BirdTrout
Chester-Sassafras Watershed, Pennsylvania
323 miles of mapped stream across 1,303 square miles of drainage in Chester county, in 21 named streams. Pennsylvania designates 54 of those miles as trout water, on 8 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 PA DEP's own classification of the stream, not a measurement, except at the gauge dots, which read live. Grey is water PA DEP has not typed.
The watershed in numbers
HUC8 02060002 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
Pennsylvania publishes no thermal class. What PA DEP publishes is a Chapter 93 designated use — Cold Water Fishes, Trout Stocking, Warm Water Fishes and the rest — which names the fishery a stream is protected for. It is the closest any agency here comes to a temperature without being one, and docs/pa-thermal-fit.md is where the distinction is measured rather than asserted. It covers 40% of this basin's stream miles (129.1 of 323); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.
- Cool 125.5 mi (97%)
- Warm 3.6 mi (3%)
0.0 of the 129.1 typed miles in this basin — 0% — are cold or cold-transitional water. The dominant class is cool.
Every named stream in the basin
All 21 of them, longest first. 3 have a page of their own and are linked; the rest are in the app. The class column is PA DEP's designation of that stream. "Now" is the live USGS reading where a gauge stands in that stream.
| Stream | Miles | Class | Now | Designation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Little Elk Creek | 24.1 | Cool | — | Trout Stocking |
| Big Elk Creek | 22.6 | Cool | — | Trout Stocking |
| North East Creek | 17.6 | Warm | — | — |
| Little North East Creek | 13.0 | Cool | — | Trout Stocking |
| East Branch Big Elk Creek | 8.7 | Cool | — | Trout Stocking |
| Stony Run | 7.0 | untyped | — | — |
| West Branch Big Elk Creek | 6.1 | Cool | — | Trout Stocking |
| West Branch Little Northeast Creek | 5.2 | untyped | — | — |
| Hodgson Run | 4.7 | Cool | — | Trout Stocking |
| Mill Creek | 4.2 | untyped | — | — |
| Gramies Run | 3.7 | untyped | — | — |
| West Branch Laurel Run | 3.2 | untyped | — | — |
| East Branch Laurel Run | 3.2 | untyped | — | — |
| Ways Run | 3.2 | Cool | — | Trout Stocking |
| Dogwood Run | 3.0 | untyped | — | — |
| Gravelly Run | 2.4 | untyped | — | — |
| Barren Brook | 2.0 | untyped | — | — |
| Jordan Run | 1.9 | untyped | — | — |
| McDonald Run | 1.7 | Cool | — | Trout Stocking |
| Laurel Run | 1.3 | untyped | — | — |
| Elk River | 1.0 | untyped | — | — |
Public land in the watershed
No public land in this basin is joined to the stream network on our map.
Neighbouring watersheds
The subbasins that share a boundary with this one and carry coldwater streams.