Last week, my friend Winston, myself and local fisherman and blogger Eric (die Fische.org) headed out to fish the Guadalupe below Canyon Dam.  This is the “trophy trout” aquarium stretch of the river, in which the state and the local chapter of Trout Unlimited stock trout every year.  Never will you see a group of people more defensive about a totally artificial environment than trout fishermen on the Guadalupe River in Texas.

Anyway, with the first stockings just a couple of days away and a cold front passing through the night before none of us had high expectations.  There was always the chance of holdover trout, but the bass fishing would suck.  This was just a scouting trip we told ourselves.  It didn’t matter if we didn’t catch anything. *cough* bullshit *cough*

Flows are incredibly low for this time of year.  Due to the severe drought Texas is experiencing there just isn’t a lot of surplus water to pump out of the dam.  Supposedly the GRTU hammered out an agreement with the dam authority to bump flows up during the winter and keep them at a constant level to better support the fish.  Whether or not that will be the case this year is still up in the air.

Winston had been down here before a couple times, and Eric knew the area well, but I didn’t have a damn clue where to go.  Eric took us to a couple of places, eventually ending up directly downstream of the dam.  The scenery is better than any other part of Texas I have yet seen.

The fishing… Well, the fishing sucked.  For six hours we plied the waters with everything we had.  Bass bugs, poppers, streamers, nymphs, the works.  We threw the box at it.  In fact, if we had even SEEN a fish in the river, literally throwing the box at it would probably have worked better.

While a lack of fish is certainly depressing, standing in moving water (even here in Texas) and casting a fly line just makes you feel better about things.  This trip was the first time I had fished with either Winston or Eric, and a skunk day will show you more about the character of your fishing buddies than anything else.  Suffice it to say, I’ll be fishing with both of them again.

Winston summed it up best while on the phone with his wife: “We didn’t catch shit.”

‘Nuff said.

Tags: Texas

Just doing some tweaking suggested by our tech brain trust and web host tech gurus (actually on the North American continent) and vaporized a dozen or so new comments today that had slipped into moderation.

Dammit and our apologies if something witty you’ve written today isn’t showing up.

Be witty once again and we promise it’ll make it through.

Finding good help these days can truly be a pain in the ass.

Tags: Chi Wulff

I Believe I can Fly ( flight of the frenchies). Trailer from sebastien montaz-rosset on Vimeo.

Tags: Damn!

Tags: Photography

h/t: Moldy Chum

Tags: Photography

The last week has been a strange one and we’re about to claw back from the virtual grave and get back into our usual routine.

A long anticipated return to home country last week was busted all to hell by what has indeed turned out to be a torn medial meniscus. I’ve been somewhat hobbled and to say the least our trip north didn’t turn out quite as we had planned.  Did manage to work in some great exploring and have cached our boat in Bozeman anticipating a return trip to make up for this week.

MRI this morning with surgery to follow. We’ll be back in the posting groove with the rest of Tom Sadler’s interview and more in a bit.

Thanks to Qdog for the great post yesterday…..

Tags: Chi Wulff

Spent most of the day in Bozeman today getting a little bit of work and play done and caught up with some friends.

Had to do a bit of record research at the library (hidden in the microfiche vault of all places) and on the way found the striking piece of original art posted in the entry hallway.  The author’s card had been removed though we’re working on finding the creator.

Being avid students of history we reenacted the consumption of John M. Bozeman’s (credited with the founding of Bozeman) first cheeseburger at the Garage.  The asian-sesame wings are most highly recommended.

We’ve been reshuffling plans a bit today as it appears I’ve torn the medial meniscus in my knee and have been a bit hobbled;  this dastardly event happened about 15 hours before climbing into the truck for the dash north.  Plan to be in the water tomorrow in Yellowstone as the swelling’s down a bit and ibuprofen is my friend.

