This website really started because there is virtually no information available (other than, now, on this website) about where to find wild trout in Massachusetts.  We've now developed 4 major sources that can help guide your search.

In order of usefulness, I would recommend checking out:

1. MA Brookies
2. MA Water Quality Data
3. MA "Living Waters"
4. Wild Trout Distribution Maps

You can click on the MA Resources menu to read more about each (it's more or less in the same order), or read on in this page for a little preview.

Check out data developed by Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture, which used fish survey data and their own predictive model to rank sub-watersheds by estimated quality of the brook trout population.  You can download a KMZ file of the complete data set to use yourself in Google Earth, or you can download some maps we made before the KMZs were published, using the original dataset which was colored and coded somewhat differently.

MA publishes some great data developed for Water Quality regulation. Among other things, you can confirm if a stream is cold water habitat, and get fish surveys to help you decide whether you want to explore further. You'll have to scan PDF reports to find the info instead of viewing maps on Google Earth, but the data are extremely useful, especially together.

Next, the NHSP "Living Waters" dataset.

These show the watersheds and streams deemed "areas that are most critical for ensuring the long-term persistence of rare and other native species and their habitats, exemplary natural communities and a diversity of ecosystems".  Pretty dense prose.

What it means is that these are water resources worth saving.  The Living Waters are plotted at a subwatershed level, which makes it useful in combination with the EBJTV data.

Finally, Wild Trout distribution maps derived from the book Inland Fishes of Massachusetts published by the Mass Audubon Society.

These are now executed interactively in Google Maps, one for the Deerfield and Hudson basins. frankly, the data in the Water Quality reports is better, but this is more fun. Click on the "MA-WTS" links in the resources menu to check them out.  Each marker corresponds to a stream where wild trout have been found.  It doesn't guarantee you'll find good fishing, but it is a starting point for an exploration.  You can zoom in the map.  You can also download the markers to use with Google Maps.  Click on the "Download WTS KML" links on the resource menu to go to a page containing the interactive maps, one for each basin.