Where Are All These Creeks And Water Holes At!?!?

[ColdWaterFshr]

Chuck Tryon's "200 Missouri Smallmouth Adventures" has enough water to keep you busy for a lifetime.

[Al Agnew]

Finding larger streams is easy...just look at a state highway map. Finding accesses and smaller creeks is a little more difficult. Certainly, if you have a name of a creek already, finding it on Google, either Google Maps or Google Earth, is easy enough, but if you're just looking for your own good spots, you have to use a number of resources and then do your own explorations. Here are my suggestions for those resources:

MDC Conservation Atlas--if you could get your hands on the older ones, which were based upon county road maps, they are terrific but sometimes out of date. The newer atlas is good, but if find the maps, while really pretty, not as easy to use for things other than just finding the various conservation areas, including MDC stream accesses. The older ones were more accurate as to all the public roads leading to the rivers.

De Lorme Atlas--very good for showing all the roads leading to the rivers, shows all the smaller streams. Some of the obscure roads shown that look promising in the atlas may turn out to be private when you check them out.

MDC Paddler's Guide--apparently the new version is out. While this guidebook only shows floatable streams, and not quite all of them, it is very good for actually giving you information on access points on those streams.

200 Missouri Smallmouth Adventures, by the late Chuck Tryon--it doesn't cover every stream in the state (wish he would have gone ahead and covered Southwest MO) but it mentions just about every fishable smallmouth creek in most of Southern MO. The information on access points is invaluable, but access points on smaller creeks change rapidly as new bridges are built and people begin to post the accesses against trespass, so you have to take his access info with a grain of salt.

USGS topo maps--available as paper maps or online, these are the ultimate source of info on what the streams are really like, if you know how to read them. From the topo maps, you can tell what the terrain is like around the streams, find springs feeding them, roads leading to them, how many houses are along them, and even the gradient (how fast the stream flows). And if you really know how to read the terrain features, you can even tell to some extent what kind of rock the stream flows through (at least, in southeast MO, whether it's flowing through the igneous rock of the St. Francois Mountains or through sedimentary rock).

There are a few other guidebooks that can be helpful, and websites that give descriptions of major streams with access points, but the above are the most useful. And then go to Google Earth or the satellite views on Google Maps to get an actual "picture" of what any particular piece of stream looks like from the air. For most of the major streams, the USGS river gauges will give you not only an idea of what the stream conditions are at present, but if you know how to read all the gauge info, you can tell a lot about what the size of the stream around a given gauge actually is normally. For instance, if the median flow at this time of year is less than 30 or so cubic feet per second, you know the stream is not normally floatable in the summer. If it's 30-75 cfs, it's marginally floatable most summers. If it's 75-250 cfs, it's usually floatable throughout the summer. And if it's over 250 cfs, it's not only floatable but probably will have jetboats on it. That's the median flow, not the actual flow shown on the graph...this summer, that actual flow is probably going to be a much smaller number!

[Smalliebigs]

Get out and seek for yourself......trial and error is your friend and time. Honestly this site doesn't help the fishing in any of our creeks and rivers so mums the word from me. There are river vets on here that can identify a body of water if you expose to much in the backround of your image posted so beware. Pretty sure thats why we don't see many pics on here and read so many stories about alleged catches.....which is cool with me. I will admit I really want to see the pics but, I do understand why people post stories instead of reports and pics. The internet is a killer of productive streams nowadays.