BirdTrout

Grant-Little Maquoketa Watershed, Wisconsin

1,084 miles of mapped stream across 1,120 square miles of drainage in Grant, Lafayette counties, in 38 named streams. Wisconsin designates 152 of those miles as trout water, on 23 streams.

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Map key
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

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

The watershed in numbers

HUC8 07060003 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

1,084 mi
of mapped stream
1,758 NHD reaches
1,120 sq mi
drainage area
716,504 acres
0 ac
public land
1 unit

Cold, cool and warm water

WDNR's trout stream classification, which types the stream by the trout population it supports rather than by measuring the water — every reach it calls Class I, II or III carries WDNR's own cold designation. It covers 15% of this basin's stream miles (159.6 of 1,084); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

159.6 of the 159.6 typed miles in this basin — 100% — are cold or cold-transitional water. Every typed reach carries the same class, which is as likely to be the coverage as the water: Wisconsin DNR has typed 15% of it.

What makes this watershed distinctive

The Grant-Little Maquoketa is the southwestern corner of the driftless, 1,120 square miles of Grant and Lafayette counties draining to the Mississippi, and it is the one basin on this site with no public land unit in it at all — nothing in the state's huntable layer clears the acreage floor here, so this page has no public ground to list. The trout water is entirely on private land with public access: the Platte River runs 34.6 miles and the Little Platte 34.4, both Class II, the Little Grant 15.9 miles as Class I and Rogers Branch 11.8 at Class II. WDNR designates 152 of the basin's 290 mapped miles on 23 of its 38 named streams, all of it wild or wild-supplemented, and classifies 221 miles cold.

Every named stream in the basin

All 38 of them, longest first. 22 have a page of their own and are linked; the rest are in the app. The class column is Wisconsin DNR's designation of that stream. "Now" is the live USGS reading where a gauge stands in that stream.

Stream Miles Class Now Designation
Platte River 34.6 Cold — Class II
Little Platte River 34.4 Cold — Class II
Mississippi River 16.7 untyped — —
Little Grant River 15.9 Cold — Class I
Blockhouse Creek 14.4 untyped — —
Rogers Branch 11.8 Cold — Class II
Martin Branch 11.0 Cold — Class II
Snowden Branch 10.6 Cold — Class II
Borah Creek 10.2 Cold — Class I
Sandy Creek 10.2 Cold — Class II
Rountree Branch 9.8 Cold — Class I
Grant River 9.0 Cold — Class II
Leggett Creek 8.5 Cold — Class II
French Creek 6.3 untyped — —
Willow Branch 6.3 Cold — Class II
Bull Branch 6.2 Cold — Class II
Crow Branch 6.1 Cold — Class II
Bacon Branch 5.9 untyped — —
Chase Creek 5.3 Cold — Class II
Martinville Creek 5.1 Cold — Class I
Newell Creek 4.9 Cold — Class II
Whig Branch 4.5 untyped — —
Culver Branch 4.2 Cold — Class I
Young Branch 3.8 untyped — —
McPherson Branch 3.8 Cold — Class I
Bear Branch 3.6 untyped — —
Austin Branch 3.6 Cold — Class I, Class II
Wyalusing Slough 3.5 untyped — —
Day Branch 3.3 Cold — Class II
Moore Branch 3.3 untyped — —
Cannon Branch 3.2 Cold — Class II
Lee Branch 2.6 Cold — Class I
State Line Slough 2.4 untyped — —
Johnsons Slough 2.3 untyped — —
Mounds Branch 1.4 untyped — —
Buck Creek 0.8 untyped — —
Wisconsin River 0.7 untyped — —
Sny Magill Creek 0.2 untyped — —

Public land in the watershed

0 acres in 1 unit. Private inholdings carried in the same source file are excluded, here and on the map.

Managing agency Acres Share Units
US Fish and Wildlife Service 0 0% 1

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.

Best time to fish

The hatch calendar for the Wisconsin driftless, 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

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

51 insects are recorded from the Wisconsin driftless. 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.