Our weather is finally heating up and there is still lots of snow in the mountains to melt and runoff. Keeping on track of water conditions can help you avoid showing up at the river only to find it is blown-out, unsafe and unfishable. BVFF’s Local Waters webpage has links to current flows and water temperatures for nearby rivers as well as reservoir and boat ramp conditions and is a good tool to help you plan your fishing trip.

I also use the “riverflows.net” app on my Android phone to track river flows on my favorite rivers. I like that it includes both USGS stations and AHPS (Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service) stations that give you insights into how the river is expected to rise or drop over the next week.

Here is a look at the main screen of my river “favorites”. For some stations you will notice both a USGS and AHPS entry. Here is a look at both of those water flow graphs. You can see that the USGS graph goes back further in time, but the AHPS graph includes a forecast for the next week.  As you can see in the MF Boise forecast, flows are headed up! So be safe out there.