrout

Hiwassee River Watershed, North Carolina

1,943 miles of mapped stream across 2,056 square miles of drainage in Cherokee, Clay counties, in 407 named streams. North Carolina designates 396 of those miles as trout water, on 276 streams.

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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 NC Wildlife Resources Commission's own classification of the stream, not a measurement, except at the gauge dots, which read live. Grey is water NC Wildlife Resources Commission has not typed.

The watershed in numbers

HUC8 06020002 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

North Carolina publishes a trout water designation and a wild-or-stocked tier, and no thermal class this page can read. It covers 0% of this basin's stream miles (0.0 of 1,943); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

North Carolina publishes no thermal classification of its streams that we could read, so this page has no cold/cool/warm breakdown. The live map colours North Carolina water from an air-temperature model at the moment you open it; the designations below are NCWRC's own and are the harder fact.

What makes this watershed distinctive

Every named stream in the basin

All 407 of them, longest first. 136 have a page of their own and are linked; the rest are in the app. The class column is NC Wildlife Resources Commission's designation of that stream. "Now" is the live USGS reading where a gauge stands in that stream.

Public land in the watershed

138,334 acres in 4 units, which is 10.5% of the 1,315,873 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.

• Nantahala National Forest 532,900 ac
• Nantahala Purchase Unit 730 ac
• Cherokee National Forest 451 ac
• Southern Nantahala Wilderness 12,011 ac

Best time to fish

The hatch calendar for the North Carolina mountains, 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.

52 insects are recorded from the North Carolina mountains. 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.

• Lower Little Tennessee 06010204
• Tugaloo 03060102
• Upper Little Tennessee 06010202