Big Hole River Closed

Big Hole 160 cfs Beaverhead 390 cfs

That’s right folks, the entire Big Hole River is closed until further notice. To reopen the river will have to come up to 200 cfs for 7 consecutive days. Even though it came up to 160 cfs in the last couple days which is above the trigger point the FWP made the decision to close it effective today.

The forecast is for quite warm today and tomorrow. By wedmesday the temp will drop dramatically with possible snow above 6000 feet. I look for the river to open again in mid September. By then most of the irrigators will have shut down and we should have some moisture in the form of rain or snow.

For the time being we will be conducting our fishing trips on the Beaverhead, Madison and Missouri rivers.

My trip to Chicago was a lot of fun but 3 days was enough for this counry boy. I didn’t think there were that many people in the whole world. I will have to say how surprised I was that for the most part the natives there are quite friendly. As to the time I got lost and all the mountains (skyscrapers) started to look the same. I had no problem asking for and receiving directions to get on the right trail. If you are going there for the fishing, forget it. I stood on the Michigan Ave. bridge over the Chicago River and watched for at least an hour and didn’t see one fish rise.

The paperwork is now in the right channels concerning those diversion dams and by the time the river reopens, they should be gone and hopefully will never return. It’s all in the hands of the investigating committee.

Just because the Big Hole is temporarily closed by no means that I will be going away. I will be doing more extensive reports on the neighboring rivers.