This may be common knowledge, but I’ve talked to a few packrafters recently who were unaware of this resource, so I figured it was worth posting…
I think many people are aware that the USGS website has real-time river data, but they also have data archived from past years. Often when I am reading old trip reports on this forum, I want to know what the river flow level was at the time the trip took place. For this, I find the USGS website to be really useful.
Here’s the link to the Alaska page, since that’s the one I use the most. You can easily get to other states from this page:
http://waterdata.usgs.gov/ak/nwis/current/?type=flow
To get to the archived data, click the link for the river you are interested in, then click the “Summary of all available data for this site” link, then search by date.
Obviously many of the rivers we can access with packrafts aren’t listed, but often there is another river nearby that can be used as an approximation. Anyway, hope some people find this useful.