The Olympic Peninsula — River Levels & Flows

Rain-forest steelhead rivers — the Hoh, the Bogachiel, the Queets and the Quinault. Big Buoy shows live USGS river gauges across WA, with stage, flow and a 7-day trend for each, plus National Weather Service flood categories where they are published.

About The Olympic Peninsula

The west side of the Olympics catches more rain than anywhere else in the lower 48, and the rivers show it. The most useful thing these gauges tell you is the difference between two kinds of river sitting side by side. The Hoh, the Queets and the Quinault are glacier-fed as well as rain-fed, so they can run high and grey through a dry spell in August — glacial melt peaks with heat, not with weather — while the Bogachiel and the Calawah a few miles away are low and clear. Read those pairs together rather than separately. The rain-fed rivers rise violently: a winter front can put several feet on the Bogachiel in a day, and take it off again almost as fast, which is why a steelhead angler here is usually waiting for a falling limb rather than for a particular number. Round on the north side the Elwha is a river still in recovery. Two dams came out of it in 2012 and 2014 and it is still moving the sediment they held back, so it behaves like a young river rather than a settled one. On the east the Skokomish, the Duckabush and the Big Quilcene fall steeply into Hood Canal and are short enough to answer a single storm. The Wynoochee and the Satsop drain the southern Olympics into the Chehalis, and the Chehalis gauge at Montesano on this list is the river receiving them rather than Olympic water itself.

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.