Jake managed to get out this evening with a fishing buddy and hit a ‘sweet secret spot’ as can be seen from the crappy quality but none the less illustrative phone pic below.  The rain squall was worth it appears.

Images from the upper Gallatin and YNP tomorrow and the first installment of an interview with Tom Sadler of the Middle River Group.

Tags: Fish Stories

It’s nice to have feet on the ground back home in Montana this evening.

Jake knocked on my door in Austin at about 130 am Saturday morning and we were on the road by 2 – arrived in Bozeman in time for breakfast today after a 3 hour stop for sleep near the Malad summit on I-15 in Idaho.

The roughly 28 hour drive straight through once again seems a blur, though it’s better than ever to be back in mountain country.

Grabbed stuff for a sandwich and headed back up 191 for a quick fish this afternoon on the Gallatin and then hit Sir Scott’s Oasis for what must be the finest prime rib on the planet.

We’ll be back in the posting groove tomorrow and are sorting out schedules for a little work and hopefully a lot of fishing over the next few days, though what appears to be a frickin’ medial meniscus tear (overly aggressive workout) in my right knee will likely put a crimp in some of my best laid plans.

We’ll be starting a new interview series with Tom Sadler tomorrow or Tuesday….should be great.

Tags: So What?

Interview video featuring several speakers including Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer.

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

Here’s a couple of solid quotes from the vid -

… that Montana — well, Montana’s interests aren’t perfectly aligned with ExxonMobil’s and the EPA’s.

Our interests are for the wealth and the health of the Yellowstone River, the people of Montana and future generations. And theirs are to limit liability for their shareholders…..

….Well, it will never be enough.

Of course, we’re expecting a full cleanup, that the Yellowstone River will be completely restored. And, of course, ExxonMobil has repeated over and over that they are financially responsible to those state and federal agencies that are involved in this cleanup and ultimately the private landowners along the river.

So, it’s a wait-and-see attitude. To paraphrase from President Reagan, with this company, we will verify and — and verify……

And from the Politico -

“We Montanans take our wildlife and our rivers very serious,” he said in an interview Tuesday. “I can tell you right now, I am gonna stay on this like smell on a skunk until it’s cleaned up.”

Not everybody’s happy with the Guv and the response thus far; an exec for the National Wildlife Federation – Alexis Bogonofsky, is an affected landowner downstream from the spill. Her plight has just happened to make it onto the NWF website complete with all the handwringing and angst you’d expect. Perhaps Allison hasn’t heard the skunk quote from the Guv.

Little known fact about Gov. Schweitzer – he has a degree in soil science therefore expect him to roll up his sleeves and dig into (clumsy metaphor) testing data with more personal fervor that any other governor around.  Go, Brian go.

The river, as you’d expect, continues to roll on briskly.

Tags: Damn!

There’s an image and a blog headline we never figured we’d be posting here.

Yesterday found our team otherwise engaged (we were all working at various posts) when the news broke of a pipeline rupture / leak beneath the mighty Yellowstone River.

Our first reaction – dammit to hell.

Didn’t really start digging into the story until late last evening and again this morning, and as one might expect given the fact that it’s the 4th of July weekend and located in the wilds of Montana, the story coverage has been somewhat long on hyperbole and short on details.

Mention the words ‘Yellowstone River’ and ‘oil spill’ and the images that come to mind are that of a genuine environmental disaster. That’s probably why the BBC and NYT have stories about the spill running today.

And this is an environmental disaster. And probably an administrative one as well given that warnings to communities downstream were issued late or not all in the early hours of the spill.

It’s one thing to read about a spill in the GOM or in some far away state, but dump in one of my rivers – dammit now we’re pissed.

We’ve got an inbox full of emails this morning asking about fly fishing impacts from the spill. Some will not doubt call us assholes for looking at this from a fisherman’s point of view. So be it.

Note that we’re far, far from experts on the Yellowstone river, though we’ve dug up a few tidbits of information that will help frame the issues a bit.

