BirdTrout

South Fork Holston River Watershed, Virginia

2,058 miles of mapped stream across 1,179 square miles of drainage in Washington, Smyth, Bristol city, Scott counties, in 226 named streams. Virginia designates 118 of those miles as trout water, on 65 streams.

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 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 06010102 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 2,058); 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

Every named stream in the basin

All 226 of them, longest first. 46 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.

Public land in the watershed

90,522 acres in 8 units, which is 12.0% of the 754,770 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.

• Jefferson National Forest 712,459 ac
• George Washington and Jefferson National Forest 866 ac
• Bear Creek National Scenic Area 5,122 ac
• Hungry Mother State Park 2,993 ac
• Lewis Fork Wilderness 6,075 ac
• Mount Rogers National Recreation Area 154,913 ac
• Raccoon Branch Wilderness 4,225 ac
• Seng Mountain National Scenic Area 5,195 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.

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.

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.

• Upper New 05050001