BirdTrout

Upper Catawba River Watershed, North Carolina

4,912 miles of mapped stream across 2,358 square miles of drainage in Burke, McDowell, Caldwell, Catawba, Alexander, Gaston, Mecklenburg, Iredell counties, in 280 named streams. North Carolina designates 526 of those miles as trout water, on 222 streams. The 1 mainstem gauge with a July record read 74.2°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 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 03050101 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 4,912); 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 280 of them, longest first. 157 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

218,256 acres in 10 units, which is 14.5% of the 1,508,875 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.

• Pisgah National Forest 510,983 ac
• Johns River Game Land 6,448 ac
• Pisgah Game Land 4,728 ac
• South Mountains Game Land 22,542 ac
• Backbone Ridge State Forest 477 ac
• Gill State Forest 462 ac
• Grandfather Mountain State Park 2,973 ac
• Lake James State Park 3,920 ac
• Linville Gorge Wilderness 11,869 ac
• South Mountains State Park 21,180 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.

• Nolichucky 06010108
• Upper Broad 03050105
• Upper French Broad 06010105
• Upper New 05050001
• Upper Yadkin 03040101
• Watauga 06010103