BirdTrout

South Fork Flambeau River Watershed, Wisconsin

511 miles of mapped stream across 739 square miles of drainage in Price, Iron, Sawyer, Oneida, Vilas, Rusk counties, in 47 named streams. Wisconsin designates 130 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 07050003 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

511 mi
of mapped stream
958 NHD reaches
739 sq mi
drainage area
473,225 acres
236,650 ac
public land
50.0% 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 18% of this basin's stream miles (90.4 of 511); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

90.4 of the 90.4 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 18% of it.

What makes this watershed distinctive

The South Fork Flambeau drains 739 square miles of Price, Iron, Sawyer and Oneida counties, and the fork itself — 68.5 miles of it — carries no trout designation at all; the designated water is in the tributaries. The Elk River runs 32.2 miles at Class III, Price Creek 17.1 miles carrying all three classes and the Little Elk 15.7 at Class I and III. WDNR designates 130 of the basin's 353 mapped stream miles on 23 of its 47 named streams, and classifies 99 miles cold — the lowest cold total of any northern Wisconsin basin here. Public ground is 236,820 acres, dominated by 148,168 acres of Chequamegon National Forest with 45,399 of Price County Forest and 24,744 of the Flambeau River State Forest. No gauge here holds a July record.

Every named stream in the basin

All 47 of them, longest first. 18 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
South Fork Flambeau River 68.5 untyped — —
Elk River 32.2 untyped — Class III
Price Creek 17.1 Cold — Class I, Class II, Class III
Sailor Creek 16.8 untyped — —
Little Elk River 15.7 untyped — Class I, Class III
Amber Creek 15.5 untyped — —
Hay Creek 12.1 untyped — —
Chase Creek 11.6 Cold — Class I, Class III
Deer Creek 11.3 untyped — —
Carpenter Creek 9.3 Cold — Class I
Musser Creek 8.2 untyped — —
Foulds Creek 6.8 Cold — Class II, Class III
Riley Creek 6.7 untyped — —
Murray Creek 6.7 Cold — Class II
East Fork Hay Creek 6.5 untyped — Class III
North Branch Little Elk River 6.3 untyped — Class III
Hackett Creek 6.3 Cold — Class I, Class II
Ninemile Creek 6.1 Cold — Class I
Spring Creek 5.7 Cold — Class II
Smith Creek 5.7 untyped — Class III
Stone Creek 5.5 untyped — —
Buckskin Creek 5.5 untyped — —
Maiden Creek 4.8 Cold — Class I, Class III
Patterson Creek 4.7 untyped — —
Crane and Chase Creek 4.4 untyped — —
Nelson Creek 4.2 Cold — Class II
Camp C Creek 4.1 Cold — Class II
Horton Creek 3.9 Cold — Class II
Clover Creek 3.8 untyped — —
Cedar Creek 3.6 Cold — Class I
Threemile Creek 3.5 untyped — —
Dalrymple Creek 3.4 Cold — Class II
Byhre Creek 3.3 untyped — —
Rock Creek 3.2 untyped — —
Mount Pelee Creek 2.7 Cold — Class I
Cramer Creek 2.5 untyped — Class III
Elevenmile Creek 2.2 untyped — —
Tracy Creek 2.0 untyped — —
Sieverson Creek 1.9 Cold — Class I
Bull Creek 1.9 untyped — —
Priest Creek 1.6 untyped — —
Fuller Creek 1.4 untyped — —
Hesher Creek 1.2 Cold — Class II
Beaver Creek 1.1 untyped — —
Popple Creek 0.6 untyped — —
Springstead Creek 0.4 untyped — —
Skinner Creek 0.4 untyped — —

Public land in the watershed

236,650 acres in 6 units, which is 50.0% of the 473,225 acres the basin covers. Private inholdings carried in the same source file are excluded, here and on the map.

Managing agency Acres Share Units
US Forest Service 148,168 63% 1
County forest 49,163 21% 2
Wisconsin DNR 39,319 17% 3

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.