The pipeline at fault is located near Laurel, a small community basically just west of Billings. From the Billings Gazette coverage this morning, and they have a special section up on the spill here, it appears oil has already traveled as far east as Miles City.

On the map below, we’ve marked the spill contaminated length of the river in red.

From a fisheries standpoint, the section of the Yellowstone (outside of Yellowstone National Park) that you read about and probably (at least among our readers anyway) picture as the traditional fly fishing Yellowstone River water is marked in blue. Obviously that’s everything north of the Park through Livingston and on to Big Timber.

We’re a bit hazy on the exact delineation here, but local custom has it that below the Pelican Access (east of Big Timber near Greycliff) the river becomes more or less a warm water fishery. There are points, notably where other bigger tribs come in, that trout exist is larger numbers, but by and large the river slows and transitions to a warm water river. That’s marked in yellow on the map above.

The Yellowstone drainage in the area is a huge one as you can see from this Montana DNR map.

Finally, to garner a bit of perspective, a look at current flows on the river is helpful. From the chart grabbed a few minutes ago this morning the Yellowstone is roaring along right now at 57,100 cfs at Billings.

Convert that to gallons and the number is damned impressive – there were 427,108 gallons of water flowing past the measuring stick per second this morning.

The spill has been reported to have been anywhere from 750 to 1000 barrels; take the higher number and note that amounts to 42,000 gallons of crude. Dammit.

I’ve already pestered a friend who’s a recovery hydrologist in Utah for projections on how this might all shake out; he’s asked that I not use his name here. He happens to also be an avid and genuine expert fly fisherman.

He notes several key issues to ponder.

One, the oil flow has been stopped at this point; lines typically have shutoffs on either side of a river. River flow has some impact on the contamination as does the nature of the crude spilled. Heavier crude will likely be dispersed to slower flows (eddy lines, flooded pasture and shoreline brush, etc.) which could make cleanup a bit easier, as compared to a widespread dispersal in the flow.

With some mixed emotion he noted this, in the perspective of oil spills, is a small one that will be swept under the rug by the oil companies as per routine. He went on to suggest that heavier crude that settled will be picked up, ‘volatiles’ will evaporate into the atmosphere, and a massive dilution effect will take water bound contaminants down to ‘acceptable’ levels downstream.

He predicted Exxon and the pipeline operator will buy cooperative silence from the affected landowners and some wonderfully rich Yellowstone bottomland soil will be carted off, likely to the mine contaminant sequestration areas a few hundred miles west.

My friend went on to ponder that mining interests in Montana have done far worse damage to Montana waterways than petroleum interests have and went on to remind me that living with extraction industries always presents a two edged sword for man and beast (and fish) coexisting in the neighborhood.

Dammit. He’s right.

And dammit, we’re still pissed.

Tags: River - Yellowstone

Our hosting provider has apparently been plagued by a couple of days worth of humongous denial of service attacks.

Please pardon our downtime today.

Burgeoning traffic demand on some other business sites that we host may push deployment of a dedicated server sooner than we’d planned on.  We’re working on it.

Tags: Dry Fly Media

Spoken by She Who Must Be Obeyed yesterday morning as we awoke to find a scorpion in the (clean) frying pan sitting on the stove top.

Damn.

Calendars and business plans reviewed thereafter.

Tags: Critters

Fracking.

What a great example of a suspect process having been given a bizarrely strange name by industry.

Frack. Fracking. To Frack or not to Frack.

There are some who’d have you believe that fracking was actually one of the plagues of Egypt so aptly described in the Book of Exodus.

There are some who’d have you believe fracking is even worse.

While none of us are old enough to have experienced personally the plagues of Egypt back in the day, we have seen some of the havoc inflicted by fracking crews on fragile high intermountain and western plains (eastern Montana and Wyoming come to mind). It ain’t pretty.

