Winter is not yet done with us. While I can begin to imagine a time when the streams are ice free my mind still wanders back to last year's angling instead of forward. My last trip of 2013 was to Yellowstone National Park. September is a time of transformation in the park. Summer is over and winter has not yet begun but it feels more like a mix of the two seasons that anything that could rightly be called fall.
The mountain air is crisp even at midday. By evening, you've got a jacket on and temperatures plummet to damn cold as measured overnight in a sleeping bag. The park's wildlife senses something is afoot. Bull Elk bugle, cows swarm in harems and the bison have shifted from one place to another. At eight thousand feet, the Yellowstone plateau sheds summer quickly.
Below water, life moves on as well. Brook trout on the upper raches of the Gibbon have deep orange, pre-spawn bellies and the browns have begun to run up out of reservoirs to carve out redds in natal streams. While the local native fish, cutthroat, are spring spawners, they're not absent from the tides of the season. The young of year, reared in the rivers, are now running out of the many tributaries and down into Yellowstone Lake to winter over.
