When I was in Kalispell in May, the weather turned a little blustery. That gave me a fleeting hope for a cool, wet summer in Montana.
The cool didn’t last.
By June 19, two days before the official start to summer, hoot-owl restrictions were already in place on some Montana rivers. A month later, restrictions had spread across the state. Surely, we’ve reached the point of recognizing this as the new normal. This will mean major changes to the way some folks will go about their business if they work on the water.
In the late ’00s, when I started guiding, my plan was to work on the Bitterroot most of the summer. Things started well following high water in June. I had a few trips and my sports caught fish. The Bitterroot usually fishes its best after high water until late July.
I can’t say the date exactly, but right about the Fourth of July, things went south. Hoot-owl regs went into effect to protect trout and my work on the Bitterroot dried up almost as fast as the river. I salvaged the season by relocating to the Flathead the rest of the summer.
The Bitterroot held out longer this year, until July 11. I’ve learned that at my advanced age, it’s not always a good idea to rely on memory alone, but I’m going to here. When I lived in the Bitterroot from 1992-1998, hoot-owl regs were a rarity, especially before August. Usually, the late summer release of water stored in Painted Rocks Reservoir saved even the dog days of fishing season.
For the record, Fish, Wildlife and Parks implements angling restrictions when flows “drop below critical levels for fish, when water quality is diminished or when maximum daily water temperatures reach at least 73 degrees for three consecutive days. Water temperatures of 77 degrees or more can be lethal to trout.”
Hoot-owl restrictions close fishing from 2 p.m. to midnight, the part of the day when water temperatures are highest.
Hoot-owl regs are a post-modern problem for fly fishers. Some of us have been around long enough to know that fly fishing once was a means for gathering dinner, rather than a fun thing you did before you headed to the pub to eat. If you’ve read “A River Runs Through It,” or seen the film, you know the McLean boys, and their pastor father, who had a hard time discerning the difference between fly fishing and religion, were not into catch-and-release.
If that old school conservation ethic was still in effect, there’d be no reason for hoot-owl closures. The fish were caught to kill and eat anyway.
That’s not how trout fisheries in Montana are managed today. There’s so much fishing traffic on popular rivers now that if everyone kept trout, rivers would be fished out well before conditions would necessitate hoot-owl regs, anyway.
We’ve made a bargain with our trout fisheries. We practice catch and release so more folks get to experience the joy of catching a wild Montana trout on a fly, but when the climate warms those rivers to near-poaching temperatures, we shut it down to keep wild fish alive.
The movie was released in 1992 when the emerging business of guiding fly fishers wasn’t exactly brand new, but wasn’t fully formed yet, either. The release of the movie changed that. And now, climate change may be changing it again.
Let’s face it, if you count on guiding for a significant chunk of your annual income, you cannot survive without July. Good guides work every day of the month if they can. Half-day trips, full days, or the golden goose, three half-day trips between sun up and sun down. That’s how you save enough to survive until you start driving a Sno-Cat in winter.
July is a guide’s bread and butter, but the hoot owl may end it.