BirdTrout

North Branch Potomac River Watershed, West Virginia

924 miles of mapped stream across 1,343 square miles of drainage in Mineral, Grant, Hampshire counties, in 86 named streams. West Virginia designates 133 of those miles as trout water, on 22 streams.

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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

58 64 70

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 nothing at all: WV DEP publishes no thermal classification, so every stream on this map draws grey. The gauge dots are the one exception and they read live. Grey is every stream here, for the reason above.

The watershed in numbers

HUC8 02070002 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

Cold, cool and warm water

West Virginia publishes no thermal class. What WV DEP publishes is a Category B-2 trout water designation under 47 CSR 2 — the state's finding that a stream sustains a year-round trout population, with annually stocked water that does not hold over excluded by the rule. It is a statement about a fishery, not about a July temperature. It covers 0% of this basin's stream miles (0.0 of 924); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

WV DEP publishes no thermal classification of any stream in the state, so this page has no cold/cool/warm breakdown and none is inferred from the trout designation. The designation has one affirmative level rather than a ladder — a stream is Category B-2 trout water or it is not listed, and the E/P/TT codes beside it say how much of WV DEP's assessment unit the designation covers rather than how strong it is — so there is nothing in it to rank a cold reach against a cool one. And the carrying rule does not fit here either: 23 gauges give a sensitivity line at R² 0.476, under the 0.50 floor, so nothing is modelled. See docs/wv-thermal-assessment.md. West Virginia water draws grey on the live map; grey means unmeasured.

Every named stream in the basin

All 86 of them, longest first. 23 have a page of their own and are linked; the rest are in the app. The class column is WV DEP's designation of that stream. It is not a temperature: this state publishes none, so every row reads untyped in the thermal column. "Now" is the live USGS reading where a gauge stands in that stream.

Public land in the watershed

141 acres in 4 units. Private inholdings carried in the same source file are excluded, here and on the map.

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.

• Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge 17,006 ac
• Monongahela National Forest 949,917 ac
• Dolly Sods Wilderness 17,777 ac
• Allegheny Wildlife Management Area 7,046 ac

Best time to fish

The hatch calendar for the Virginia mountains, across the state line — no insect records in this dataset are filed under West Virginia, or this basin's centre falls on the far side of the border, so these are the nearest ones — 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.

56 insects are recorded from the Virginia mountains, across the state line. 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.

• Cacapon-Town 02070003
• Cheat 05020004
• South Branch Potomac 02070001