South Carolina wild trout streams are restricted to a relatively small sliver of the southern Appalachians in the far northwest end of the state.
Despite the limited resource (or perhaps because of it), the SC department of Natural Rescources (NCDNR) publishes a very useful guide to South Carolina Trout Fishing.
A lot of the material is what you’d expect from a state-produced fishing guide, with an emphasis on stocking schedules and regulations. But included in the guide is a set of nicely produced maps, which show streams with naturally producing trout populations (presumably the TN streams classified by the SCDHEC).
A detail from one of the maps is shown in the photo below. Note, that we’ve recreated these maps as a series of geo-registered photo overlays you can load into Google Earth. Unfortunately, the DNR used a map projection that was incompatible with the projection used by Google Earth. As a result, registration of the overlay and the underlying Google Earth display can’t be perfect. Generally, we’ve stretched and sized the image so that the largest group of wild trout streams are closely registered. This means that streams and other features towards the edge of the overlay won’t be perfectly aligned. But generally, the registration is close enough that you won’t find it difficult to identify the wild trout streams, which are shown as brown lines.
The animation shows the map from which we extracted the detail, displayed in Google Earth. Note the map appears in space, and is texture mapped onto GE’s elevation model, just like the base image. If you zoom in and out, the overlay will scale as well. Each overlay is keyed to the page number in the Trout Fishing book, so you can easily take advantage of the stream descriptions and other information you can find there.
Generally, we would recommend downloading and using the NHD dataset to show streams. The SC map overlays are good to identify the wild trout streams, but you’ll want to turn them off for any serious Google Earth exploration, and the NHD dataset (which you can download from any of the GIS data pages) will highlight the streambeds on the base image and also give you stream names.
Above: Detail of map in SC DNR Trout Fishing Guide. Wild trout streams are shown with brown lines.
Below: Animation of the same map (showing the whole page) as a georegistered overlay in Google Earth.