Georgia's wild trout streams are restricted to a relatively small sliver of the southern Appalachians which fall principally in the NE Corner of the state.

Trout Streams are designated in the GA State Code that regulates water quality.  The code, 391-3-6-.03 Water Use Classifications and Water Quality Standards, designates two levels of trout stream:  "Primary", which support self-sustaining populations of wild trout, and "Secondary", which provide habitat suitable for stocking trout. 

The Georgia DNR produces a series of "Trout Maps" for 29 counties in GA which support Trout Streams.  A total of 13 counties support Primary streams, highlighted in the county map to the right.

Unfortunately, for our purposes, the original maps do not distinguish Primary and Secondary streams.  So, we've gone through and highlighted the Primary streams in blue, as shown in the illustration, and made them available for download here as both PDF files and Google Earth overlays.  (See "County Trout Maps" in the GA Resources menu in the sidebar).   Note, the zip file containing all of the maps is large, about 86MB.  The KMZs are much smaller.

Four comments about using these maps... 

• While the Google Earth overlays are trimmed to roughly the county boundaries, the PDFs overlap into other counties.  Wild trout streams are marked only within the county boundaries of the current map.  If you're wondering about Primary streams in a neighboring county, check its map.  Don't assume that because a stream located outside of the current county's boundaries isn't highlighted, that it's not a Primary Stream.
• If you use the overlays in Google Earth, which we think is the right way to use these maps, be sure to download the NHD layer (accessible from any of the GIS Data pages).  This allows you to turn off the overlay and still see the streams, and will give you more stream names than do the map overlays alone (see screen shot at very bottom of this page).
• As will be obvious when you view the full size maps, Primary Stream designations were marked by hand, based on reading and interpreting the water Code.  Generally, the Code is fairly straight-forward and we believe our highlights are quite accurate.  However, a few of the designations are fairly obscure.  We've done our best, viewing the National Map and its USGS topo map base layers to sort them out, but it's always possible we've made an error.  We've included the Trout designations from the code within each of the zip files you from which you download the PDFs or the KMZs.  We suggest you read the code yourself and confirm our designations for any stream you decide to explore.
• In addition, to help you intepret these maps, we suggest you read,  "What is a Trout Stream?"  This is a brief discussion of how water quality agencies (and others) code streams, which doesn't necessarily comport to the way a fisherman might think they should be coded.

Finally, in trying to suss out Lumpkin County, which is one of the few places where the state code was almost indecipherable (there's a reference to a road number that doesn't seem to be marked as such on any map), we stumbled onto a map of Primary Trout Streams produced by the Lumpkin County GIS Department.  It's a fabulous map, scaled for printing wall-size, which shows a great deal of useful information including hiking trails into the watersheds.  We've included it in the package of the state PDFs, and it's definitely worth checking out if you're thinking of fishing in Lumpkin County.  You'll need to view it at high magnification, and print it in sections unless you happen to own a chart printer.

First Image Below:  Fannin County map as an overlay in Google Earth. Second Image Below:  Detail of overlay, showing labels from NHD layer