Most people are aware of the record snowfall here in the Intermountain West this past winter and the cool early summer which resulted in a late, long, and huge run off. Most fly anglers felt shut out as the rivers ran high, fast, and dirty.

Locally, the Bitterroot, the Blackfoot, Rock Creek and the Clark Fork carried unreal amounts of off color water for a long time. The Clark Fork topped out down by Plains MT at around 103,000 CFS. What a sight that was !!

My adopted home water, the Lochsa in eastern Idaho, was also rampaging early and took a long time to settle down. On my first trip over there in late May, it was really ripping. But as I walked the road scouting the river, I noticed a Salmonfly. That was a start. I decided to rig up, and as I did so, a Golden Stone landed by my foot. The rest is history, as shown in the slideshow.

Fishing the Lochsa regularly as it dropped from somewhere around 15,000 CFS down to 1500 CFS ** was not always easy, but it was always fun. Catching was consistently good and sometimes great. After the first few outings with nymphs, it was mostly dry flies - adult salmonfly and golden stones of the FEB variety.

The slideshow starts with a couple pix from my last day on the Bitterroot the day before it blew out. It records my experience through the run off except for a number of days when I didn't have the camera with me, and includes pix from outings on several other streams such as the St. Regis, Keep Cool Creek, the East Fork of the Bitterroot, and Crooked Fork Creek.

Some may find the slideshow boring. Maybe you had to be there to appreciate that fishing the same river through this period of tremendous change was never fishing the same river, and it was never boring. I learned some interesting lessons this summer. Maybe there are lessons for others here.



John

** My best guess at the flows on this unmonitored stretch of the river.