Water Level For Lower Wilderness

[gotmuddy]

at the level now i would say clabber shoals has 1 foot waves. at 600+ cf/s they were 3 foot(we were in the riverboat)

[Al Agnew]

No need for a lesson. Discharge and guage height are equally irrelevant unless you have a known point or concept to compare them to. I get what you're saying...I fully understand the concept of volume and discharge, but as you pointed out, 1,000 cfs means something entirely different on crane creek, the mulberry river, the elk, and the Mississippi. That's why I asked the folks who travel this section of the river regularly what the ideal guage height is. It's easier for me to remember, tells me how tall the wave at clabber creek is, and is easier for most folks to relate to. It not only depends on the width of the stream, but the depth as well.

Few folks can say off the top of their head what discharge level is ideal for whitewater on the Mulberry. I'm sure I've looked at it before but I don't care. If you tell me it's 3.5 at Turner Bend, we're going to have a good weekend.

Ah, but I'm not talking about gauging the whitewater or how high the river can be and still be floated safely, and that's not the question you asked. You asked about how low the river can be and still be floatable without a lot of work. And the figures I gave you will hold true when gauging low water levels for any Ozark stream. I don't need to have a reference point for a stream I'm not familiar with...as long as I know that it's fairly typical of a FLOATABLE stream (not a little creek like Crane Creek) in the Ozarks, I can use the flow in cfs to gauge what kind of floating I will find in low water levels. Of course, you have to do a LITTLE homework. The gauges on some rivers are not in places where you can judge sections of river above or well below that location. If a gauge is 50 miles upstream from the part you want to float and there are several tributaries running into the river between those two points, obviously you can't go by the flow at the gauge. But if that's the case, you can't always go by the level, either, because one of those tribs might be coming in higher than normal and making the river down where you're wanting to float it higher as well. In the case of the Buffalo, the gauge at the Hwy. 14 bridge is perfect for telling you what the lower river will be like in low water, because the only good sized tributary coming in below that point is Big Creek, halfway through the float from Rush to the White.

The beauty of going by flow rather than level is that the flow can be compared from river to river. A level of 3 feet on one river will mean something vastly different than a level of 3 feet on another river, but a flow of 100 cfs is the same volume of water on every river. In paying attention to flow rather than level, I've pretty much learned to gauge the flow by looking at it on any stream...I know what a flow of 20 or 50 or 100 cfs looks like when I see it. So, I can make some other assumptions when looking at a flow on a gauge. For instance, there are only two important gauges on Big River. One is up near the headwaters, and the other is down in the lower middle river. In low summer water levels, the flow on the upper gauge might be 10 cfs. Knowing that there are three decent sized tributaries and one very significant tributary between there and the lower gauge, which might be reading 125 cfs, I can figure that the three smaller tribs are probably adding 5-10 cfs each, and the bigger tributary will be adding around 40 cfs. Adding in some springs and seeps and small amounts of water from barely flowing little tribs, I can figure that between the upper gauge and the first tributary, the river will be flowing 10-20 cfs, between it and the second trib 25-40 cfs, between that and the third trib 45-60 cfs, and between that one and the bigger trib 65-80 cfs. Then the bigger trib adds the 40 cfs that brings the river up to close to the flow of the lower gauge. So I know about what the floating will be like in any section of the river between the two gauges. It takes some extrapolation and just plain guessing, but it's a lot better than looking at a level in feet on a river you don't know.

As you say, the best "gauge" is the experience of people who know the river. I'm not faulting you for asking the question and wanting to use level instead of flow, but I think if everybody used flow rather than level it would be more helpful to those who are unfamiliar with a river. Like I said, flow is comparable river to river. If you know what 100 cfs looks like on a river you're familiar with, you'll have a real good idea what it looks like on an unfamiliar river.