BirdTrout

Upper Fox River Watershed, Wisconsin

408 miles of mapped stream across 1,544 square miles of drainage in Waukesha, Walworth, Racine, Kenosha counties, in 23 named streams. Wisconsin designates 50 of those miles as trout water, on 13 streams. The 1 mainstem gauge with a July record read 78.4°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 07120006 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

408 mi
of mapped stream
934 NHD reaches
1,544 sq mi
drainage area
988,191 acres
78.4°F
July water temperature at the gauges
1 mainstem gauge, mean 78.4°F
17,805 ac
public land
1.8% of the basin · 13 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 14% of this basin's stream miles (55.3 of 408); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

55.3 of the 55.3 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 14% of it.

What makes this watershed distinctive

This is the Fox that drains south into Illinois — Waukesha, Walworth, Racine and Kenosha counties — and it is the thinnest trout basin in Wisconsin on this site: 50 designated miles on 13 of 23 named streams, out of 152 mapped miles, with 55 classified cold. It is here because the Mukwonago River, 10.9 miles of Class II water, and Sugar Creek's 14.0 miles at Class III survive in a basin that is otherwise suburban and warm; the Fox's own 36.4 miles, the White River's 13.8 and the Pewaukee's 12.0 carry no designation. Public ground is 18,823 acres across 1,544 square miles: the Vernon Wildlife Area at 4,355 acres, the southern unit of the Kettle Moraine State Forest at 3,872, Tichigan at 1,604. No gauge here holds a July record.

Every named stream in the basin

All 23 of them, longest first. 12 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
Fox River 36.4 untyped — —
Sugar Creek 14.0 untyped — Class III
White River 13.8 untyped — —
Pewaukee River 12.0 untyped — —
Mukwonago River 10.9 Cold — Class II
Peterson Creek 8.7 untyped — —
Pebble Creek 8.5 Cold — Class II
Jericho Creek 8.0 Cold — Class II
Spring Brook 6.0 Cold — Class I
Mill Brook 6.0 Cold — Class I, Class II
Palmer Creek 5.8 untyped — Class III
Brandy Brook 5.0 Cold — Class I
Genesee Creek 4.4 Cold — Class I, Class II
New Munster Creek 4.3 untyped — —
Potawatomi Creek 2.1 Cold — Class I
South Branch Genesee Creek 1.9 untyped — —
Harris Creek 1.6 Cold — Class II
North Branch Genesee Creek 1.6 Cold — Class I
Van Slyke Creek 0.5 Cold — Class I
Como Creek 0.5 untyped — —
Pebble Brook 0.1 untyped — —
Wind Lake Drainage Canal 0.0 untyped — —
Hoosier Creek 0.0 untyped — —

Public land in the watershed

17,805 acres in 13 units, which is 1.8% of the 988,191 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 17,805 100% 13

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.