How this site works

Northwest Boat Ramps is built and run by Magic Smoke Studio, LLC. It's a free tool — there's no account, no paywall, and the "Donate for a Coffee" link on each reservoir page is optional and goes toward keeping the site running.

Every reading on this site comes from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's public Hydromet network — the same daily forebay (water-surface) elevation data USBR itself publishes. We don't measure anything ourselves. Each time you open a reservoir page, your browser requests the latest daily reading directly from USBR; if that request hasn't landed yet, or USBR is briefly unreachable, the page shows the most recent reading it has and says so.

Each ramp's end-of-ramp elevation — the number a reservoir has to drop below before that ramp goes dry — comes from USBR's own published ramp pages. Every one of the 61 ramps on this site has had its GPS location checked against a named ramp or marina, not estimated from the reservoir's shoreline.

We compare today’s water level to each ramp’s end elevation. The difference — how much water is over the end of the ramp — decides the status:

• Usable — 4 ft of water or more over the ramp end • Shallow — between 1.5 and 4 ft • Barely wet — between 0 and 1.5 ft • Dry — the water line is at or below the ramp end

The trend (ft/day) is the average rate of change over the last 3 days of readings. The days-until-dry estimate projects that same rate forward, up to 14 days, and is capped so a rising reservoir is never shown crossing above full pool. It's a short-term estimate from a straight-line trend, not a forecast of reservoir operations — a reservoir's drawdown rate can speed up or slow down with irrigation demand or weather, and the estimate will be wrong when it does. The season chart uses a longer, separate estimate based on prior years, which can move faster or slower than the short-term trend.

This is percent of storage volume (measured in acre-feet), not water-surface elevation — today's stored volume divided by the most this reservoir has been observed to hold. A percent based on elevation alone reads wrong for a reservoir with steep or shallow walls, sometimes by 40 points or more, so we don't use it.

USBR's real-time data is provisional — marked "subject to change" by USBR itself — and has not been reviewed or edited. We are not affiliated with USBR and can't correct errors in their source data, only in how we compute and display it. Always check conditions in person before you launch; see each reservoir page's own disclaimer for the full wording.

If something here looks wrong — a ramp elevation, a station code, anything — tell us: contact@magicsmokestudio.com