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Wilderness Canoe Tripping
North River Gauge Image
A picture by Laurie of the river gauge just above Fire Lake. It read .46 meters at the time, and hopefully the brown recording box on it is working. I'm hoping to be able to get the data it collects to present here. There was another gauge below the lake, but no recorder that I could see when we paddled by it. That gauge read .35 meters. The above image is not of a typical government water survey gauge. This one is a relatively inexpensive, temporary installation, probably done by the mining company who's bush camp is on Fire Lake, not too far downstream of the gauge. I'll try and get a picture of a government one sometime to show for comparison. The "official" ones are more sophisticated and weatherproof. A small, but substantial (and lockable), building is erected near the river, but where flooding or ice-out cannot harm it, and a pipe is extended from the building to the river. Because water seeks it's own level, the height of the water in the pipe can be measured and it reflects the river stage directly towards the center of the river from the gauge. Unlike the gauge pictured above, no delicate mechanism is exposed to possible damage by nature or human vandalism. Really sophisticated gauges are telemetered, meaning that they can be read at any time, either by telephone or radio. The standard models punch a tape at predetermined intervals (usually 15 minutes to an hour apart) and the tape is picked up every so often (two to six weeks). At remote locations where electrical powerlines are not available, batteries are replaced at the same time. Most of Canada's gauges are this latter, standard sort, why the country has so few gauges that are "real-time." I tried to find a Web page that has info on how a gauge works but haven't yet. If I do find one, I'll post a link here. In the meantime here's a page by the United Stages Geological survey on the difficulties of making telemetered gauges that work. http://wwwhif.er.usgs.gov/public/telemet.html I don't know how long that page will be up. (It's gone now - 12/14/02 - or at least moved, and I can't find it) A link to the gauge on the Liard River at our take-out (not the gauge shown above) can be found in the Guage page, also linked from the list of pages in the North/Black Contents List linked below. There are also instructions on that page on how to use the Web site to get real-time info (what the gauge is reading right now) as well as historical data, what the gauge has read at any time before this.
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