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Montana's trout in hot water: as global warming comes to the Rocky Mountain west, anglers and environmentalists start to speak the same language.

Article Excerpt
Close your eyes and imagine for a moment that fly-fishing is your passion. Your idyll might well look something like this: the valley of the East Fork of Rock Creek in western Montana on a clear morning at the beginning of July, rimmed by the snow-peaks of the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness; a vast expanse of yellow and blue wildflowers under the big sky; a meandering, spring-fed meadow stream, where the brown trout rise steadily from beneath the cut banks, one after another, to take your dry fly. [??] But landscapes aren't always easy to read, and this one was especially deceptive. Beneath the calm and radiant surface, the attentive observer could detect ominous symptoms of a warming world. [??] Bruce Farling, who has run the Montana office of Trout Unlimited for the past 12 years, told me that he sees the signs of global warming all around. Like the rest of the Rocky Mountain states, Montana has now suffered through seven straight years of drought. "We haven't had an 'average' snow-pack since 1997," Farling said. "It used to be common for us to have a couple of weeks every winter when it would go to 30, 35 below. These days it hardly ever falls below zero." The winter had also been abnormally dry, he added: "Precipitation in western Montana in February was the lowest ever recorded." But then late snows whitened the peaks again in April and May, and June brought downpours. The Flathead Valley, an hour north of Missoula, experienced its wettest June in more than a hundred years. By the end of the month, most rivers were bank-full torrents. Things had gone from one extreme to another, in other words, which is why Farling prefers the term "climate disruption."

Conditions such as these have a way of limiting the angler's options. On Montana's biggest rivers--the Missouri, the Madison, the Yellowstone--you're pretty...