The Adirondacks — River Levels & Flows

The upper Hudson, the Ausable, the Raquette and the Saranac — inside the Blue Line. Big Buoy shows live USGS river gauges across NY, with stage, flow and a 7-day trend for each, plus National Weather Service flood categories where they are published.

About The Adirondacks

The Adirondacks is a dome rather than a basin, and water leaves it in every direction: the Hudson and the Sacandaga south, the Ausable, the Boquet and the Saranac east to Lake Champlain, the Raquette, the St. Regis and the Oswegatchie north to the St. Lawrence. Two gauges thirty miles apart can be answering different weather, so this list is worth reading across rather than one line at a time. The water is freestone — thin soil over hard old rock — which means it rises fast after rain, drops nearly as fast once the rain stops, and runs low and warm through a dry August. Several of the rivers leaving the mountains pass through hydro dams on the way, and below one of those the level follows a release schedule rather than the sky: the Raquette at South Colton and the Sacandaga at Stewarts Bridge both read that way. Two things this page cannot show you. The most famous trout water in the park, the West Branch of the Ausable at Wilmington, carries no USGS gauge at all — the nearest readings are White Brook, which feeds it, and the main stem and East Branch down at Au Sable Forks. And the southwest headwaters — the Moose, the Independence, the Black and the Buck Creeks at Inlet — are Adirondack water that drains to Lake Ontario, so they are listed on the Lake Ontario tributaries page instead of this one. The gauges at Chazy, Bombay, Heuvelton, Raymondville and Brasher Center sit out in the lowlands below the Blue Line. Read them as the drainage leaving the mountains rather than as mountain water.

How to read these gauges

Flow (discharge, in cubic feet per second) is comparable between gauges and is usually the better number for judging whether a river is up or down. Stage is the water height in feet above each gauge's own local datum, so it is local: the same 4 ft describes different rivers at two different gauges. Readings older than three times a gauge's reporting interval are shown as last reported rather than as current conditions, and a gauge that reports nothing is shown as not reported — never as zero.

Data: USGS National Water Information System. Flood categories: NOAA/National Weather Service.