BirdTrout

La Crosse-Pine Watershed, Wisconsin

1,029 miles of mapped stream across 695 square miles of drainage in La Crosse, Monroe, Trempealeau counties, in 27 named streams. Wisconsin designates 199 of those miles as trout water, on 22 streams. The 3 mainstem gauges with a July record read between 62.2 and 64.0°F in July.

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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 07040006 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

1,029 mi
of mapped stream
1,844 NHD reaches
695 sq mi
drainage area
444,788 acres
62.2–64.0°F
July water temperature at the gauges
3 mainstem gauges, mean 63.2°F
3,360 ac
public land
0.8% of the basin · 6 units

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 25% of this basin's stream miles (252.4 of 1,029); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

252.4 of the 252.4 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 25% of it.

What makes this watershed distinctive

The La Crosse-Pine basin is 695 square miles of coulee country, and almost every named stream in it is trout water: 199 designated miles on 22 of its 27 named streams, out of 1,029 mapped miles, with 252 miles classified cold. The La Crosse River runs 70.8 miles at Class I and II; the Little La Crosse's 23.9 miles, Farmers Valley Creek's 14.8 and Silver Creek's 14.7 are all Class I, and Bostwick Creek runs 16.6 miles at Class I and II. Public ground is 3,360 acres, most of it the 2,961-acre Coulee Experimental Forest, with the rest in scattered wildlife holdings. No USGS gauge in the basin holds a July temperature record.

Every named stream in the basin

All 27 of them, longest first. 15 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
La Crosse River 70.8 Cold — Class I, Class II
Little LaCrosse River 23.9 Cold — Class I
Bostwick Creek 16.6 Cold — Class I, Class II
Farmers Valley Creek 14.8 Cold — Class I
Silver Creek 14.7 Cold — Class I
Halfway Creek 14.6 Cold — Class II, Class III
Burns Creek 14.5 Cold — Class I, Class II
Tarr Creek 11.7 Cold — Class I
Dutch Creek 11.7 Cold — Class II
Fish Creek 9.4 untyped — Class III
Mississippi River 8.9 untyped — —
Big Creek 8.0 Cold — Class II
Suukjak Sep Creek 7.5 Cold — Class I, Class III
Neshonoc Creek 6.5 Cold — Class I, Class III
Upper Big Creek 5.5 Cold — Class I
Stillwell Creek 4.5 Cold — Class II, Class III
East Beaver Creek 4.2 Cold — Class I
West Beaver Creek 4.0 Cold — Class II
Sand Creek 4.0 untyped — Class III
Bailey Creek 3.9 Cold — Class II, Class III
Pine Creek 3.8 untyped — —
Beaver Creek 3.7 Cold — Class I
Sparta Creek 3.5 Cold — Class I
Root River 3.2 untyped — —
East Upper Big Creek 3.1 Cold — Class I
Pammel Creek 2.9 untyped — —
West Channel 2.3 untyped — —

Public land in the watershed

3,360 acres in 6 units, which is 0.8% of the 444,788 acres the basin covers. Private inholdings carried in the same source file are excluded, here and on the map.

Managing agency Acres Share Units
Wisconsin DNR 3,209 96% 4
County forest 151 4% 1
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.