For a few years now I have been running a little web app called Cone Patrol that simply notifies the snow riders of Central Oregon when there is new snow at Mt. Bachelor.  Users send a text with their preferred snow amount – say 4″ of powder – and when the mountain receives four or more inches overnight, that user is sent a text.  Stoke via SMS!

A friend recently asked if I could do something similar for river levels, and it seemed like a great idea.  Rather then setting up river level alerts ( though this might be cool for fishing drops on coastal rivers ), this new service is focused on the current river levels for some popular fisheries in Central Oregon: The Deschutes and The Crooked.  For the sake of song-titled blog posts, I’m going to call this creation Even Flow.

480-420-FLOW

Or in non-tricky notation: 480-420-3569 is the number to message for the current river levels.  This little river flow robot knows how to respond to four commands currently:

• lower – will return the latest reading from the Warm Springs / Madras gauge on the Lower Deschutes
• middle – will send back the current flows for the “Deschutes Below Bend” gauge
• upper – you probably get the drill now – this is for the gauge below Wickup dam
• crooked – the final gauge supported is for the Crooked River below Bowman dam

One improvement I’m probably going to make is to show a trend arrow for the flows over the last 12 hours – so you get the current reading along side an up/down/even arrow.  What do you think?  Is this a tool you would find useful in your virtual tackle box?  I know there are times when I don’t have data coverage, but can still send/receive texts and this would definitely help out in those scenarios.