Beaverhead, Red Rock rivers could be ready for turnaround

Late snowfall and April showers have offered hope for trout anglers fond of fishing Montana’s fabled Beaverhead River and its upstream tributary, Red Rock River.

“We’re anticipating some good flows in the Red Rock that might even fill Lima Reservoir for the first time in a while,” said Bruce Rich, Montana Department of Fish Wildlife and Parks regional fisheries manager in Bozeman.

The fishing season on Red Rock River was not opened last spring because of low flows. But even though the river and the upper Beaverhead should open as scheduled on Saturday, Rich quickly pointed out that this might only be a short-term turnaround.

“We’re still way behind in this seventh year of drought,” he said.

In the past few years, the agency has mitigated the impacts with fishing closures and reductions in bag limits to slow the drought-related decline in trout populations in the Beaverhead River and Clark Canyon Reservoir.

Surveys conducted by Dick Oswald, Fish, Wildlife and Parks biologist in Dillon, found the fish population dropped by a third in 2001 and hasn’t rebounded.

In 2003, inflows to Clark Canyon Reservoir set record lows for several consecutive months.

“We remain locked in the same horrible drought,” he said in March, noting that aquifers were depleted.

Anglers need to be patient with the weather trends, he said.

“The water situation was so bad on the Red Rock last year, it never opened to fishing,” he said. “The year before it was a summer closure. It’s a highly popular fishery with people who can get on, although is mostly surrounded by private land and hard to get onto.”

But keeping anglers off the waters there and in the Red Rock Wildlife Refuge when water levels are low and warm has helped prevent the trout populations from plummeting further, he said.

Even catch-and-release fishing kills a much higher percentage of fish when they are stressed, he said.

Area irrigators made a huge contribution to fish survival last year by not withdrawing water so that flows could be maintained at minimum levels for fish survival, he said.

Basically, there wasn’t enough water to do their crops much good, so they left it for the fish, he said. “We applaud them for that.”

The trout population will need more than one good spring to recover, Rich said.

“On Clark Canyon Reservoir,” Oswald pointed out, “we’ve hit an all-time record low for rainbow trout. The bright spot is that the few fish we caught in our sampling nets were huge.”

In the Beaverhead, bag limit reductions on the 30-mile stretch between Clark Canyon Dam and Dillon, as well as a fall closure to protect spawning brown trout, have helped preserve a fishery renown for big fish.

“We seem to have bottomed out in the most productive upper-river section and the most productive tailwater,” Oswald said. “They haven’t declined further.”

In the midriver near Dillon, outfitted floats have not been permitted during summer for the past last three years. Still, the trout numbers declined in the past two years, he said.

“But without reducing the fishing pressure, it could have really been bad,” he said.