I was out for a walk the other day with the Elk Hunter, in town, near some farm fields. As we walked, she stopped and leaned over to inspect a clump of straw-colored stalks waving in the breeze above the muddy bank.
“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head as she straightened up.
Asparagus season hasn’t yet arrived.
The ditch was still filled with grimy snow, and though it was melting fast, we figured if we dug into the soil we might still hit ice. Spring, however, will soon thaw the soil.
The good news is that we’re back on daylight saving time, which facilitates after-work outdoor play at a time when the weather finally facilitates it as well. The concerning news is that the Montana Senate, with apparently too much time on its hands, approved a bill that would end daylight saving time.
The bill passed through the Senate without much attention, but now that it’s in the hands of the House, folks are taking notice. Reporting of the bill’s introduction in the House State Administration Committee suggests it wasn’t well received. Good.
There are plenty of reasons why ending daylight saving is a bad idea. For starters, there’s the hour of 8-9 p.m. in the Flathead, any day in July. Daylight saving time is what makes an after-work float from West Glacier down to Blankenship possible. With daylight saving, if you lollygag, you may have to run your shuttle in the dark. End daylight saving, and you’ll have to float in the dark.
That’s just the start of it. Fall and spring youth sports would suffer, as would folks who do business in neighboring Wyoming or the Dakotas (the Wyoming legislature recently rejected a proposal to end daylight saving).
The Flathead is perfectly located to take advantage of daylight saving, being situated about as far north as you can get in the U.S. without moving to Alaska, and it’s right on the western edge of the Mountain Standard Time zone. Ending daylight saving would mean trading that magical hour in July for sunlight from 4-5 a.m.
That’s a lousy deal if you play outdoors.
There’s no real magic hour this time of year, however. March is the in-between month; the season of mud. There’s stuff going on, but it’s more in the vein of watching the asparagus grow than it is summer float trips on the Middle Fork.
Still, this might be a good time to wander down to the Bitterroot to see if the trout are looking up for skwala stoneflies. Might be, but when I last checked the river was running more than 1,800 cubic feet per second in Darby, and climbing fast. That’s high for skwalas and a little dangerous for floating the root wad obstacle course that is the Bitterroot River.
Anything above 1,200 at Darby and floating becomes a brief scenic cruise with fly rods. It’s usually below 500 cfs this time of year, and as long as you’re in a raft, that’s plenty of water.
A glance at the USGS water data map reveals plenty of dark blue and black dots, meaning most rivers in western Montana are running in the 90th percentile or higher. In the long run, all this water is a good thing, but for early-season fly fishers it’s not the best news. Rivers never fish as well when the water is on the rise.
So for now we have to pick our spots. Lakes after ice out, or maybe, as things inevitably cool and all that frigid snowmelt stops pouring downstream, look to the rivers again.
They’ll come down again this spring, before the real runoff hits in May.
In the meantime, that ground will thaw and once the asparagus toes are out of the ice, there will be green stalks poking out from amid the dried yellow stalks of last summer.