BirdTrout
Rapidan-Upper Rappahannock Watershed, Virginia
848 miles of mapped stream across 1,557 square miles of drainage in Culpeper, Madison, Fauquier, Rappahannock, Orange, Greene, Spotsylvania, Stafford counties, in 67 named streams. Virginia designates 110 of those miles as trout water, on 33 streams. The 1 mainstem gauge with a July record read 74.9°F in July.
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 Virginia DWR's own classification of the stream, not a measurement, except at the gauge dots, which read live. Grey is water Virginia DWR has not typed.
The watershed in numbers
HUC8 02080103 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
Virginia publishes stockability classes and a wild-or-stocked tier for its trout water, and no thermal class this page can read. It covers 0% of this basin's stream miles (0.0 of 848); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.
Virginia publishes no thermal classification of its streams that we could read, so this page has no cold/cool/warm breakdown. The live map colours Virginia water from an air-temperature model at the moment you open it; the designations below are VDWR's own and are the harder fact.
What makes this watershed distinctive
The Rapidan and the upper Rappahannock drain the east slope of the Blue Ridge in Madison, Rappahannock, Culpeper and Fauquier counties, and this is the wild-trout basin of northern Virginia: every one of the 110 designated miles here is filed by VDWR as wild, with no stocked-holdover water at all — the only Virginia subbasin on this site of which that is true. Thirty-three of the 67 named streams are designated. The Rapidan River itself runs 25.7 miles at Class I, the Hughes River 14.6 miles also at Class I, and the Hazel, Thornton and South rivers run 13 to 16 miles apiece at Class II. Public ground is modest and state rather than federal: 10,027 acres of Rapidan Wildlife Management Area and 4,557 of C.F. Phelps, 15,128 acres in all across a basin of 1,557 square miles. One gauge holds a July record, at 74.9°F.
Every named stream in the basin
All 67 of them, longest first. 29 have a page of their own and are linked; the rest are in the app. The class column is Virginia DWR's designation of that stream. "Now" is the live USGS reading where a gauge stands in that stream.
| Stream | Miles | Class | Now | Designation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rapidan River | 25.7 | untyped | — | Class I |
| Hazel River | 16.3 | untyped | — | Class II |
| Hughes River | 14.6 | untyped | — | Class I |
| Conway River | 14.4 | untyped | — | — |
| Thornton River | 13.8 | untyped | — | Class II |
| South River | 13.8 | untyped | — | Class II |
| Jordan River | 12.5 | untyped | — | Class II |
| Rush River | 12.5 | untyped | — | Class IV |
| Robinson River | 10.2 | untyped | — | Class I |
| North Fork Thornton River | 9.1 | untyped | — | Class II |
| Rose River | 8.8 | untyped | — | Class I |
| Piney River | 8.3 | untyped | — | Class II |
| Covington River | 7.4 | untyped | — | — |
| Garth Run | 7.4 | untyped | — | Class III |
| Popham Run | 6.5 | untyped | — | — |
| Indian Run | 6.2 | untyped | — | Class III |
| White Walnut Run | 5.8 | untyped | — | — |
| White Run | 5.8 | untyped | — | — |
| Elk Run | 5.7 | untyped | — | — |
| Keyser Run | 4.9 | untyped | — | — |
| Rocky Run | 4.9 | untyped | — | — |
| Rippin Run | 4.2 | untyped | — | — |
| Staunton River | 4.1 | untyped | — | Class I |
| Buckner Run | 4.1 | untyped | — | — |
| Hickman Run | 4.0 | untyped | — | — |
| Beaverdam Creek | 4.0 | untyped | — | — |
| Kilbys Creek | 4.0 | untyped | — | — |
| Henshaw Run | 4.0 | untyped | — | — |
| Racer Run | 3.9 | untyped | — | — |
| Hittles Mill Stream | 3.8 | untyped | — | — |
| Brokenback Run | 3.7 | untyped | — | Class I |
| Gilmore Run | 3.4 | untyped | — | — |
| Big Branch | 3.1 | untyped | — | — |
| Kinsey Run | 3.1 | untyped | — | Class III |
| Bolton Branch | 3.0 | untyped | — | Class II |
| Ragged Run | 3.0 | untyped | — | Class II |
| Whetstone Run | 3.0 | untyped | — | — |
| Rosson Hollow Run | 2.9 | untyped | — | — |
| Pocosin Creek | 2.9 | untyped | — | Class II |
| Devils Ditch | 2.8 | untyped | — | Class I |
| Entry Run | 2.7 | untyped | — | Class III |
| Hannah Run | 2.5 | untyped | — | Class II |
| Collects Run | 2.5 | untyped | — | Class III |
| Cedar Run | 2.3 | untyped | — | Class I |
| Bull Yearling Run | 2.2 | untyped | — | — |
| Sprucepine Branch | 2.1 | untyped | — | Class II |
| Butterwood Branch | 2.1 | untyped | — | — |
| Strother Run | 2.1 | untyped | — | Class II |
| Waterfall Branch | 1.9 | untyped | — | — |
| Hogcamp Branch | 1.9 | untyped | — | Class I |
| Bearwallow Creek | 1.8 | untyped | — | — |
| Runyons Run | 1.8 | untyped | — | — |
| Mill Prong | 1.8 | untyped | — | Class II |
| Tims River | 1.8 | untyped | — | Class II |
| Wilson Branch | 1.7 | untyped | — | — |
| Bush Mountain Stream | 1.5 | untyped | — | Class II |
| Sams Run | 1.4 | untyped | — | Class II |
| Jemima Branch | 1.4 | untyped | — | — |
| Wilson Run | 1.3 | untyped | — | — |
| Bootens Run | 1.2 | untyped | — | Class II |
| Laurel Prong | 1.0 | untyped | — | Class II |
| Long Point Branch | 0.9 | untyped | — | — |
| Dry Branch | 0.9 | untyped | — | — |
| Aarons Branch | 0.8 | untyped | — | — |
| Garth Spring Run | 0.7 | untyped | — | — |
| Raven Cliff Branch | 0.5 | untyped | — | — |
| Haunted Branch | 0.4 | untyped | — | — |
Public land in the watershed
14,584 acres in 4 units, which is 1.5% of the 996,348 acres the basin covers. Private inholdings carried in the same source file are excluded, here and on the map.
| Managing agency | Acres | Share | Units |
|---|---|---|---|
| Virginia DWR | 14,584 | 100% | 2 |
| National Park Service | 0 | 0% | 2 |
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.
- Rapidan Wildlife Management Area 10,031 ac
- C.F. Phelps Wildlife Management Area 4,544 ac
- Shenandoah National Park 195,720 ac
- Shenandoah Wilderness Area 82,307 ac
Species present
Recorded by VDWR on the reaches it has classified, per stream. The temperature ranges are our own species table and are the same numbers the app's picker uses.
| Species | Best water | Tolerates | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Brook Trout
Salvelinus fontinalis |
50–60°F | 42–65°F | surveyed |
|
Brown Trout
Salmo trutta |
55–63°F | 45–70°F | surveyed |
Best time to fish
The hatch calendar for the Virginia 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.
January
May
- Blue-Winged Olive
- Blackfly
- Blue Quill
- Cranefly
- +18 more
June
July
- Caterpillar
- Crayfish
- Green Sedge
- Light Cahill
- +18 more
August
September
October
November
December
Nothing seasonal on the water.
56 insects are recorded from the Virginia 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.