Flood Stage

COMES THE COLOR

A Water Park

the warm wet spring

WALLPAPER:  FLOOD STAGE, NATIONAL PARK MEADOWS

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.. Briefly: flood stage in National Park Meadows, more than just "tea stained," more moisture pending, even the Firehole River is colored.
..The west side of Yellowstone National Park is wet; very wet. Bison in the meadows are ankle deep in standing water perched upon saturated soils.
.. Twin Lakes, north of Norris Junction have joined into a single lake. The park landscape resembles parts of the palmetto swamps of Florida, (minus the little palm trees.)

THE UNIVERSAL NEBULOUS

.. Green-up is doing nicely and accelerating apace with the warmness and wetness of our recent weather.
.. Catching Between the Lakes is slowing as releases from Hebgen Dam provide for the annual draw down to allow storage for all the runoff.
.. This is a good time to tell stories and marvel at the renewing power of our Spring discharge.
.. Boulders, Cobbles, Silt, Sand, and Clay get rearranged in our rivers. Nutrients are stripped and renewed at the same time. Banks are undercut anew or collapsed as the rivers grind away.
.. These processes, (and many others,) change the rivers. Erosion and deposition take place simultaneously in different places.
.. These changes affect the fish. Their feeding, their hiding, their resting, their migratory routes. Fisher folk seldom respond to these changes. They pretend befuddlement.

MADISON MAULER

.. We are blessed with a ringside seat to these changes. So are the local professional fly fishers. Sadly most of them ignore this dynamic period.
.. They call it unfishable, (which it mostly is,) but it is not uninteresting.
.. It provides insight into the earliest of Spring fishing and can save precious moments of fishing time. The saddest part is that "RELEARNING" is extended.
.. One significant byproduct of this dynamic is the amount of debris that remains in the rivers.
.. This debris, (animal, vegetable, mineral,) must be relearned by the fish. Most of it looks like food. They eat it.
.. Cagey, professional fisher folk, await the earliest bug hatches and choose their flies accordingly. They, unlike the fish, ignore the debris hatch.
.. Our neighbors don't. We listen to the neighbors. We've seen trout stomachs full of pebbles, sticks, leaves, etc. Mostly in early Spring catching.

GLITTER NYMPH

.. We hear the pros and the very experienced express bewilderment when fish don't take their super flies during the early Spring hatches.
.. Perhaps something less super is what the fish are eating.
.. Just say'n.

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WALLPAPER:  GREEN UP ON THE GIBBON