BirdTrout

Tygart Valley River Watershed, West Virginia

2,397 miles of mapped stream across 1,375 square miles of drainage in Randolph, Barbour, Upshur, Preston, Taylor, Marion counties, in 256 named streams. West Virginia designates 519 of those miles as trout water, on 114 streams. The 2 mainstem gauges with a July record read between 65.6 and 77.9°F in July.

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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 05020001 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 2,397); 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 256 of them, longest first. 100 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

40,240 acres in 14 units, which is 4.6% of the 880,309 acres the basin covers. 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.

• Monongahela National Forest 949,917 ac
• Kumbrabow State Forest 9,158 ac
• Tygart Lake State Park 2,103 ac
• Audra State Park 344 ac
• West Virginia Wildlife Center 322 ac
• Holly River State Park 8,128 ac
• Becky Creek Wildlife Management Area 1,903 ac
• Blackwater Wildlife Management Area 61,302 ac
• Cheat Wildlife Management Area 79,510 ac
• Huttonsville State Farm Wildlife Management Area 2,744 ac
• Little River Wildlife Management Area 122,430 ac
• Otter Creek Wildlife Management Area 67,702 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.

• Cheat 05020004
• Elk 05050007
• Little Kanawha 05030203