Now there’s been ‘an incident’ involving a casing rupture on a fracking rig in northern PA, and it’s pumped thousands of gallons of contaminated water into a small unnamed pasture creek, which feeds the Towanda, which feeds the Susquehanna and eventually makes it way down into Chesapeake Bay. Dammit to hell. Wook’s even pissed.

Quite probably fueled by the coincidence of occurring on the first anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, the fracking fluid spill has been described using a few panic-stricken descriptors including “uncontrolled, blowout, emergency” etc.

Fluid releases have apparently been contained (there’s only so much fracking fluid in the system and they appear to have beefed up their local containment) and much of the breathless reporting has ceased.

Water impact assessments are underway, though these days we’d be incredulous if a county / state / federal monitoring agency stepped up and told the truth about a spill or event such as this. (Read much about the Gulf spill lately????)

Yep, they’ve shat in yet another waterway. Give it a few days and it will be forgotten by most Americans whose attention span rivals that of a fruit fly.

Our biggest beef with fracking doesn’t have to do with spills such as the one yesterday in PA, though don’t misunderstand, that was a travesty and CEC should be flogged. Once for every day there’s contamination in the watershed.

IOHO there’s a far bigger issue with fracking – the process consumes thousands and thousands of gallons of water, and the overwhelming bulk of the effluent from the fracking process is at best unpotable and much more typically highly contaminated, unsafe for man or beast or fish.

Having spent the past 30 years or so in the West, we’ve become a bit crotchety when it comes to water.

We’ve weathered years when the last moisture was in March and the snowpack was largely out by the end of June – no irrigation water meant no hay that year. Rivers slowed to a trickle, and what fish survived the low flows were baked in their shallow pools come August.

Clean, abundant water supply is more precious than the gold some of us are chasing and clean water is taken for granted every minute of every day.

On one hand it’s damned tempting to say frack all the energy producers in the country. Don’t frack up my countryside and stop fracking up all my water. Quit fracking around for natural gas and oil in my neck of the woods. Get your rigs and pumps and chemicals the hell out of my neighborhood.  Frack the frackers.

(Being myopic can be downright comforting and can impress the hell out of my drinking buddies at the pub.)

On the other hand, unless you’re so fracking wealthy it just doesn’t matter to you, we’re teetering on the edge of the financial abyss here in the States and without reasonable sources of affordable energy, there’s a bevy of enviably intelligent guys and gals who think we’re truly fracked.

For a teaser of what’s to come, just watch as gas prices edge up over $5 over the next few months.

There’s no easy answer to the energy question-dilema, and what the hell, this is just a fly fishing blog. (Though there is some interesting, adult discussion over on The Oil Drum, where they have been honest enough to admit that subsidized wind farms and ethanol aren’t cuttin’ it.)  If you’ve got the answer to the reasonable sources of affordable energy question that will save the world as we know it,  we’ll help you publish your genius and you’ll become a gagillionaire.

On the other hand, you could just move to Texas.

They’ve been fracking gas wells down here for decades and the state is awash with all the visible trappings of great times. Watching all the surgically enhanced babes driving their Escalades, Excursions and Suburbans like bats out of hell must mean that energy costs aren’t a factor here.

Texas tap water may taste like liquid crap but there must be an endless supply given the acre of grass surrounding the estate houses down here. (Keeping up with the Jones’ is a very water intensive proposition in this neck of the woods.)

There’s a bit of a drought on and they’re about to institute water rationing – you’ll only be able to wash your car once a week. Damn.

Frackin’ A, Bubba.

Tags: Inquiring Minds Want to Know

The Montana house late this week voted largely along party lines to pass SB 306 – the cyanide leach bill.

This is nothing short of a jaw-dropping ‘go to hell’ to Montana voters who had twice before voted overwhelmingly to end cyanide leach mining in the state.

We’re f’n speechless.

Governor, time to heat up that veto branding iron.

Image via Great Falls Tribune / John Adams.

Tags: Damn!

Buster takes a well deserved poke at Big Sky country.

Tags: Culture, Books, Art