There's no such thing as a bad day on the Boardman River. Except for that day we got caught in that cold thunderstorm and bailed at Ranch Rudolf. At least lunch was good.

Now The Boardman River is on the map, Google Earth to be specific. From Google Earth, get yourself close to the Boardman River. On the Layers to View, check 'Google Earth Community'. Your old pal Uncle Spongehead entered in The Boardman River. All your favorite spots should appear, Forks, Scheck's, Beitner, to name a few.  And for those of you with Google Earth 4.0 or better, I posted a guided tour of the river in Google Earth Community. Right click on BoardmanRiver.kmz and Save As... to get it directly from this site.

Now here's an example of your tax dollars at work. Did you know that every 15 minutes the water level and flow rate of the Boardman River are recorded in a database maintained by the US Geological Survey? Before going to the Boardman website, take a look at all the rivers in the United States and zoom in on the Boardman. Graphs and tables for daily, monthly and yearly time periods provide a wealth of information. I took the graphs for the years 1999-2006 and built this animated view of recorded flow versus average flow. Hey kids, if there ain't a science project in here somewhere, my name ain't Uncle Spongehead.

The USGS also has topography maps available. I glued together topographical maps for the entire stretch of the river that we kayak and created this humungous map of the river and added close up maps of the put in and take out spots.

The trout stories have yet to occur, but here's 3 hot spots; Beitner Road 44.6749, -85.6307; Jaxon Creek 44.6502, -85.5899; North/South Branch 44.6747, -85.3956. You figure it out!