Mountain Status

Loading live conditions. If they do not appear, use the official sources below.

How to read this page

Every panel in the snapshot above is fetched from the agency that publishes it at the moment you open this page. Nothing is written ahead of time, nothing is cached overnight, and nothing here decides whether a road, a river, or the air is fine. Those calls belong to the agencies below, and in an emergency they belong to 911.

Boulder Creek Local is a community guide, not an alert service. What this page does is put the official screens in one place and say plainly where each number came from, so you can reach the source in one click when it matters. What follows does not change from day to day: it is the map of the page, not a report on conditions.

What each panel checks, and who publishes it

• Air quality. A modeled US AQI and PM2.5 estimate for downtown Boulder Creek from Open-Meteo. A model is not a monitor. During a smoke event the ground monitors on the AirNow Fire and Smoke Map are the ones to work from, and in a canyon they can differ from a modeled figure by a wide margin.
• Highway closures. The Caltrans District 5 lane closure feed, filtered to Santa Cruz County on Highways 1, 9, 17, 35, and 236. State highways only. County-maintained roads, including Bear Creek Road, Jamison Creek Road, and China Grade, are not in that feed at all. For those, use the Santa Cruz County road dashboard, and check Caltrans QuickMap for the state routes before you drive.
• San Lorenzo River. Gage height in feet and streamflow in cubic feet per second from USGS gauge 11160500, San Lorenzo River at Big Trees, in Felton. It is the nearest real-time gauge downstream of Boulder Creek, so it reads the valley rather than the town. The panel prints the reading, the time it was taken, and the National Weather Service stages published for forecast point BTEC1, and it stops there. Turning a reading into a flood call is the NWS river forecast's job, not ours.
• Weather forecast and alerts. The National Weather Service API, queried for a single point, downtown Boulder Creek. Alerts are point specific: a warning in force over another part of Santa Cruz County may not appear here at all. The full county picture is at the NWS Bay Area office.
• Power. Direct links to the PG&E outage map, the outage alert signup for your address, and the report line. Boulder Creek Local does not read a PG&E feed and does not restate one. The outage map is the source.
• Sirens and smoke. Links to the same screens dispatchers feed. PulsePoint shows Boulder Creek Fire Protection District calls with the units responding. Watch Duty carries human-verified wildfire updates. The CAL FIRE incident list covers state incidents. The ALERTCalifornia cameras at Brookdale and Mt. Bielawski are steerable cameras for situational awareness. The CHP dispatch log lists highway incidents under the Monterey Communications Center, which covers Highways 9 and 236. The Sheriff's calls-for-service lookup is a records search by address, not a live feed.

What these panels will not tell you

• Whether anything is safe. No panel converts a reading into advice. A number is published with its source and its timestamp, and the judgment stays with the agency that owns it.
• What is not being shown. An empty feed means not shown, not nothing happening. Law enforcement calls are generally not published live anywhere public, and several incident types are excluded from the Sheriff's lookup by policy.
• Evacuation information. Zones, warnings, and orders come from CruzAware and from the agency issuing them. That is the one thing this page will never summarize, paraphrase, or delay.
• A reading you can rely on later. Each panel is read once, when the page loads, and the timestamp on the snapshot says so. Reload to read it again. If what you see here disagrees with an agency's own page, the agency is right.
• Final numbers. USGS river data arrives provisional and is revised afterward. The panel labels it that way for a reason.

When a panel says unavailable

Unavailable means the feed did not answer, or answered with something the page could not read. It never means the condition is fine. Missing data is missing, and the useful response is to go straight to the source.

• Air quality unavailable: AirNow Fire and Smoke Map.
• Roads unavailable: Caltrans QuickMap for state highways, the county road dashboard for county roads.
• River unavailable: the USGS gauge page and the NWS river forecast.
• Weather unavailable: the NWS Bay Area office and its Boulder Creek point forecast.
• Anything involving fire or smoke: Watch Duty and the CAL FIRE incident list, with CruzAware for anything that becomes an order.

Three numbers worth keeping in your phone. Report a power outage to PG&E at 1-800-743-5002. For a downed power line, call 911 first, then PG&E at 1-800-743-5000. For a tree or a slide on a county-maintained road, Santa Cruz County road dispatch is 831-477-3999.

Questions we get

Is this an official alert service?

No. Boulder Creek Local is an independent community guide with no dispatch role and no standing with any agency. Official alerts for Santa Cruz County come through CruzAware, which takes a few minutes to sign up for and is the most useful link on this page. Emergencies go to 911.

Why does the page not just say whether Highway 9 is passable?

Because the feed cannot hold that sentence up. Caltrans publishes lane closures on its own schedule, so a closure that started minutes ago may not be in the data yet, and a county road closure will never be in it. A page that printed an all clear would be guessing, and guessing about a mountain road is how somebody ends up driving into one.

My road is not a state highway. Where do I look?

The county road dashboard covers county-maintained roads, and Santa Cruz County road dispatch takes reports at 831-477-3999. Private roads and shared driveways belong to their owners or road associations, which is worth knowing before a storm rather than during one.

The air quality figure here does not match the app on my phone. Which is right?

They measure different things. The panel above is a model, an estimate built from regional conditions for a point in Boulder Creek. Most phone apps blend monitors, and smoke apps read sensors directly. When smoke is the question, use the ground monitors on the AirNow Fire and Smoke Map and treat the modeled number as background context.

What is gage height, and is a given reading high?

Gage height is the height of the water surface above the gauge's own reference point. It is not the depth of the river and it is not comparable between gauges. Streamflow, in cubic feet per second, is the volume moving past the gauge. Whether a reading matters is answered by the National Weather Service stages for that gauge, published on the NWS river forecast page. The panel quotes those stages with attribution and does not invent its own.

I heard sirens. How do I find out what that was?

Start with PulsePoint for fire and medical calls in the Boulder Creek Fire Protection District, then the CHP dispatch log for highway collisions and Watch Duty for anything that looks like wildfire. Law enforcement calls are generally not visible in real time, so a screen with nothing on it is not an answer to what you heard.

How often does this page update?

Every time you load it. There is no overnight refresh and no stored copy of a previous reading. That is also why the snapshot carries the time it was retrieved: it is telling you how old the data on your screen already is.

Can Boulder Creek Local text me when something happens?

No, and we would not want to sit between you and an evacuation order. Sign up with CruzAware for county alerts, PG&E outage alerts for your address, and the PulsePoint Respond and Watch Duty apps for calls and wildfire. Those come from the agencies themselves, with no extra link in the chain.

Related pages on Boulder Creek Local

The rain tracker holds the rainfall record for the valley back to 1937, which is history rather than a forecast. Resident Resources lists the water, power, fire district, school, and road contacts for Boulder Creek and the San Lorenzo Valley. If a link on this page has moved or an agency has changed how it publishes something, send a correction.