E-14: 60 Days and Counting!

Fellow Extravaganzers:

 

Here we sit pre-runoff and inside 60 days and counting until the curtain rises on Extravaganza 2014 and I thought I would give you a global overview of E-14 and what lies in store for us this wonderful fishing year. 

 

As you can see, year after year for the past seven years we have developed our own tracking chart to give you an idea in advance as well as mid-runoff where we might be headed water-level-wise.  During this time period we have had demurely low water level years (witness both last year and in 2007) as well as wildly high water level years (as in 2008 and 2011—each of which years we trekked over the Continental Divide to find safe and bountiful fishing waters on the Holter Dam-controlled Missouri River, just outside Craig, MT—an hour north of Helena).

 

In preface, the runoff can be and often is our best bountiful fishing-generating event.  The “runoff” occurs when warmer May weather melts the accumulate snow mass in the upper mountain climes and sends that melt downhill into thousands of streams and rivulets that (a) gathers silt on its downhill journey and (b) amasses into our major Montana rivers and streams.  Imagine if you would a hundred thousand individuals streaming into a prime-time sporting event—individual travelers are innocent enough in their impact and presence but the stadium collection of those individuals creates a force to be reckoned with (as in “home field advantage”—right Group Two veteran Seahawks 11^th man fan Brad “Maven” Miller?!?).  This amalgamation and downstream flow of the soon-to-be melted accumulated snow mass is the “runoff” which serves to scour and clean out our fishery rivers but at the same time to silt them over such as to become unfishable (the fish simply can’t see through the runoff’s mocha coffee colored water to ingest food).  Also, post runoff, bugs on the now cleaned out rivers literally comes to life, as their annual mating and reproduction cycles begin as the waters warm up from their snowmelt induced ice bath.

 

Our goal is to be onsite to fish immediately after the runoff when these now food deprived fish are ready to make up for lost opportunities—and that is why the Extravaganza for each of its now 12 years occurs when it does—we want to be on Montana’s prime fishing waters at prime time, fishing with the best guides available at the time of “bugamania” on those rivers.  That’s why we do what we do when we do it, gang.

 

As you can see from the attached chart which reflect water flows on our home’s Rock Creek, each year is a different experience, as each year Mother Nature deals us a different runoff hand.  What we would like to see as we begin tracking this year’s runoff in two weeks (we will be sending an updated chart out to you frequently with the current year posted in an easily readable red color) is a bell shaped curve where, like in 2009—one of our best fishing years, the runoff starts out slow, builds a nice even head of steam and then, for Rock Creek, ends up right around 1750 cubic feet per second come Father’s Day, June 15^th, our first E-14 fishing day.  During the high water years of 2008 and 2011, that water flow level was two to three times that mark, correspondingly making each our local targeted rivers (the Clark Fork of the Columbia River, the Big (“A River Runs Through It”) Blackfoot River and the Bitterroot River) torrentially unsafe; during the low water years of 2007 and 2013 we (successfully) scrambled to find good fishing waters and, in the case of 2007, found ourselves arising well before the crack of dawn to get on the waters by 7:00 a.m. before the afternoon temperatures soared overheating the very low waters.

 

What will this year hold for us, you ask?? 

 

Well, as I have earlier reported to you, we start out the runoff with very high amounts of snow water content in the upper climes mountains.  Right now, the Bitterroot Range (our primary targeted E-14 fishing watershed) is boasting 163% of twenty year median snow water content…that means that, as compared to last year—when at this time things were tracking right at “normal”--one and one half times of “normal” water needs to flow downhill between now and E-14. 

 

What happened last year with low fishing water levels, you further ask??

 

Well, the other variable is heat…and last year, even with a “normal” snow pack, Montana witnessed an unusually dry and warm May such that the snow pack literally evaporated—as you can see from the redline on the attached chart, it simply never made its way downhill.

 

So, as we stand in line for the upcoming runoff movie, we will be carefully tracking temperatures, precipitation and water flows with the knowledge that, at some point in time, all the water is going to traverse downhill…it is just a question of when!  Regardless of when that blessed event occurs, just as we have doen for every prior Extravaganza, we WILL fish every E-14 fishing day!! 

 

Stay tuned…

 

Best to all in anticipation of it all,

 

Rock Creek Ron

    ----<’///:><