BirdTrout

Namekagon River Watershed, Wisconsin

686 miles of mapped stream across 1,019 square miles of drainage in Washburn, Bayfield, Sawyer, Douglas, Burnett counties, in 50 named streams. Wisconsin designates 179 of those miles as trout water, on 31 streams. The 1 mainstem gauge with a July record read 65.8°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 07030002 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

686 mi
of mapped stream
1,478 NHD reaches
1,019 sq mi
drainage area
651,863 acres
65.8°F
July water temperature at the gauges
1 mainstem gauge, mean 65.8°F
280,505 ac
public land
43.0% of the basin · 16 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 19% of this basin's stream miles (127.9 of 686); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

127.9 of the 127.9 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 19% of it.

What makes this watershed distinctive

The Namekagon River runs 122.4 miles through this basin as Class II water — the longest continuously designated river on this site's Wisconsin list — and it is most of what the basin's trout designation covers: 179 miles on 31 of 50 named streams, out of 482 mapped miles, with 276 classified cold. The Totagatic River adds 54.0 miles at Class III, the Ounce 26.5 and Bean Brook 19.3, also Class III; Stuntz Brook's 17.3 miles are Class II. Public ground is 280,862 acres across 1,019 square miles of Washburn, Bayfield, Sawyer and Douglas counties, and Washburn County Forest alone holds 121,202 of them, with 46,496 acres of Chequamegon National Forest and 32,376 of Sawyer County Forest. No gauge in the basin holds a July temperature record.

Every named stream in the basin

All 50 of them, longest first. 25 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
Namekagon River 122.4 Cold — Class II
Totagatic River 54.0 untyped — Class III
Ounce River 26.5 untyped — Class III
Bean Brook 19.3 untyped — Class III
Stuntz Brook 17.3 Cold — Class II
Potato Creek 15.5 untyped — —
McKenzie Creek 14.6 Cold — Class I
Hay Creek 12.2 untyped — —
Spring Creek 11.9 Cold — Class II
Castle Creek 9.6 untyped — Class III
Chippanazie Creek 8.8 Cold — Class I
Gull Creek 8.8 Cold — Class I
Webb Creek 8.8 Cold — Class I
Fivemile Creek 8.4 Cold — Class II, Class III
Big Brook 8.1 Cold — Class I
Mackay Creek 8.0 Cold — Class II
Shell Creek 8.0 Cold — Class I
Godfrey Creek 7.7 Cold — Class I
Bergen Creek 7.7 Cold — Class II, Class III
Spring Lake Creek 7.4 untyped — —
Cap Creek 7.0 untyped — Class III
Smith Lake Creek 6.3 untyped — —
Jackson Creek 5.8 untyped — —
Tag-Alder Creek 5.7 untyped — —
Snake Creek 5.7 untyped — —
Taylor Creek 5.6 untyped — —
Little Mackay Creek 5.4 Cold — Class II
Mosquito Brook 5.1 Cold — Class I
Whalen Creek 4.9 Cold — Class I
Elm Creek 4.2 untyped — —
Otter Creek 4.1 untyped — —
Cold Brook 3.9 untyped — —
Little Bean Brook 3.4 Cold — Class I
Tranus Creek 3.3 untyped — —
McDermott Brook 3.1 Cold — Class II
Dugan Run 3.1 untyped — —
Nelson Creek 2.7 Cold — Class I
Hatchery Creek 2.4 Cold — Class I
Dogtown Creek 2.2 Cold — Class I
Maggie Creek 1.9 untyped — —
South Fork Bean Brook 1.9 Cold — Class I
Spring Brook 1.7 Cold — Class I
Flat Creek 1.6 untyped — —
Pine Brook 1.6 Cold — Class II
Boyle Brook 1.4 untyped — Class III
Wheeler Brook 1.2 untyped — —
Rainbow Creek 0.7 Cold — Class II
Bradley Branch 0.4 untyped — —
Casey Creek 0.4 untyped — —
Chicog Creek 0.0 untyped — —

Public land in the watershed

280,505 acres in 16 units, which is 43.0% of the 651,863 acres the basin covers. Private inholdings carried in the same source file are excluded, here and on the map.

Managing agency Acres Share Units
County forest 228,133 81% 5
US Forest Service 46,496 17% 2
Wisconsin DNR 5,876 2% 9

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 northern Wisconsin, 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

42 insects are recorded from northern Wisconsin. 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.