Hatches: The Mapping Apps Guiding Anglers to Hidden Waters

One cabinet in my gear room houses a stack of coffee-stained, beat-up DeLorme atlases from states near and far, many of their blue-lined pages marked up with notes. These maps were tools as important as rod and reel, and oftentimes using them to find new spots less traveled brought more fish to hand than any new fly pattern or upgrade in gear.

While I always have one for my home state of Pennsylvania in my vehicle—honestly more out of habit than anything—I have gradually retired these DeLorme maps in favor of trip planning almost exclusively online. The controlled chaos of tabs open in my browser—a half dozen USGS stream flow stations, Google Earth,  county property maps, state GIS data, and so on—has become standard operating procedure for trip planning. We are truly in a golden age of information, helping us find waters to fish, but it has always been a bit of a challenge to manage all those resources. And then as soon as you were on to your next daydream, you have to assemble another dossier of open windows as the process begins anew.

This was precisely the problem that, in 2019, Minnesota angler Zach Pope set out to solve. An enthusiastic angler in the fly-fishing Mecca of the Driftless Area, Pope wanted a way to corral access information for the best trout streams, including hard-to-find easements, into one source. His solution became TroutRoutes, an all-in-one mapping app that consolidates hundreds of public data sources into a single tool designed with anglers in mind.

What began as a Minnesota–Wisconsin app quickly drew interest from anglers nationwide. Requests for Colorado, Montana, and other states poured in. Backed by Twin Cities funding, Pope assembled a tight team of GIS specialists, developers, and marketers. Within six months, they expanded coverage from half the country to all 48 contiguous states, eventually mapping more than 50,000 trout streams. In March 2024, TroutRoutes was acquired by mapping powerhouse onX, known for its hunting and backcountry apps. The partnership brought a surge of resources—including onX’s vast public land database, larger cartography team, and more developers.

A few weeks ago, I spent a week in Colorado fishing with Erik Johnsen and Jack Flatley from TroutRoutes and onX. Though I have spent a lot of time in Colorado working with authors on guidebooks and other projects, I was excited about this trip because we had a chance to use the app to explore and fish some waters that previously had flown under my radar, including the headwaters of the Arkansas, some spots wedged in between private stretches on the Eagle that I hadn’t fished, and a tributary to the Eagle near Minturn that was riddled with beaver dams penning up eager brookies and browns.

On a float down the lower Colorado, we used the app to easily check river mileage, plan a midway lunch spot that was on public property, and check whether we could anchor to snap a pic of a fish we caught (Colorado, like Wyoming, is one of those states where you can’t anchor in the water that flows through private property). There was zero cell service on the float, so the ability to download an offline map beforehand was clutch.

Honestly, as someone who loves to float rivers, when I discovered the river mileage measurement tool, I was hooked. You used to have to awkwardly use the ruler in Google Maps to click on every twist and turn to get even what some would call an educated guess of true distance, but in TroutRoutes you can simply tap two points on any given river and it spits out the river miles, not the distance as the crow flies. Because as all of who have pushed and pushed to get off the water by dark thirty know, you’re not flying over it, you are floating it.

There are so many cool things about the TroutRoutes app, and way too much to go over here (TroutRoutes has full tutorials built into the app and webinars on their site and on YouTube) but here are a few highlights that I find really useful.  

• Different layers/modes show different information. For instance, Guide mode emphasizes quality of fishing; Access mode emphasizes public and private lands. You can also switch between roads, terrain, or—my favorite—satellite, similar to Google Earth.
• 3D mode allows you to see the topography. This is a game changer for viewing ridges, canyons, draws, and other features. The 3D mode is highly addicting, and you can literally travel along a stream’s course and see the surrounding geographic features.
• Filters let you customize your maps and really clean up the presentation of data, based on exactly what you want to see.  
• When you tap on a stream, a stream card pops up with a description of the water, quality of fishing, nearby stream gauges, fly shops, and more.
• You’re able to add notes, custom markers, and even images (all this info is private unless you choose to share it).
• Offline mode lets you download your maps ahead of time in case you have no cell service.

TroutRoutes is available in three versions: Basic (free), State ($19.99 per year), and Pro ($58.99 per year). Basic gives you access to the streams, but not really any of the in-depth information that Pro does. State is Pro level info, but for just one state. The app is available for both iOS and Android, and the desktop version syncs with your devices through your account.

Goodbye to all those open windows! The TroutRoutes app has all the data you need for planning, except perhaps for the weather report. It pairs perfectly with the type of information that you’d get from a well-researched guidebook or article, such as tactics, hatches, and fly patterns.

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