Gauge Description:

There's a visual gage at the takeout bridge on Brush Creek.   It was repainted in 2010 with 3 inch increments.   The new 2 reading is the same as the old 2 reading at 78 inches from the top.   The new 5 is one inch higher than the old 5.   The new 7 is 1.5 inches higher than the old 7.   The new 0 & 1 are slightly lower than the old 0 & 1.    (Thanks to Brett Duxbury for this information.)    A few locals tend to report visual flows on the forums at Boof.com or Dreamflows.com/Forums/Flows.    Visual gauge readings may also get reported to the SierraSouth. store or at Kernville Brewery. 

Some people will boat Brush at around 1. Others consider 1.6 a minimum, while 4.5 is high, and above 5 is "very high."

There is no online gauge for Brush Creek itself.  There are some online flow and snow gauges that may be helpful in estimating flow from a distance, at least until a local reports a visual reading.    

The Pascoes snow gauge is near the headwaters of Brush Creek and can give a sense of what the spring runoff season will be like.   Eric Giddens reported on Boof.com that the spring peak reading on the Brush Creek visual gauge tends to be around 1/10 of the peak snow water content reading.    Watching the temperature gauge and watching the drop in snow water content reading during spring runnoff, may be very helpful in estimating sprinig flows.

The SF Tule has a similar drainage area and elevation as Brush Creek, plus it is very close by to the east.   The two creeks should have somewhat similar spring snowmelt flow patterns.   They can have very different reactions to rain storms.   Brush will tend to react much less or even not at all to winter storms that bring the Tule up to high levels.   Brush is in a rain shadow cast by the Tule headwaters and sometimes gets snow when the Tule gets rain.  Still, the gauges available on the SF Tule seem to be a helpful, realtime, online way of estimating Brush Creek flows. There is an upper SF Tule gauge at Cholollo Campground gauge.  This one is graphed below as it seems most likely to have a reasonable correlation with Brush Creek.   A lower one is near the reservation Boundary gauge.    To see if there is a dependable relationship between Brush and SF Tule, please document as often as possible, the level on Brush at specific dates and times and the flow at Cholollo at the same date and time.   Post Brush Creek compared to SF Tule flow information in the comments section of this page, and/or at Dreamflows bulletin board, and at Boof.com.    If you take pictures please post them with the date, time and visual gauge reading.    Reports which have been recieved or figured out are in the table below. 

If the SF Tule is in the green during spring runoff, then there is a good likelyhood that Brush is also runnable and worth checking.   Check other sources for visual reports.

Table Comparing visual reports with gauge reports.   (The old visual readings have been altered to correspond with the new, 2010 visual gauge readings.)

Historical records for the SF Tule gauges are only daily averages rather than hourly.    The daily average can be very different from the actual flow at the time of a visual reading.  Hopefully the daily average is in the general ballpark of the real reading at the time of the visual.

Geno, who has put the most effort into this comparison feels that the relationship is really not very helpful, especially during rain events when SF Tule is very responsive, but Brush does not respond.   During the spring snowmelt, the comparison may be more helpful.   Best bet is just to look for frequent visual reports from locals at boof.com, dreamflows.com and similar forums.

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