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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Relief: Outdoorsmen shed no tears for summer’s demise


Celebrating the demise of a long, hot summer, Greg Putnam, fly-fishing guide for Coeur d'Alene-based ROW Fishing, removes a grasshopper pattern from the mouth of a cutthroat trout he caught on the St. Joe River on Aug. 16 as water temperatures were finally starting to cool to temperatures less stressful to fish. 
 (Rich Landers / The Spokesman-Review)
Rich Landers Outdoors editor

Summer doesn’t officially bow to autumn until Sept. 23, but hunters, firefighters and especially anglers began celebrating the change of seasons last week. Land and wildlife managers reverently refer to the transition as the “August singularity,” an annual weather change that occurs around the third week in August to effectively advance the season just about the time fire crews are stretched beyond their limits and fishermen are climbing the walls.

Cooler evenings slow the advances of forest fires and dramatically drop river water temperatures to relieve stress on trout.

Long-needed rain – a critical but less reliable event – brings on the “fall green-up” of mountain forage that enables big game to layer on fat that could be the difference in surviving or succumbing to a difficult winter.

“Finally!” said Brooks Sanford reacting to the Aug. 18 lifting of the daytime fishing restrictions on the Clark Fork River. Since July 13, the fly-fishing guide based in St. Regis had been meeting his clients at 5:30 a.m. in order to pursue trout and be off the river before the 2 p.m.-midnight fishing closure set to protect heat-stressed trout .

The Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department lifted fishing restrictions last Saturday on the Clark Fork, Bitterroot and Yellowstone rivers after water temperatures finally dipped reliably below 70 degrees.

“We basically went from the dog days of summer to fall in just a few days,” Sanford said.

“We get an amazing amount of public support for putting on restrictions as needed to protect the fish,” said Pat Saffel, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department regional biologist in Missoula. “Even without fishing, we were literally seeing fish belly up and float down the rivers in some areas this summer.”

While dam-controlled rivers such as the Kootenai and Yakima are running far above natural flows to provide water for downstream uses, this year’s heat and drought has left natural flows so low that some rivers – including the Blackfoot, Thompson and Big Hole – have been closed to all fishing.

Joe Peak, the proprietor of the Enaville Resort (The Snake Pit) who keeps his fingers on the pulse of the Coeur d’Alene River, saw it all coming shortly after the North Idaho stream fishing season opened on the last weekend in May.

“We’re already seeing July river conditions,” he said in the first week of June, noting that the meager snowpack was disappearing too fast. “This is scary.”

Joe Dupont, the Idaho Fish and Game Department biologist who studies North Idaho cutthroats, doesn’t expect the low, warm water to have a long-term impact on the fisheries.

“You never know,” he said, “but we had a similar summer in 2003 and the following year the cutthroat numbers went up in the Coeur d’Alene River.”

The trout survive the low, warm flows on the Coeur d’Alene, not by migrating but rather by seeking spring-fed cool-water sanctuaries or sulking on the river bottom and cutting back their feeding, he said.

“On the St. Joe, most of the fish migrate upstream in early July to find cooler water,” he said. “They don’t really start moving back downstream in any numbers until sometime in late September or even late October, depending on temperatures

While North Idaho streams have been unusually low and warm this summer, they never required official sanctions.

Still, the Coeur d’Alene and St. Joe rivers were under de facto fishing closures during many hot summer afternoons in July and early August.

“Sometimes there were so many people floating in rafts and inner tubes to beat the heat, you really couldn’t fish during the middle of the day, especially on the Coeur d’Alene,” said Greg Putnam of ROW Fishing Adventures based in Coeur d’Alene.

“Not that you’d really want to,” he said. “The fish weren’t very active during the heat. You felt bad bothering them.”

But fishing guides often found themselves out in the heat to meet their customers’ schedules.

“A lot of my clients would want to fish the middle of the day so they could be back in town for happy hour,” Putnam said. “Unfortunately, their happy hour conflicted with the trout happy hour on the river, so they’d miss out on the best fishing after the floaters left and the bugs started showing.”

On Aug. 16, Putnam said the St. Joe River was already noticeably cooler as he waded in with his fly rod to sample the river’s cutthroat trout fishery.

He’d left Coeur d’Alene at 6:30 a.m. and the fishing was slow at first. But by 10 a.m., he was all smiles as virtually every other cast into a good run would trigger a cutthroat to rise to the surface and at least check out his hopper pattern.

“Gentleman’s hours are back,” he said, noting that good midday trout fishing ought to be the rule from now well into October. “No need to get out of bed so early. You can enjoy a second cup of coffee.

“The colder water will bring on bug hatches and make the fish more active. Best of all, the crowds are gone.”