spatial hydrology data

I've been trying to download river spatial data (for arc) for a while now, and finally have come up with some sort of resolution. But the problem seems to be information overload. I still haven't figured out if there's a way to, say, query "Truckee River" and have the trace of only that river returned.

Instead, here are some convoluted ways to get data of Quads or defined map areas.

(1) USGS maintains the National Hydrography Dataset.

(2) The Data Availability page describes ways to obtain the data.

(3) It appears that USGS is in the middle of transitioning to a new map viewer/data downloader interface.

New one: http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/

It is easy to download hydrology data by quadrangle, if you click on the map, it tells you the quadrangle and the available data. (Using the download data tool.)

(4) One way to figure out all of the quadrangles covered by a particular river is to use the Geographic Names Information System.

(5) The page for the river will list each quadrangle, which you can then locate in the Map Viewer.

(6) You send in a request for a data and it may take several hours to be returned. (Still waiting for some I ordered a couple hours ago.) It is not very efficient.

(7) Another way is to download pre-defined subregions. These datasets are ~250 MB zipped and ~750 MB unzipped. It is information overkill, but you can also download it right away. The old map viewer seems to be better in identifying the 4-digit identifier (first 4 of the 8 digits).

FTP for predefined regions:
ftp://nhdftp.usgs.gov/SubRegions/

Only works in Internet Explorer! Not Firefox or Chrome! Also has a README in a .doc format! gah.

I'm not sure how much closer this gets me to the trace of a single river, but possibly this information will be useful to someone somewhere.

Here's their tutorial.
http://nhd.usgs.gov/tutorials.html

Note:

The last section of the tutorial, on Navigating, actually lays out how to save the trace of a river. First you need to click on Analysis in the Utility Network Analyst toolbar, and click Options, Results, and check Selection.

Then "perform navigation," set an Edge Flag at the source of the river (this is located in the Geographic Names Information System entry, or at least the correct quadrangle). Then use the Utility Network Analyst to navigate to all points downstream.

You will be able to save it to the map and export the data as a shapefile.

Read the last page of the tutorial linked above.