Watersheds of North America - Part 6
I am continuing to draw stream/river networks to visualize watersheds and this article is Part 6 in my watershed series. All of the data I use to create these images is free, open-source data from various online sources and I use the open-source software package QGIS to visualize the data.
This first watershed is that of the Columbia River, which covers areas in both Canada and the United States. Headwaters start in the north in the Kootenay mountains in British Columbia and in the south east with the Snake River in the states of Idaho, Wyoming (even into Yellowstone National Park) and northern Nevada, .
In the Columbia River Valley in British Columbia, the river actually flows north to the northernmost point in the watershed, where it turns south on its way to the border between Canada and the USA. In the southeast, the Snake River flows west and northwest towards the Columbia River near Kennewick in Washington State, where the Yakima River also joins the Columbia River from the west. The Columbia River then continues westward, through Portland, Oregon, before flowing into the Pacific Ocean along the border between the states of Washington and Oregon.
The Kansas River watershed is the second presented here. It is actually a subwatershed of the Missouri River, which, is a subwatershed of the enormous watershed of the Mississippi River. The Kansas River has its headwaters in the state of Colorado and the river flows west-to-east through Nebraska and Kansas before converging with the Missouri River in Kansas City.
The third and final watershed is a small subwatershed in California and is known as the Hungry Hollow watershed. The main stream is Cache Creek, which flows west to east towards Sacramento, California where it flows into the Sacramento River, which continues south and west towards the Pacific Ocean near the city of San Francisco. The straight lines in this stream network are dug channels for water diversion, irrigation and drainage in the agricultural region of this subwatershed.
If you have a specific request or a favourite watershed, feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll draw it up! The watersheds in my articles have been popular with readers and I’m thinking about creating wall art watersheds. Let me know if you are interested.
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I would like to see what you can find about the St. John's in Florida. The river, according to some local maps, rises in a small pond called Lake Helen Blazes. On some other maps, the lake is not there. And its name sounds suspiciously like Lake "Hell and Blazes".
Sixty years ago, having grown up in the area of the river, I read James Branch Cabell's contribution to the Rivers of America series, about the river that shaped my youth in DeLand and Palatka, and I cannot now find a copy!