Mississippi River

About Mississippi River

The Mississippi forms 264 miles of Wisconsin's western border, from Prescott down through Pierce, Buffalo, Trempealeau, La Crosse, Vernon, Crawford and Grant counties to the Illinois line. The survey puts 143,459 acres of surface on it and 2,696 miles of bank — by far the most of any water in the state, and a number that only makes sense once the backwaters and sloughs are counted.

That bank figure is the real story. This is a river with a main channel and an enormous braided margin of sloughs, side channels and flooded timber: Beef Slough, Bagley Bottoms, Belvidere Slough. Thirty-eight public landings are on record, at Prescott, Diamond Bluff, Alma, Buffalo City, Fountain City, La Crosse, Stoddard, Genoa, Lynxville, Cassville, Potosi and Glen Haven among others.

The state's only fisheries designation here is smallmouth bass, classified across non-wadable coarse and fine substrate and wadable warm water. That understates what lives in the river, but it reflects that the Mississippi is managed jointly rather than through Wisconsin's inland programmes.

This is a boundary water shared with Minnesota and Iowa, and it has its own regulations. Check the current DNR boundary-water rules before fishing it.

Written from Wisconsin DNR hydrography and fisheries data. State water ID WBIC 721000.

How the state manages it

• smallmouth · Non-Wadable Coarse Substrate; Non-Wadable Fine Substrate; Wadable Warm Water

Wisconsin DNR fisheries designations. These describe how the water is managed, not what is in it on any given day.

Fishing license

Wisconsin sells them online. Buy one from the state. We don’t know whether you need one — that depends on your age, where you live, the water, and what your guide’s own license covers.